A Review of The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities

Abstract

Cognitive literary criticism has arguably been the fastest growing area of criticism in recent times. A field characterised by diversity, it is unified by an analytical animus: to discover what the cognitive sciences can teach us about art, and what art can teach us about cognition. More specifically, it engages with contemporary neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy of mind, to consider the nature of sociality, empathy, perception, and consciousness in relation to literature and the processes surrounding its production and consumption. In particular, second-generation cognitive literary criticism—which is premised on a model of the mind as embodied, culturally and ecologically situated in a particular environment, and enacted through our interactions with this environment—has revealed the ways in which classical, dualist approaches to literary notions of interiority inadequately represent both human experience and behavior and literary encounters, and the interactions between them. Though controversial, cognitive literary criticism has made significant contributions to the broader field: the synthesis of cognitive science with the literary produces a model of knowledge able to move between objectivity and subjectivity, synapse to syntax, the empirical to the experiential.The field has been developing since (at least) the 1980s, with the work of Norman Holland deploying cognitive neuroscience as a powerful hermeneutic tool in literary analysis. In concert with the development of cognitive science technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and other forms of neuroimaging techniques, interest in cognitive literary studies has expanded exponentially within the last four decades. As Isabel Jaén and Julien Simon argue, “By the end of the 20th C, cognitive literary studies began to establish itself firmly as a new and exciting field aiming to understand literature in the context of the embodied mind and its dynamic interaction with the environment.”1 Rather than a specific theoretical model, cognitive literary criticism consists of a constellation of cognitively informed approaches, including neuro-aesthetics (see, for example, Vilayanur Ramachandran, David Miall, and Semir Zeki), cognitive poetics (Reuven Tsur and Peter Stockwell), cognitive stylistics (e.g., Elena Semino and Jonathen Culpeper), cognitive cultural studies (Mary Thomas Crane, Ellen Spolsky), cognitive narratology (Monika Fludernik, Patrick Colm Hogan, and David Herman), and innumerable others. However, due to the newness of cognitive science technologies themselves, as well as the unfamiliar territory of such an interdisciplinary dialogue, cognitive literary critics like Alan Richardson emphasize the “provisional, even embryonic character of research in the mind and brain sciences.”2 Progress is tentative; the field remains in a state of flux, constantly expanding and revising. Yet it is precisely this inchoate state that renders cognitive literary studies so rich: despite the proliferation of recent research, there remains a vast and untapped space for further investigation.In this space, a new collection, The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities (2021), edited by Jean-François Vernay, brings the interdisciplinary concerns of cognitive literary studies to bear on Australian works of literature. This is, in one sense, another installment in a series of collected works that have outlined some of the contours of cognitive literary criticism, adding to anthologies such as the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (2015), Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature (2016), Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions (2012), and Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative (2013). In another sense, it’s the early signs of a new and exciting field, the Australian neurohumanities. As the editor says, the present volume is “a conversation starter” (xvii). This is a welcome contribution, as Australian cognitive literary criticism is still in the early stages, even relative to our colleagues in the rest of the world.As others have noted, cognitive literary studies asks different questions of literature than the rest of the literary scholarship. Generally, the essays in The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities answer questions of the social and ethical dimensions of literature, rather than hermeneutic dimensions. That is, they are, in general, not so much concerned with developing a system of interpretation as understanding how individual texts bear on the reader’s, or writer’s, experience. It is, therefore, through theoretical lenses of reader response and cultural and social utility that the authors of this collection discuss concepts of literary theory (such as narrative voice and focalization) and specific works of Australian literature, including authors such as Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Christos Tsiolkas, Charlotte Wood, Gail Jones and, more surprisingly, Aussie rules player Garry Lyon. These chapters are attendant to reading and writing as both exchanges between minds (fictional and real), and internal processes of affect, cognition, and