Ellen Spolsky
Biographic Data
| ID | 747010 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ellen Spolsky |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ellen |
| FAMILY NAME | Spolsky |
| SIGNATURE | SPOLSKY E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bar-Ilan University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
REtrying: The Genre of Romance from the Round Table to Around the Pool
The limits of human understanding are the perennial concern of the genre of romance in both tragic and comic versions. It isn’t surprising, thus, to find parallels between romance motifs and cognitive science theories of knowing. This article discusses Jackendoff’s gradient categorization, the speech act theories of Austin with revisions by Searle, and the developmental psychology Theory of Mind, as the building blocks of our current embodied und…
Laws and Outlaws in Pastoral Comedy and Revenge Tragedy
The two genres of the title are not usually considered a pair. I argue that they share an important concern, namely, the clash between law and outlawry, city life and country life, abstraction and embodiment. The protagonists of both (often forced by the illegal actions of others) live outside the law and have to make their own laws. They often “take matters into their own hands.” Examples: paintings by Titian, Manet, Guercino, Marvell’s “The Gar…
Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet: Rebuilding the Bildungsroman
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet – an almost continuous rave of interconnected love and desire, anger and violence – is also a story of the protagonist’s struggle to make sense of her life by writing it. She turns a traditional genre of a young person’s coming of age into a neurologically realistic portrait of the growth of an artist by multiplying narrative voices and by ignoring conventional bounds of narrative probability. Her story of the …
Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds: Cognitive Science and the Literature of the Renaissance
Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds: Cognitive Science and the Literature of the Renaissance. Donald Beecher. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. ix + 484 pp. $39.95. - Volume 70 Issue 2
Archetypes Embodied, Then and Now
With Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation to Mary and the 1984 and 1991 Terminator movies as examples, this essay notes a common interest in the availability of help from a superhuman source. It argues that the yearning for access to a powerful hybridity, a cooperative mixing, a productive grotesque, is an archetype. However, with the support of some recent hypotheses in evolutionary anthropology and biology, the article refurbishes the term…
Cognition, Literature, and History
Book Review| December 01 2016 Cognition, Literature, and History Bruhn, Mark J. and Wehrs, Donald R., eds., Cognition, Literature, and History. New York: Routledge, 2014. xii + 271 pp. Ellen Spolsky Ellen Spolsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2016) 37 (4): 705–707. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3638244 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation E…
An Embodied View of Misunderstanding inMacbeth
The project of describing how people understand each other's unspoken motivations, beliefs, commitments, and intentions had been housed in departments of linguistics or philosophy until about twenty-five years ago, when some developmental cognitive scientists intervened with different kinds of arguments and evidence. As part of the same broad movement toward academic interdisciplinarity, several young philosophers and some literary scholars have …
Literacy After Iconoclasm in the English Reformation
Believing that the destruction of church imagery was necessary to the amendment of Christian life, the religious reformers in sixteenth-century England aimed to change minds as well as church furnishings. Image worship was to be replaced by reading, and learning from pictures and statues was to be replaced by learning to read the English Bible. Literacy, however, isn't easy, even now. Taking up the issues of iconoclasm and literacy from the persp…
Skepticism and Memory in Shakespeare and Donne
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Frozen in Time
Research Article| December 01 2007 Frozen in Time? Ellen Spolsky Ellen Spolsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2007) 28 (4): 807–816. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2007-014 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ellen Spolsky; Frozen in Time?. Poetics Today 1 December 2007; 28 (4): 807–816. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2007-014 Download citation file: Zotero R…
Recruiting (Once Again) Wittgenstein and Cavell for Reading Literary Texts
Book Review| March 01 2005 Recruiting (Once Again) Wittgenstein and Cavell for Reading Literary Texts Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost, eds., Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. xxii + 353 pp. Ellen Spolsky Ellen Spolsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2005) 26 (1): 141–149. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-26-1-1…
Cognitive Literary Historicism: A Response to Adler and Gross
Research Article| June 01 2003 Cognitive Literary Historicism: A Response to Adler and Gross Ellen Spolsky Ellen Spolsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2003) 24 (2): 161–183. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-24-2-161 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ellen Spolsky; Cognitive Literary Historicism: A Response to Adler and Gross. Poetics Today …
Toward a Theory of Embodiment for Literature
Book Review| March 01 2003 Toward a Theory of Embodiment for Literature Ellen Spolsky Ellen Spolsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2003) 24 (1): 127–137. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-24-1-127 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Ellen Spolsky; Toward a Theory of Embodiment for Literature. Poetics Today 1 March 2003; 24 (1): 127–137. doi: htt…
Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory As a Species of Post-Structuralism
Rather than denying the insights of post-structuralist theory, literary interpretation and theory with an evolutionary cognitive perspective actually nestles nicely within a central niche of deconstructionist thinking, that is,the critique of representation. What we learn from recent cognitive science is that the meanings of texts are indeed unstable and dependent upon contingent contexts. While theories of neuronal activity can be understood as …
Dialogue
Spolsky raises a number of interesting and important issues too wide-ranging to fully address here. However, the core of the disagreement between us boils down to her belief in the explanatory adequacy of a number of widely credited ideas that unrepentant and hard core believers in materialism and computationalism (like us) cannot accept. For example, for those attempting to construct computational models of the mind, Spolsky's counterposing of "…
Why and How to Take the Fruit and Leave the Chaff
SubStance - Issue 94/95 (Volume 30, Number 1&2), 2001
Dialogue
Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretive Theory
Literary Change and Cognitive Science
Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures
Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretive Theory
The Bounds of Interpretation: Linguistic Theory and Literary Text
The Limits of Literal Meaning
Stylistique, production du sens et sens litteral| lecture critique de Hendiadys and Hamlet de G. T. Wright (PMLA, 96, 1981) et Problematizing the Pentameter de A. Easthope (ibid. 12, 1981)
Toward a Cognitively Responsible Theory of Inference: Or, What Can Synapses Tell Us About Ambiguity
Article TOWARD A COGNITIVELY RESPONSIBLE THEORY OF INFERENCE: OR, WHAT CAN SYNAPSES TELL US ABOUT AMBIGUITY? was published on January 1, 1985 in the journal Theoretical Linguistics (volume 12, issue 2-3)
Toward a Cognitively Responsible Theory of Inference: Or, What Can Synapses Tell Us About Ambiguity
Article TOWARD A COGNITIVELY RESPONSIBLE THEORY OF INFERENCE: OR, WHAT CAN SYNAPSES TELL US ABOUT AMBIGUITY? was published on January 1, 1985 in the journal Theoretical Linguistics (volume 12, issue s1)
Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory As a Species of Post-Structuralism
Rather than denying the insights of post-structuralist theory, literary interpretation and theory with an evolutionary cognitive perspective actually nestles nicely within a central niche of deconstructionist thinking, that is,the critique of representation. What we learn from recent cognitive science is that the meanings of texts are indeed unstable and dependent upon contingent contexts. While theories of neuronal activity can be understood as …
Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures
An Embodied View of Misunderstanding inMacbeth
The project of describing how people understand each other's unspoken motivations, beliefs, commitments, and intentions had been housed in departments of linguistics or philosophy until about twenty-five years ago, when some developmental cognitive scientists intervened with different kinds of arguments and evidence. As part of the same broad movement toward academic interdisciplinarity, several young philosophers and some literary scholars have …
Dialogue
Literary Change and Cognitive Science
Stalking a Generative Poetics
ANY BESTIARY of modern literary fauna would have describe generative poetics as either shy or sly. Ever since the appearance in 1957 of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures we have known of its existence, and we have long assumed we would recognize it by its resemblance generative grammar. Nevertheless, it has been illusive. Literary theorists have not been successful in describing the essential nature of the beast, though many of its features have bee…
Stalking a Generative Poetics
ANY BESTIARY of modern literary fauna would have describe generative poetics as either shy or sly. Ever since the appearance in 1957 of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures we have known of its existence, and we have long assumed we would recognize it by its resemblance generative grammar. Nevertheless, it has been illusive. Literary theorists have not been successful in describing the essential nature of the beast, though many of its features have bee…
Toward a Cognitively Responsible Theory of Inference: Or, What Can Synapses Tell Us About Ambiguity
Article TOWARD A COGNITIVELY RESPONSIBLE THEORY OF INFERENCE: OR, WHAT CAN SYNAPSES TELL US ABOUT AMBIGUITY? was published on January 1, 1985 in the journal Theoretical Linguistics (volume 12, issue 2-3)
Toward a Cognitively Responsible Theory of Inference: Or, What Can Synapses Tell Us About Ambiguity
Article TOWARD A COGNITIVELY RESPONSIBLE THEORY OF INFERENCE: OR, WHAT CAN SYNAPSES TELL US ABOUT AMBIGUITY? was published on January 1, 1985 in the journal Theoretical Linguistics (volume 12, issue s1)
The Bounds of Interpretation: Linguistic Theory and Literary Text
The Limits of Literal Meaning
Stylistique, production du sens et sens litteral| lecture critique de Hendiadys and Hamlet de G. T. Wright (PMLA, 96, 1981) et Problematizing the Pentameter de A. Easthope (ibid. 12, 1981)
Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretive Theory
Literary Change and Cognitive Science
Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures
Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretive Theory
Dialogue
Spolsky raises a number of interesting and important issues too wide-ranging to fully address here. However, the core of the disagreement between us boils down to her belief in the explanatory adequacy of a number of widely credited ideas that unrepentant and hard core believers in materialism and computationalism (like us) cannot accept. For example, for those attempting to construct computational models of the mind, Spolsky's counterposing of "…
Why and How to Take the Fruit and Leave the Chaff
SubStance - Issue 94/95 (Volume 30, Number 1&2), 2001
