Thinking through Images: Cognising the World of Emily Dickinson

The article is an attempt to approach the poetry of Emily Dickinson through some of the principles of cognitive literary studies. In the first part the focus is placed on the first approaches to literary cognition in Slovak literary theory and on the nature of cognitive literary studies. The second part is a reading of some of the poems of the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson from the point of view of traditional criticism as well as cognitive literary studies, with a particular emphasis on the way the writer cognises the world around herself. Her poetic vision is presented as iconic expressions of mental experiences aimed at gnomic compression of the final image. She is characterised as a poet who "thinks through images" and her poetry as a fusion of the conceptual and figurative search for the truth.