Dr Jeremy Scott, Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature in the Department of English Language & Linguistics, has just published an article in the journal New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing.
New Writing publishes both critical and creative work – offering a forum for debate, as well as an avenue for the publication of the best stories, poems, creative non-fiction and works for the stage and for the screen.
Jeremy’s article, entitled ‘Cognitive Poetics and Creative Practice: Beginning the Conversation,’ draws upon aspects of the field of cognitive poetics – the principled study of what happens in the mind as readers read – to explore how an understanding of these processes might benefit the creative writer.
The paper is pioneering in that it considers the implications of cognitive poetic approaches for the ‘mechanics’ of prose fiction, explicitly in terms of creative practice rather than from the perspective of the stylistician or literary critic. It is in providing a principled and rigorous account of the way readers read, that cognitive poetics has much to offer the writer. Indeed, Jeremy argues that writing and reading, rather than being separate activities, should be seen as interrelated positions along a cline.
The article is freely available and may be accessed here:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14790726.2017.1376800