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Lyric Poetry and Conceptual Blending
Michael Booth
Department of English
3-4 pm Wednesday March 13
ORB 2.12 (O'Rahilly Building)
This talk will offer an overview of “conceptual blending" theory and its uses in the study of poetry. Conceptual integration or blending, according to cognitive researchers, is a constant and mostly unconscious process of drawing elements from different conceptual domains, or frames of reference, and finding new ways to make them fit together. Works of art and literature, indeed examples of creative thinking of any kind, tend to be striking because they have found an original way of combining things—ideas, scenarios, situations. Artists and poets bring into the foreground what our minds are accustomed to doing quietly in the background. The usefulness of this theoretical model for literary analysis is something that I have sought to explore both in my scholarly work—in my book Shakespeare and Conceptual Blending, for example—and also in the classroom.