self-construction. In particular, a takeaway from this collection is the power of literature to transform our understanding and connection with ourselves, our society, our culture, and the societies and cultures of others. Such analyses of literature are sometimes criticized for failing to treat the text as an art object, rather than an anthropological site or sociological tool. However, as Rocío Riestra-Camacho points out in the penultimate chapter, one can take an extrinsic perspective of a text without denying its intrinsic value. This collection makes a good case for the pragmatic utility of literature, while also acknowledging its aesthetic power.The chapters in this collection are also highly diverse, in line with the sprawling nature of the discipline. As Lisa Zunshine notes in the introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, the field demonstrates a “resistance to unified theories” (Zunshine 2015, 178). This is only fitting: As Spolsky notes in her argument about cog lit crit as a variant of poststructuralism, the relationships between the embodied mind and text are so rich and complex that no single theory or method could capture them in their entirety (Spolsky 2003). A broad range of paradigms and approaches are therefore essential to the project of the field. This inclusivity is to the benefit of the scope of The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities, which ranges over narratological, public health, affect studies, and postcolonial concerns.The book begins with a useful overview of cognitive Australian literary studies by the editor, Jean-François Vernay. Vernay proposes a tentative description of the field as a cluster of various literary criticism-related disciplines forming a broad-based trend which draws on the findings of cognitive science to sharpen their psychological understanding of literature by exploring the mental processes at work in the creative minds of writers and readers. (2) While I might add to this account cognitive literary criticism that engages with fictional minds (e.g., Alan Palmer, Blakey Vermeule, or I. Wentworth), Vernay’s overview of the field’s history is nevertheless illuminating. He limns cognitive literary studies’ various methodologies and the history of developments in the area, including not only criticism but cognitively inspired fiction (also called the neuro-novel) and nonfiction. This introduction provides a welcome orientation for the reader and will help to navigate the following essays.The first essay, by Lukas Klik, works within cognitive narratology, exploring how reader empathy (the “vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect” [Suzanne Keen, Novel, 4]) operates in multiperspectival narratives. Klik compares narratives that contain directly conflicting viewpoints (e.g., The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas) with narratives in which the focal perspectives do not interact (Gail Jones’s Five Bells), suggesting that they engender reader empathy in different ways. This, of course, is not only due to textual phenomena, Klik argues, but also due to differences in reader identification, such as their own sexuality or ethnicity, as the narrative is filtered through the reader’s subjectivity. Klik claims that Tsiolkas’s acerbic suburban drama foregrounds conflict between the various focal characters, which modulates narrative empathy. In contrast, in Five Bells, a story of the Chinese cultural revolution, the empathy triggered by the text “is not a result of the narrative’s multiperspectivity” (23).3 Rather, Klik argues that the specific form of narrative empathy in Five Bells emerges from its exploration of trauma and grief through its focal characters. He follows Suzanne Keen in noting that depictions of particular negative sensations have the ability to facilitate narrative empathy; however, this doesn’t have to result in mutual identification or fusing of “self and other” (22). Klik contends that the implied Anglo-Saxon reader of Five Bells would be, alongside their empathetic reaction to the trauma depicted in the story, simultaneously alerted to cultural differences between themselves and the oppressed characters, producing instead an “empathetic unsettlement.” (22)Though the broader argument, that we are likely to feel empathy with various characters in the text, depending on a number of factors such as plot, content, focalization, and our own personal background, may be intuitive, Klik well explores the specific relations between perspectives and characters, and how these more nuanced textual features can drastically alter readerly engagement. Analysing two quite different texts, he makes the good point that narrative empathy in these diverse texts can still function in a similar way: encouraging empathy and identification with marginalized groups, which has clearly ethical implications. This chapter therefore contributes to a growing body of research that suggests literature can change how people feel about others in the real world.The impact of perceived relevance of the text on the reader’s experience is a bridge between Klik’s work and the following essay by Victoria Reeve, which explores emotion in Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend. Reeve looks at the interpretive