عنوان

Narrative (K)nots / Symbolic Seduction:

Number

TL71m3f87j

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Narrative (K)nots / Symbolic Seduction:

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Pici, Nicholas F.

Title Proper by Another Author

Toward a Biopoetics of Second-Order Symbolism in the Storytelling Arts

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Young, Kay

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

UC Santa Barbara

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2017

Body granting the degree

UC Santa Barbara

Text preceding or following the note

2017

Text of Note

This dissertation intends to reimagine and reinvigorate theoretical criticism on symbolism in the narrative arts from an evolutionary-cognitive perspective. It gestures toward establishing a more robust, scientifically informed, consilient view of how symbolic devices operate in aesthetic-narrative texts and inside the minds of artists and audiences: i.e. toward formulating a biopoetics of symbol. It presents, specifically, a biocultural treatment of the nature, function, and value of indirect referential complexes precipitated by the techniques and modes of second-order symbolism within aesthetic-narrative art. Aesthetic text-makers configure the cues and patterns of their texts to tap specific and sometimes multiple stages of the mind-brain's PECMA flow, serially or in parallel. This peculiar cognitive orientation-wherein mental routines must cope with simultaneous multimodal "brain tappings"-has enabled a special mode of meaning-making to take shape: second-order symbolism within a replete aesthetic environment. Certain cultural energies, traditions, and technologies have enabled Western artists and their interpretive communities to refine second-order meaning-making, giving rise to a generic mode of symbolic realism-a mode that might be useful for demarcating between so-called literary/artistic texts and non-literary/non-artistic texts. Selections from American short fiction and film are offered as paradigmatic instances of symbolic realism: Hemingway, Poe, and Kubrick are spotlighted. Non-American texts establish a cross-cultural, cross-temporal, species-typical profile of second-order symbologics. Traditional boundaries between poetry, fiction, and visual art are crossed to reckon second-order symbolism as a multimedia, multimodal platform of artistic technique.Foundational questions explored include: • Why and to what ends do some artists deploy devices of second-order symbolism?• How does a biopoetics of symbol embed with theories of reading and hermeneutics?• What are the cognitive advantages and disadvantages of engaging in an open-ended, or elusive and obliquely decodable, signification process?• How do the cognitive mechanisms of the evolved mind-brain enable, constrain, or otherwise contribute to second-order symbolic processes of meaning-making?• How are these symbol-producing/symbol-reading ev-cog mechanisms implicated in the larger replete aesthetics of meaning-exchange ecologies that emerge in the artistic transaction between textmaker, text, and text-interpreter?This dissertation sets out on an interdisciplinary, biocultural sortie for thinking through these questions.

Pici, Nicholas F.

Young, Kay

UC Santa Barbara

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y