Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science

Organisation: Mihailo Antović & Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas

Conference-Website

The Parry-Lord research on oral composition in performance was arguably the major breakthrough in classics and oral tradition studies in the 20th century. The so called “cognitive revolution” has probably been the most important movement cutting across all the sciences of the mind for the past one hundred years, maybe more. Both paradigm shifts have an important point of coincidence: the idea that language learning and verbal creativity result from usage and performance, and build on general cognitive capacities and cultural context. The basic units of language and oral poetry are not a set of transformational or formal rules, but functional form-meaning pairs acquired through an instance-based process.

Oral poetics and Cognitive Science seeks to lay the foundations of a new discipline, Cognitive Oral Poetics, through an interdisciplinary conversation between researchers in oral poetics, empirical literary scholars, linguists and cognitive scientists.

Keynote speakers

• Egbert Bakker, Yale University, Department of Classics
• Hans C. Boas, University of Texas at Austin, Departments of German and Linguistics
• Anna Bonifazi, University of Heidelberg, Department of Classical Philology
• Winfried Menninghaus, Free University Berlin, Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature
• Mark Turner, Case Western Reserve University, Department of Cognitive Science

Guest speakers

• Peter Auer, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies & University of Freiburg
• Monika Fludernik, University of Freiburg