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On the Shore of Nothingness
A study in cognitive poetics |
Table of Contents
Sample Chapter (full text)
This book does not study religious ideas for their own sake, but how
religious ideas are turned into verbal imitations of religious experience
by poetic structure. Even such words as ‘ecstasy’ or ‘mysticism’ denote
clear-cut concepts. The book investigates how such a conceptual language
can convey such non-conceptual experiences as meditation, ecstasy or mystic
insights. Briefly, it explores how the poet, by using words, can express
the ‘ineffable’. It submits to close reading English, French, German, Spanish,
Italian, Armenian and Hebrew texts, from the Bible, through medieval, renaissance,
metaphysical, and baroque poetry, to (secular) romantic and symbolistic
poetry.
REUVEN TSUR is professor emeritus of Hebrew Literature at Tel Aviv University, and Middle East vice president of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. He has developed a theory of cognitive poetics, and applied it to rhyme, sound symbolism, poetic rhythm, metaphor, poetry and altered states of consciousness, period style, genre, archetypal patterns, translation theory, and critical activities.
His books in English include Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance -- An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics (1998), Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (1992), What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive: The Poetic Mode of Speech-Perception (1992), On Metaphoring (1987), The Road to “Kubla Khan” (1987) and A Perception-Oriented Theory of Metre (1977). His non-academic publications include volumes of poetry translation into Hebrew and memoirs from the Holocaust (in Hebrew).
Table of Contents
PrefaceSynopsis
1. Introduction: Means, Effects, and Assumptions
2. Poem, Prayer and Meditation
3. The Ultimate Limit—Appresentation and Transcendence
4. “Composition of Place”, Experiential Set, and the Meditative Poem
5. Mystic Poetry—Metaphysical, Baroque and Romantic
6. The Sublime and the Absolute Limit
7. Rhythmic Structure and Religious Poetry—The Numinous, the Infernal, and Agnus Dei
8. Visual and Auditory Ingenuities in Mystic Poetry
9. Oceanic Dedifferentiation, “Thing Destruction” and Mystic Poetry
10. The Infernal and the Hybrid—Bosch and Dante
11. Let There be Light and the Emanation of Light—The Act of Creation in Ibn Gabirol and Milton
12. Light, Fire, Prison: A Cognitive Analysis of Religious Imagery in Poetry
13. The Asymmetry of Sacred, Sexual, and Filial Love in Figurative Language
References
Index
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