Search results for ""Author Guillemette Bolens""

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The triggers of laughter in spoken language or conversation can often be very simple, such as a change in gesture, or in vocal tone or tempo. Speakers and listeners understand these dynamics of gesture through motor cognition and use them to great effect. The causes of laughter and the experience of humor in written texts, however, are less well understood. In Kinesic Humor, Guillemette Bolens offers a cognitive poetics-based study of triggers of laughter in texts, focusing in particular on tonic shifts and gesture in plot and narrative. Bolens shows how literary texts from a variety of periods provide remarkably precise information concerning kinesthesia, the role of tonicity in communication, and the impact of momentum, timing, and tempo on the way in which gestures are processed in human exchanges. She investigates the narrative use of such parameters and how they prompt laughter in a wide-ranging corpus of major authors that includes Chrétien de Troyes, Cervantes, Milton, Saint-Simon, Rousseau, Sterne, and Stendhal. Using the theory of embodied cognition, Bolens shows how thwarted perceptions and expectations of movements and sensations produce the cognitive shifts typical of humor. Bringing together narratology, cognitive studies, gesture studies, humor studies, and historical context, this book offers original perspectives on important artworks and represents a major contribution to cognitive poetics. Originally published in French as L'Humour et le savoir des corps in 2016, this volume not only brings the work to an English-speaking audience for the first time but expands significantly on the original by analyzing a new corpus of texts and engaging with recent advances in the field to develop a cutting-edge theory of kinesic humor.

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In this volume Guillemette Bolens examines the ways in which artists, authors, and readers draw on skills, sensorimotor capacities, and embodied knowledge when creating and experiencing artistic and literary works. In so doing, Bolens offers a new literary perspective on gesture studies and the role of embodied cognition in narrative. At the cutting edge of interdisciplinary inquiries into gesture, style, narratology, cognition, and literature, this work brings together academic expertise in literary studies with a consideration of neuroscientific and cognitive findings. Bolens studies the relevance of kinesic intelligence - our ability to understand the meaning of body movements, postures, gestures, and facial expressions - to the interpretation of literature. Through her discussions of works by John Milton, Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and major medieval authors, Bolens shows how our experience of creative works draws on forms of cognition that are grounded in our corporeality. This book represents a crucial contribution from a literary scholar to the exciting new field of embodied cognition. With a foreword by well-known neuroscientist Alain Berthoz, "The Style of Gestures" convincingly makes the case that embodied cognition is essential to the reception, understanding, and enjoyment of art and literature.

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