capacity of emotion in reading practices, as she finds her personal relation to Wood’s novel, and in particular its older female protagonist, is mediated by her own relationship with her mother. Reeve identifies the recursive implications of reading, interpreting the text through levels of identification and affective engagement. Affective reading of the literary text, Reeve suggests, invokes a rereading of one’s own life (the very lens through which one appraises literature, which is what makes this a recursive relationship). Such a subjective, emotionally inflected response to literature is often missing from formal literary criticism, but is crucial to the project of cog lit crit as an endeavor that aims to understand all aspects of literature, including both reading and writing. Reeve convincingly outlines the literature around affect as an organizing category through which we interpret embodied and embedded experiences, and the pathos of her intimate discussions of The Weekend and its connections to her own life itself provokes an emotionally engaged reading of this chapter itself (adding another layer to the affective palimpsest involved in this interpretive endeavor). She also considers how reading provokes cognitive and emotional responses through formal narrative strategies, and their parallel with everyday interactions (e.g., perspective-taking/focalization). Reeve ultimately suggests that emotion can be used as a hermeneutic tool to help us to understand how relationships operate across unequal social and economic lines.4This conviction carries into the next chapter, as Francesca Di Blasio does important work in acknowledging the role of First Nations writers in shaping Australia’s cultural memory. Di Blasio does so through an approach to Kim Scott’s Taboo, which sews together cognitive theory, affect theory, and cultural memory studies. Like Reeve and Klik, Di Blasio uses readerly emotion and empathy effects to analyse the forms of knowledge that literature can offer, outside of the empiricism of the sciences. This is, as Nussbaum, Hogan, and Massumi note, an ethically charged mode of knowledge, and Di Blasio uses these theorists well in her analysis of how literature can reconfigure modes of identification, both with individuals, places, and cultures. Di Blasio focuses on Taboo’s combination of “individual and collective cultural memory with the materiality of space and place,” arguing that Scott’s novel presents sites of collective trauma, revealing emotion in its material, physical dimension, as it moves through individuals, communities, and the land that they inhabit. (Emotion is here understood as both subjective experience and relational “engine”—to use Patrick Colm Hogan’s term). Subsequently, reading these works “stimulates emotion, sensitizing us to the world around us,” and develops our ethical and cultural understanding.The next essay by Lisa Smithies analyzes Cate Kennedy’s “Cold Snap” through the concept of “voice.” Smithies uses the term narrative voice as a metaphor, understanding it through transference of elements from spoken voice to textual voice. She defines it as the confluence of narrative features like narration (idiom), dialogue, perspective, and paralinguistic cues (such as tone, tempo, etc). Like the spoken voice, narrative voice acts as a bridge between the external and the internal, belonging both to the text and to its reader. On the other side of the Markov blanket, Smithies explains that readers bring our own “meaning making apparatus” (59), that is, our cognitive abilities, for example, theory of mind, as well as our own culturally embedded and embodied experiences, to the task of constructing the “voice” of a text. Of course, this distinction isn’t watertight. The boundary between textual voice and the “mind’s ear,” as Smithies terms it—that is, between the perceiver and perceived, or perhaps the hearer and the heard—is porous here.Smithies follows Monika Fludernik in arguing that Gérard Genette’s conception of the separation of speaking and seeing (the difference between focalization and voice in traditional narratology) is an infelicitous categorization, because when readers read, we hypostasize a narrator figure, projecting real life parameters onto the reading process, so that the difference between the speaker and seer is unstable. With this theoretical framework, Smithies approaches “Cold Snap,” a short story in which the effect of the narrative is inextricably linked with its voice—which perhaps characterizes a particular kind of Australian literature. She locates “Cold Snap” in the literary tradition of bush realism, which carries a distinctively unpretentious, stark voice, at once unique and polyphonic, capturing the “cadence of our lived experience” (57). Smithies competently analyzes “Cold Snap,” covering a range of interesting textual phenomena, and their implication within eco-fiction. One area it would have been good to hear more about is the role of the space between the lines: narrative “gaps” (a key area of research in cognitive reader response theory that could have been productively explored here.5) Overall, however, this essay provides a solid account of narrative voice, and its role in reader engagement.The following essay comes from literary author, Sue