Dialogue
Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory As a Species of Post-Structuralism
Rather than denying the insights of post-structuralist theory, literary interpretation and theory with an evolutionary cognitive perspective actually nestles nicely within a central niche of deconstructionist thinking, that is,the critique of representation. What we learn from recent cognitive science is that the meanings of texts are indeed unstable and dependent upon contingent contexts. While theories of neuronal activity can be understood as …
Cognitive Literary Historicism: A Response to Adler and Gross
Research Article| June 01 2003 Cognitive Literary Historicism: A Response to Adler and Gross Ellen Spolsky Ellen Spolsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2003) 24 (2): 161–183. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-24-2-161 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ellen Spolsky; Cognitive Literary Historicism: A Response to Adler and Gross. Poetics Today …
Toward a Theory of Embodiment for Literature
Book Review| March 01 2003 Toward a Theory of Embodiment for Literature Ellen Spolsky Ellen Spolsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2003) 24 (1): 127–137. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-24-1-127 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Ellen Spolsky; Toward a Theory of Embodiment for Literature. Poetics Today 1 March 2003; 24 (1): 127–137. doi: htt…
Recruiting (Once Again) Wittgenstein and Cavell for Reading Literary Texts
Book Review| March 01 2005 Recruiting (Once Again) Wittgenstein and Cavell for Reading Literary Texts Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost, eds., Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. xxii + 353 pp. Ellen Spolsky Ellen Spolsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2005) 26 (1): 141–149. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-26-1-1…
Frozen in Time
Research Article| December 01 2007 Frozen in Time? Ellen Spolsky Ellen Spolsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2007) 28 (4): 807–816. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2007-014 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ellen Spolsky; Frozen in Time?. Poetics Today 1 December 2007; 28 (4): 807–816. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2007-014 Download citation file: Zotero R…
Literacy After Iconoclasm in the English Reformation
Believing that the destruction of church imagery was necessary to the amendment of Christian life, the religious reformers in sixteenth-century England aimed to change minds as well as church furnishings. Image worship was to be replaced by reading, and learning from pictures and statues was to be replaced by learning to read the English Bible. Literacy, however, isn't easy, even now. Taking up the issues of iconoclasm and literacy from the persp…
Skepticism and Memory in Shakespeare and Donne
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
An Embodied View of Misunderstanding inMacbeth
The project of describing how people understand each other's unspoken motivations, beliefs, commitments, and intentions had been housed in departments of linguistics or philosophy until about twenty-five years ago, when some developmental cognitive scientists intervened with different kinds of arguments and evidence. As part of the same broad movement toward academic interdisciplinarity, several young philosophers and some literary scholars have …
Cognition, Literature, and History
Book Review| December 01 2016 Cognition, Literature, and History Bruhn, Mark J. and Wehrs, Donald R., eds., Cognition, Literature, and History. New York: Routledge, 2014. xii + 271 pp. Ellen Spolsky Ellen Spolsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Poetics Today (2016) 37 (4): 705–707. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-3638244 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation E…
Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds: Cognitive Science and the Literature of the Renaissance
Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds: Cognitive Science and the Literature of the Renaissance. Donald Beecher. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. ix + 484 pp. $39.95. - Volume 70 Issue 2
Archetypes Embodied, Then and Now
With Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation to Mary and the 1984 and 1991 Terminator movies as examples, this essay notes a common interest in the availability of help from a superhuman source. It argues that the yearning for access to a powerful hybridity, a cooperative mixing, a productive grotesque, is an archetype. However, with the support of some recent hypotheses in evolutionary anthropology and biology, the article refurbishes the term…
Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet: Rebuilding the Bildungsroman
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet – an almost continuous rave of interconnected love and desire, anger and violence – is also a story of the protagonist’s struggle to make sense of her life by writing it. She turns a traditional genre of a young person’s coming of age into a neurologically realistic portrait of the growth of an artist by multiplying narrative voices and by ignoring conventional bounds of narrative probability. Her story of the …
Laws and Outlaws in Pastoral Comedy and Revenge Tragedy
The two genres of the title are not usually considered a pair. I argue that they share an important concern, namely, the clash between law and outlawry, city life and country life, abstraction and embodiment. The protagonists of both (often forced by the illegal actions of others) live outside the law and have to make their own laws. They often “take matters into their own hands.” Examples: paintings by Titian, Manet, Guercino, Marvell’s “The Gar…
Art (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Literature (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (8 works) · History (7 works) · Linguistics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · World Wide Web (6 works)