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Access status: Open Access ,
Narrative triggers. Metonymy and metaphor in the process of recovering temporality in atemporal representations
(2021) Olszewska, Ewa; Fabiszak, Małgorzata
This study investigates how single monophase representations function as narrative triggers, prompting recipients to construct temporally and causally organized meanings despite the atemporal character of the original representation. Drawing on the Motivation and Sedimentation Model of meaning making and Stampoulidis’ (2019) account of narrative interpretation, we focus on the reception stage of communication and examine how embodied, sedimented and situated dimensions of meaning making interact in the reconstruction of narratives. The analysis combines two case studies. The first examines media discussions surrounding the renaming of streets commemorating historical figures in Poznań, based on newspaper articles and below-the-line comments. The second investigates museum visitors’ interpretations of an unnamed sculpture by African-American self-taught artist Bessie Harvey, collected through ethnographic interviews at the Tubman Museum in Macon, Georgia. In both cases, metonymic and metaphorical processes provide access to broader historical, cultural and experiential frames, allowing recipients to develop narratives extending beyond the immediate representational stimulus. The findings suggest that the Motivation and Sedimentation Model should be expanded to account more explicitly for individual experience as a distinct source of meaning-making motivation. They also demonstrate that the relationship between a narrative trigger and the narratives it evokes is not one-to-one: a single representation may activate several independent or interconnected stories, while different recipients may construct substantially different narratives depending on their cultural knowledge and personal experience.
Access status: Open Access ,
Understanding discourse of art - a reception study report
(2019) Olszewska, Ewa
I see art as a product of a multimodal and multimedial shared semiotic code. The process of interpreting art is what we may call a conceptualization of meaning of a product of this code. This process is a cognitive one, nevertheless, it is possible to investigate mental processes of art viewers by examining how they talk/write about art, namely the discourse about art. In order to understand these mental processes I propose MuCADA, the Multimodal Critical Analysis of the Discourse of Art, which draws upon the following theoretical approaches to language analysis: Conceptual Metaphor Theory Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999, Dancygier and Sweetser 2014, Forceville 2011, 2013, Kwiatkowska 2013, El Rafaie 2015), Social Semiotics (O’Toole 2011, O’Halloran 2008), and Discourse Historical Analysis (Wodak and Reisigl 2009). My research question asks whether MuCADA reflects the understanding processes of the art viewer. I assume that an artwork is a stimulus that activates certain cognitive processes which can be expressed in communicative acts. The analytical procedure focuses on these linguistic expressions and searches within them for the evidence of conceptual metaphor, embodied cognition and socio-cultural contexts. The data for this presentation come from 27 interviews conducted with 42 visitors of the Tubman Museum in Macon (GA) and High Museum of Art in Atlanta (GA). The preliminary results show systematic patterns in meaning construction triggered by the artworks. The research trip was partially financed by ESSE Bursary Type A which I received in 2018. References: Arnett, William S. 2015. “A History That Refused to Die”, in: Laura Bickford (ed.) History Refused to Die: The Enduring Legacy of African American Art in Alabama. Atlanta, GA: Tinwood, 9–24. Evans, Vyvyan and Melanie Green. 2006. Cognitive Linguistics. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dancygier, Barbara and Eve Sweetser. Figurative Language. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Dörnyei, Zoltán. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methodolo– gies, Oxford, 2007. Forceville, Charles, and Marloes Jeulink. “The flesh and blood of embodied understanding: the source–path–goal schema in animation film”, Pragmatics & Cognition, vol. 19, no. 1, 2011, pp. 37–59. Forceville, Charles. “Metaphor and symbol: SEARCHING FOR ONE'S IDENTITY IS LOOKING FOR A HOME in animation film”, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 11, no. 2, 2013, pp. 250–268. Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–2. Kwiatkowska, Alina. 2013. Interfaces, interspaces: Image, Language, Cognition. Piotrków Trybunalski: Naukowe Wydawnictwo Piotrkowskie. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and, Mark Johnson. Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books, 1999. Libura, Agnieszka, 2007. Amalgamaty kognitywne w sztuce. Kraków: Universitas. Lupyan, Gary and Benjamin Bergen. 2016. “How Language Programs the Mind.” Topics in Cognitive Science 8: 408–424. O’Toole, Michael. 2011. The language of displayed art, 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Wodak, Ruth. 2001. “The Discourse–Historical Approach” [in:] Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.
