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Constructing Cognitive Scaffolding Through Embodied Receptiveness: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Massimiliano Morini
Who Evaluates Whom and What in Jane Austen’s Novels?
Reuven Tsur
Two Medieval Hebrew Devotional Poems Convention, Evaluation,
and
“Platonic” vs “Metaphysical” Poetry
Considering Morrison’s novel in light of recent neuropsychological studies and theories of mind, embodiment and cognition, I suggest that The Bluest Eye offers incisive insights into human processes of intersubjective communication. Morrison’s sensitive portrayal of the emotional histories of her characters facilitates an examination of the role of what Andy Clark terms “cognitive scaffolding” in the construction of self. Claudia’s powerful attraction to the body, which stands in contrast to the accepted norms of the dominant white-Christian culture of her time, allows her to access a primal form of understanding that ought to be available to all humans through “motor equivalence.” Her particular form of receptiveness, which both embraces the body and maximizes its multiple means of knowledge acquisition, and her keen attunement to emotional cadence, generate both self-empowerment and productive socialization.
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Massimiliano Morini, “Who Evaluates Whom
and What in Jane Austen’s Novels?” / 409
In this article, I use stylistics, narratology and evaluation theory
to understand how Jane Austen manages to insert evaluative comments in
her novels, while at the same time appearing to invest them with what R.F.
Patteson calls “a tissue of indeterminacy.” While evaluation, the “point”
of language, has an indeterminacy of its own, it is my contention that
in Austen’s works, and particularly in Emma and Mansfield Park, a sort
of “evaluative opacity” is created by disseminating and undermining authority.
Rather than simply eschewing all sources of authority in high modernist
fashion, Austen confers authority on her narrators and on other characters
(particularly her heroines): then, when a traditional, authoritative narrative
has been thus constructed, Austen proceeds to play her authorities against
each other and/or to show the wrongness of authority against the backdrop
of fictional facts.
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Reuven Tsur, “Two Medieval Hebrew Devotional
Poems Convention, Evaluation, and
‘Platonic’ vs ‘Metaphysical’ Poetry” / 434
In eleventh century Hebrew poetry there was a convention that poets
payed homage to some great poet by writing a poem similar to one of his
poems, in the same metre, using the same monorhyme, and adopting some of
its key expressions. In this article I am comparing such a “minimal pair”
of poems, one by the great poet Shlomo Ibn Gabirol, and an homage to it
by Levy Ibn Altaban. Traditional scholarship explores this poetry in terms
of its own conventions, and cannot systematically distinguish between a
masterpiece and its inferior imitation, as long as they conform with the
conventions. In the present article I point out two systematic differences
between the two poems. First, they exploit the same poetic conventions
in two different stylistic structures: what John Crowe Ransom calls “Metaphysical”
and “Platonic” poetry, respectively. Secondly, when viewed in perspective
of “succinct thought and expression” (or the evaluative canons of “unity”
and “complexity”), Ibn Gabirol’s poem turns out to be far superior to Ibn
Altaban’s, in spite of the great similarities. Finally I consider briefly
a pair of seventeenth-century examples by two great English poets, the
sling image in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and in George Herbert’s “Praise,”
the former being typically “Platonic,” the latter typically “Metaphysical.”
This may indicate that this distinction is descriptive, not evaluative.
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