“As reading as if”: Harryette Mullen’s ‘cognitive similes’

Abstract

Abstract The poet Harryette Mullen takes the defamiliarization technique celebrated in cognitive poetics to an extreme – she manipulates not only the subject matter of her writing but the process the reader undertakes in attempting to read that defamiliarized language as well. I apply to Mullen’s poem “Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia” a number of ideas taken up by cognitive poetics (using Stockwell 2002 as my guide): reading versus interpretation, defamiliarization, prototypicality and actualization, sequential and summary scanning, and the mapping of conceptual metaphor. I then argue for several broader and unaccounted for challenges that Mullen’s work presents for cognitive poetic theory.