Woolfe. This fact is important because cognitive science does a lot of speaking about author’s brains, and much less listening. Here we get the opportunity to hear from an author directly as they reflect on their own cognitive processes. It’s a rare insight, connecting theory and practice, in anthologies such as these. In this essay, Woolfe conducts a general investigation into the neuroscience of writing, anchored through the experience of writers block and other various cognitive and affective inhibitions. Further, she also reflects on the impact of this reflexive awareness on her own writing practices.Woolfe convincingly weaves together philosophy, personal experience, and neuroscience: she explains that Heidegger’s distinction of waiting upon (rather than waiting for) articulates a kind of creative process which Woolfe herself follows, and which neuroscience has described as “an initial generative phase of the creative process in which the creator uses insight, intuition, and incubation,” before being subsequently followed by the analytical stage when various ideas cohere and connect in the authors’ mind and the “desire” of the creative work makes itself known (69). This event, of the underlying structure of idea fragments forming a complete whole in the secondary stage of creative process, has profound implications for, Woolfe suggests, both writer and reader. If the story develops “out of the creator’s ‘truth’ or worldview, then the worldview in the creation may be discerned by others, with the potential to heal them,” as well as the creator (73). This beautiful theory finds deeper resonance as Woolfe begins talking about her most recent work, the story of her difficult childhood with a violent mother, chiming with Reeve’s earlier exploration of her own maternal relationship. Both women seem to have found healing in the processes of writing and reading.One minor comment is that it might have been good to acknowledge the provisional nature of the research upon which Woolfe draws (seminal studies that were undertaken in the 1960s and 70s and have come under scrutiny since). Cognitive literary criticism often runs into difficulty when it presents the findings of cognitive science—which are often messy, contradictory, and tentative—as concrete. For example, Woolfe draws upon Mednick’s 1962 study that found, in Woolfe’s words, that “whereas most people have what he termed steep associative hierarchies so that a given stimulus evokes only highly related memories, creative people have distinctively flat associative hierarchies so that a given stimulus evokes not only high related, but also remote memories” (70). This is a description of Mednick’s Remote Associates Test, and the construction of these associative hierarchies is termed divergent (creative types) and convergent (noncreatives) information processing. However, using divergent thinking as a proxy for creativity has been questioned by subsequent studies (Dietrich and Kanso, 2010; Dietrich, 2007; Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999). As Dietrich and Kanso point out, this is partly because divergent thinking fails to track novelty in idea creation, and convergent thinking also seems to arrive at novel ideas fairly often.Similarly, Woolfe also draws upon the work of Colin Martindale to argue that “creative people achieved this [creative inspiration] by spontaneously lowering their brain activity.” (70) In so doing, Woolfe suggests, creators leave more mental resources for heightened sensitivity to the world around them, as well as subliminal impressions. Although she doesn’t cite the study in her bibliography, I assume she is talking about the experiment published in the article “Creativity and Cortical Activation during Creative, Intellectual, and EEG Feedback Tasks” (Martindale and Mines 1975). This study focused on the alpha band (a pattern of slow brain waves) and found that creatives exhibited a higher percentage of basal alpha during creative tasks, taken to indicate unfocused attention and low arousal. However, this interpretation has been questioned (by, for example, Klimesch, Sauseng, and Hanslmayr 2007), which according to Dietrich and Kanso, “increases the challenge of understanding the functional meaning of EEG data” (Dietrich and Kanso 2010, 825). On more solid ground, Woolfe reports recent findings that associate creativity with brain states that are lower in predictive processing, goal-oriented brain activity, and value-laden consciousness. Woolfe doesn’t give this state its name—the default mode network (Beaty)—perhaps for fear of overloading the paper. However, it seems pertinent to mention, especially as recent research on the default mode network unifies two of the key elements of creativity that Woolfe discusses (defocus and high associative activity).6These are, however, minor comments, and overall Woolfe’s is a valuable contribution to a much talked about, but incompletely understood, aspect of literature: the writing of it.In the second to last essay, Rocío Riestra-Camacho joins a growing body of cognitive literary criticism that focuses on the utilitarian uses of literature: in this case, to motivate readers to exercise. Focusing on Specky Magee, a children’s book about Aussie rules (written by former player Garry Lyon), Riestra-Camacho