Poetic language and cognitive estrangement

Abstract

Shklovsky envisioned estrangement in art as the effect of an artifice that allows the experience of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. But perception —from the cognitive point of view— is a complex phenomenon that encompasses more basic operations that can also offer ´defamiliarization´ by appearing —even fleetingly— in consciousness. The hypothesis presented by this paper is that modern poetry registers these processes with singular persistence and transforms them into an index of poeticity. Thus, modes of perceptual estrangement that occur both in the material nature (acoustic and visual) and in the mental nature of poetic language will be addressed. This exploration will be carried out from the assumptions of embodied cognition and with the help of concepts drawn from cognitive neuroscience.