ABSTRACT
Cognitive poetics is not the study of texts alone, nor even specifically the study of literary texts; it is the study of literary reading. Recalling Ingarden’s (1973a) distinction that I cited in Chapter 10, literary texts are autonomous objects, having a material existence in the world, but literature is a heteronomous object, existing only when activated and engaged by the animating consciousness of the reader. Autonomous texts can be parsed and described by linguistics, but the heteronomous object of literature can only be described analytically by a cognitive poetics that integrates textual patterns and readerly disposition and effects. I.A. Richards (1924: i) famously declared that ‘a book is a machine to think with’: this applies to encounters with literary works, but it also applies to this textbook in cognitive poetics.