first deploys theories of embodied cognition to understand how the novel may impact upon readers’ motor system, and then considers three (interrelated) avenues in which the book might contribute to reader’s motivation to exercise: cognitive appraisal, empathy, and simulation. Of the three, I found the latter to be a little questionable. That is, I am unsure that the link between experiencing motor resonance activation through reading and motivation has been convincingly made by empirical studies. There may be some slippage here between motor imagery as a self-generated visualization exercise and motor imagery in response to a written description of activity performed by a character (see Ross Stewart’s study, cited in this chapter, on motor imagery). However, the article convincingly surveys the literature on linguistic motor resonance (or the role of embodied simulation in reading), which is a fascinating area of research, as well as the textual features that can stimulate readers’ cognitive appraisal, affective associations, and empathetic relations with characters. Riestra-Camacho explains that stories about sport can spark the reader’s interest, teach them about the sport, give them positive associations with it, and lead them to empathize, and perhaps identify, with a player-character. Riestra-Camacho also makes a strong argument for the role of sports literature in shifting behavioral patterns: an important issue in today’s obesity crisis. (Though it perhaps wasn’t necessary for Riestra-Camacho to focus only on “overweight readers” [84] when it seems she just meant “people that are unmotivated to exercise,” which are two different groups.) Like the other authors in this study who look at the pragmatic impact of literature, this chapter makes a convincing case, perhaps in a slightly surprising direction, for literature’s social value.Dorothee Klein closes the anthology with an exciting essay on encoded environmental meanings in Aboriginal fiction, and how these “implicate the reader’s body to convey the vitality of the land and to potentially elicit moments of corporeal interconnectedness” (94). Key to her theoretical framework, as others in the anthology have relied upon, are the visceral and simulationary effects of narrative and language, as understood through the paradigm of embodied, situated cognition, and readerly participation. The first half explores intercorporeality, anchored by the rhythmic functions of life: breath and heartbeat, in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Kim Scott’s Benang. Klein’s analysis here is both agile and resonant, gesturing toward the potential of literature to move between specific, local environmental and cultural experiences, into a “human commonality,” partly via embodied simulation in the reader. The second half of the chapter analyses language as the point of interconnectedness between body and land in Tara June Winch’s The Yield and Scott’s Taboo. On the one hand, it seems a little contrived to set these texts as counterpoints to Carpentaria and Benang, as it forces Klein into making perhaps unnecessarily strong claims. For example, that Tara June Winch’s The Yield does “not contain textual features that trigger an embodied simulation of feeling the land,” which might be surprising to readers of Winch’s work—though Klein concedes that the novel is invested in the land “on the level of content” (101). Or that “Taboo sidelines an embodied understanding altogether,” which again is surprising for a novel so seemingly concerned with the violence and vulnerability of the body. However, generally Klein expertly analyzes the project of each novel. She argues that Winch’s The Yield challenges white Australian readers to experience the articulation, if imperceptible, of a language that is both alien and yet connects the body with the land they inhabit. This has profound implications for the role of literature in empathetic connection both within and between cultures, though it is relevant that the works at the core of her argument are self-consciously and even didactically constructed around postcolonial notions of re-education,7 which suggests that critics should be wary of making universalizing claims about the direct moral effects of literature on prejudice, empathetic connection, and social change. Furthermore, Klein is careful to point out the limitations of linguistic resonance as an avenue to understanding Indigenous culture. This is a line that non-Indigenous readers can walk only “tentatively and vicariously” (104). As such, Klein argues that Scott’s Taboo does not invite the reader into language with detailed descriptions of its production or sound, as The Yield does, rather emphasizing the need for a respectful stance toward Indigenous culture.All in all, the main issue I have with the collection is that there isn’t enough of it: at only eight short essays, The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities gives just a taste of the rhizomatic growth of cognitive literary criticism in Australia. Of course, as other anthologies of the field have shown, in such a dynamic space, only “a representative rather than exhaustive coverage of the field” (Zunshine 2015, 4) is possible. I am therefore very much looking forward to the next installment.