Access status: Open Access ,
Figuration in the discourses of art: A reception study report
(2020) Olszewska, Ewa
This presentation addresses two leitmotifs suggested in the CfP: (1) figuration from body, culture and society and (2) figuration and creativity. In my earlier work I have proposed Multimodal Critical Analysis of the Discourse of Art (MUCADA), which integrates insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999, Dancygier and Sweetser 2014, Forceville 2011, 2013, Kwiatkowska 2013, El Rafaie 2015), Social Semiotics (O’Toole 2011, O’Halloran 2008), and Discourse Historical Analysis (Wodak and Reisigl 2009) in order to represent meaning making processes in the interpretation of 3D artworks (sculptures, installations, assemblages). This model predicts that in the process of constructing the figurative meaning of an artwork art viewers rely on the structural elements of the work of art, as well as various types of contextual knowledge, such as the author’s background, collective memory of a social group, or museum’s profile. Context is here understood as internalized cognitive representation of an individual’s socio-cultural experience (cf. Kovecses 2015). In this study, a systematic analysis conducted by the researcher is compared with the viewers’ interpretations of the artworks. The data has been collected during 27 interviews conducted with 42 visitors of the Tubman Museum in Macon (GA) and High Museum of Art in Atlanta (GA). The results show that personal experience and knowledge, as well as embodied cognition play a crucial role in the interpretation of artworks. Access to more layers of contextual information allows the viewers to narrow down their interpretations. The interpretations based on the embodied experiences of height, weight and object’s materiality are similar across different groups of viewers. Less generic, and more specific interpretations are situated in the socio-cultural experience which differs between viewers and may facilitate the construction of more specific meanings. For example, the artwork “Untitled” by Bessie Harvey, representing a black person carved in a wooden branch, was interpreted by white Americans as an image of pride and passion; African-Americans, on the other hand, beside strength and perseverance, have also decoded the figure as reproducing the “Black Face” stereotype. This feature was less accessible to the interviewed white visitors. References Dancygier, Barbara and Eve Sweetser (2014). Figurative Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. El Refaie, Elisabeth. (2015). Cross-modal resonances in creative multimodal metaphors: Breaking out of conceptual prisons. In Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics ed. Maria-Jesus Pinar-Sanz, 13–26, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Forceville, Charles, and Marloes Jeulink (2011). The flesh and blood of embodied understanding: the source-path-goal schema in animation film. In Pragmatics & Cognition, 19(1): 37–59. DOI: 10.1075/pc.19.1.02for Forceville, Charles (2013). Metaphor and symbol: SEARCHING FOR ONE'S IDENTITY IS LOOKING FOR A HOME in animation film. In Review of Cognitive Linguistics 11(2): 250–268. DOI: 10.1075/rcl.11.2.03for Kövecses, Zoltan (2015). Where Metaphors Come From: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor. London: Oxford University Press. Kwiatkowska, Alina (2013). Interfaces, interspaces: Image, Language, Cognition. Piotrków Trybunalski: Naukowe Wydawnictwo Piotrkowskie. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1999). Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books. O'Halloran, Kay L (2008). Systemic functional-multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA): constructing ideational meaning using language and visual imagery. In Visual Communication 7(4): 443–475. DOI: 10.1177/1470357208096210 O’Toole, Michael (2001). The language of displayed art. London: Routledge. Wodak, Ruth, and Martin Reisigl (2009). The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, eds. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 87-121. London: Sage Publications.
Access status: Open Access ,
Kulturoznawstwo jako nauka. Od epistemologii do metod
(Wydawnictwo Nauk Społecznych i Humanistycznych UAM, 2026-06) Redakcja; Kijko, Maciej; Koschany, Rafał; Michałowska , Marianna; Zydorowicz, Jacek
Przekazywana do rąk Czytelniczek i Czytelników antologia tekstów pomyślana została jako wydawnictwo okolicznościowe, przygotowane w ramach obchodów Jubileuszu 50-lecia Instytutu Kulturoznawstwa Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu. Tom ten nie ma wyłącznie charakteru wspomnieniowego. Nie rekonstruujemy historii Instytutu i jego kolejnych przeobrażeń strukturalnych Zebrane w niniejszej antologii teksty zostały napisane przez kilka pokoleń poznańskich kulturoznawczyń i kulturoznawców. Są tu artykuły inicjatorów kierunku, a także – jako komentarze – ich uczennic i uczniów. To międzygeneracyjny dialog, a także ukazanie ewolucji sposobów myślenia o kulturze i języków wypowiedzi naukowej.
Access status: Open Access ,
Postawy wobec robotów społecznych. Zarys teoretyczny i przegląd badań
(2026-05) Wasielewska, Aleksandra
Książka Aleksandry Wasielewskiej stanowi realizację dojrzałego metodologicznie i wartościowego pod względem merytorycznym projektu badawczego. W monografii zostały usystematyzowane społeczne aspekty problematyki postaw względem robotów wraz z wyraźnym wskazaniem kierunków przyszłych badań tej niezwykle aktualnej problematyki, a przeprowadzone badania związane z kontekstem polskim oraz otrzymane wyniki stanowią o aktywnym włączeniu się Autorki w nurt badań nad postawami wobec robotów społecznych.