Texts and Minds ─ Papers in Cognitive Poetics and Rhetoric

The 22 essays combine papers selected from a 2010 international conference in Lodz, Poland with some invited contributions to explore mental processes accompanying the production of meaning, especially the meaning of the subtle and non-obvious kind arising from creative activity. Looking in turn at cognitive approaches to literary thought and at aspects of cognitive rhetoric, they consider such topics as simultaneous multiple frames in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, poetry and the invisible subject, blending in New Testament parables, whether Obama's and Sarkkozy's remarks at the United Nations Climate Change summit were a contest between figurative and literal language, and cognitive mechanisms at work and their perlocutionary effect in Catholic preaching. They are not indexed. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Alina Kwiatkowska is Professor at the University of Lodz, head of the Department of Semantics and Linguistic Semiotics. Both her PhD dissertation and her Habilitation thesis were cognitively oriented, exploring issues on the borderline of linguistics, literature studies and cognitive psychology. During her term as President of the Polish chapter of the Cognitive Linguistics Association, she organized a number of international conferences, including notably the 2010 conference on Cognitive Poetics and Rhetoric. Her current research interests include cognitive poetics, linguistic and visual semiotics, and especially the various aspects of the visual-verbal interface. She teaches courses on semantics, stylistics, and semiotics, cognitive linguistics, and media language.