Iconic Power of the Short Story

«Bretones Callejas is a master of both humanistic and scientific approaches. She shows the great power of combining cognitive science and textual analysis.»

(Mark Turner, Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University)

«The Iconic Power of the Short Story offers readers an interesting, cognitive linguistic approach to literary texts. This approach enables Bretones to explore Heaney’s poems as stories, each with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Her close readings of Heaney’s poems explore their metaphoric and synesthetic potential, blends, emotional resonance, contexts, perspectives, and themes. Scholars of Heaney’s work in particular, and those interested in cognitive poetics in general, may therefore find The Iconic Power of the Short Story worth reading.»

(Craig Hamilton, Professor at the English Department, Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse, France)

«Carmen Bretones offers a novel biocultural vision of Seamus Heaney's narrative, skillfully combining nature and nurture to depict his deeply experiential poetic composition. She navigates the cognitive complexities of Heaney’s work like no one else, exploring how his stories shape human cognition, language, culture, and social mind. Through her examination, Bretones reveals how Heaney’s artful narrativity contours the reader’s perception and conceptualization, making his poetic short stories socially all-encompassing. Her book has made me feel alive inside a Nobel literary mind.»
(Juani Guerra, Head of the Cognition and Health Lab and Professor at the Department of Modern Philology, Translation and Interpretation, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain)

This book explores the nexus between cognitive complexities and the iconic power of the short story, and its manifestations in Seamus Heaney’s literary work, examining the intersections of cognition, affective involvement, and culture, which mark the enduring impact of the literary craft. The concept of a poem as a short story is an approach that blurs the traditional boundaries between poetry and prose narrative. Viewing a poem as a short story allows for a deeper appreciation of the narrative and storytelling aspects present in both forms. The notion of cognitive condensation and of synesthetic force are also essential in this analysis.

Carmen M. Bretones Callejas is the Head of the Department of Philology at the University of Almería, Spain.