Reuven Tsur is a pioneer in cognitive poetics, exploring how readers perceive and engage with literature. His work applies sophisticated theories to analyze poetic elements such as rhythm, metaphor, and rhyme across diverse languages and historical periods. Tsur's innovative research delves into the instrumental investigation of poetic performance, particularly rhythm, pushing the boundaries of literary analysis. By integrating linguistics, psychology, and aesthetics, he offers profound insights into the reader's experience and the very structure of literary meaning.
Focusing on the interplay between poetic structure and religious experience, this book explores how verbal imitations evolve into conceptual frameworks. It delves into the challenges of articulating non-conceptual experiences like meditation, ecstasy, and mystic insights, demonstrating how language can bridge the gap between the ineffable and the conceptual.
Provides a comprehensive view of poetry, with chapters on the sound stratum of poetry, the units-of-meaning stratum, the world stratum, regulative concepts, and, the poetry of orientation and disorientation. This book consists of samples from the author's study of the rhythmical performance of poetry and the expressiveness of speech sounds.
This book attempts to solve the yet unsolved mystery: what are the intuitive rules of versification followed by poets and readers in writing and reading poetry? It performs a small Copernican Revolution, shifting the constraints from verse structure to the reader's «Rhythmic Competence». It confers a psychological meaning upon the phrase «rhythmical performance», that allows us to make predictions concerning the rhythmical performance of a metrically complex line. The theoretical discussions are supported by empirical research, in which readings by leading British actors and colleagues from the academy are submitted to an instrumental investigation.
Poets, academics, and those who simply speak a language are subject to mysterious intuitions about the perceptual qualities and emotional symbolism of the sounds of speech. This title investigates the expressive effect of sound patterns, addressing questions of concern for literary theorists and critics as well as for linguists and psychologists.