Anne Holm

Poet and literary scholar Matti Kangaskoski has suggested that momentariness is one defining characteristic of digital cultural interfaces. In the case of digital poetry, this may, for example, involve selective engagement with a work due to a lack of clear boundaries framing its apprehension. This chapter proposes that a cognitive take on the notion of deixis can be fruitful in addressing the complexities of such momentariness. Deixis is usually understood as expressions whose meaning is relative to the discourse situation, such as “here”, and is linked to a more general perspectival positioning in cognitive accounts of language use. In a broader semiotic sense, deixis may operate through any kind of communicative cues that draw the recipient’s attention to something, thus placing more emphasis on the range of mechanisms facilitating intersubjectivity. In the asynchronous discourse situations of digital poetry, analysing such cues additionally requires a medial approach. With its starting point in Ronald W. Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar and drawing further insights from the spatiotemporal dimension of Lars Elleström’s model of media modalities, the chapter investigates the critical potential of deictic positioning in Ian Hatcher’s Attentions (2022). It argues that the work’s treatment of the momentariness of human attention in the digital age comes into view through an intermedially informed analysis of deixis.

With Joseph Brodsky’s poem “To Urania” as a case study, this article argues that a cognitive stylistic approach offers a new way into exploring literary representations of the experience of displacement. Drawing on the notion of the embodied mind in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, it presents a close reading of the poem’s portrayal of exile as a “felt” absence. The tension between the immediacy of embodied experience and what lies beyond its grasp is investigated with a particular consideration of enactivism and the dynamics of reading. Metaphor is seen as a tool for enacting vicarious experiences, but also as a means of conveying the difficulty of representing an experience of displacement. The analysis thus focuses on the poem’s strategies for negotiating the discrepancy between the past and the present. These include expressions viewing memory as a space, the juxtaposition of the personal and the generic, and projected movement.