Cognitive Poetics and Readers’ Experientiality in Contemporary Palestinian War Poetry

Abstract

War poetry voices the traumatic cultural productions and sensitivity through the formal, aesthetic and creative dimensions of psychical responses. A perpetual trauma is imprinted on the psyche and the cultural memory of the people living through wars. To witness the representative suffering, war poetry needs to be examined from experiential and embodied dimensions of cognitive perception.  Mosab Abu Toha is an acclaimed Palestinian poet who represents his affective experiences, to lament over the displacement, loss and cultural clashes he witnesses, in his autobiographical poetry.  The research highlights that Abu Toha, in his transitional poetic space of the selected poem, invokes the receptiveness of witnessing through the defamilairized graphic images and syntactic representation which are foregrounded.  Further, the prototypical cognitive models in his selected poem are both situational and cultural.  The research is significant in examining the embodied and experiential dimensions of language processing in the poetic space to encode the readers’ positionalities and the linguistic structures that invoke the specific perspective in readers’ imagination.