Forty-five years of law and literature: reflections on James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination and its impact on law and humanities scholarship

Myra Bradwell and the Profession of Law: Case Documents JOHN A. LUPTON Most attorneys—certainly most women attorneys—know the story ofMyra Bradwell, who applied to become a lawyer in Illinois only to be rebuffed by both the Illinois supreme court and the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite her fame in her attempt to become licensed as an attorney specifically and for progressive Victorian women generally, there are only a few biographies of her and a handful ofarticles regarding her plight.1 This documentary edition is a new perspective on Myra Bradwell’s attempt to become a lawyer—not through an interpretive framework, but through the lens of the case documents.2 By examining transcriptions of the original case documents with interspersed editorial narrative, researchers and historians can place Bradwell in the context ofher times and better interpret her role in attempting to break gender barriers. Myra Colby was bom in Manchester, Vermont on February 12, 1831, the youngest of five children born to Eban and Abigail Colby. Soon after, the family movedto Portage, New York. In 1843, the family moved to Schaumburg, Illinois in Cook County. Myra moved to Wisconsin to live with a married sis­ ter to attend a finishing school. She finished her schooling at the Elgin Female Seminary in 1851.3 While at Elgin, Myra metJames Bradwell. The Colby family did not like Bradwell due to the fact that he had worked menial jobs while studying law. James had claimed that he could earn a living as a journeyman in seventeen different trades. James and Myra escaped to Chicago, where they eloped in May 1852.4 The newlywed couple moved to Mem­ phis, Tennessee, and James began teaching at a private school. James continued to study law and became licensed to practice in Ten­ nessee in 1852. James was under way in a promising career, but the constant reminder of slavery weighed heavily on the abolition­ ist couple. In 1854, the Bradwells returned to Illinois, settling in Chicago. From 1854 to 1862, they had four children: Myra in 1854, Thomas in 1856, Bessie in 1858, and James in 1862. Only Thomas and Bessie survived into adulthood.5 MYRA BRADWELL AND THE PROFESSION OF LAW 237 Upon his return to Illinois, James resumed studying law to become licensed in Illinois, which occurred in 1855. He formed a partner­ ship with his brother-in-law, Frank Colby, who four years earlier had chased Bradwell with his shotgun for courting his sister.6 After James became a lawyer in Illinois, Myra began reading law with him. She had no intention of becoming a lawyer but only stud­ ied with him in order to assist him in his cho­ sen career. In the 1850s, reading law with an established attorney was the principal method of obtaining a legal education. Myra stopped reading law when the Civil War broke out in 1861. She raised money to assist with sick and wounded soldiers with Soldiers’ Fairs in 1863 and 1867 and with the Northwestern Sanitary Fair in 1865.7 In the meantime, James won election as a Cook County judge in 1861 and gained reelection in 1865. He served as a probatejudge, and, during the Civil War, held that a slave marMyra Bradwell originally learned the law by reading it alongside her husband, James, as he studied to be an attorney. She did not decide to get her law license until many years later. riage was valid after emancipation, securing inheritance rights for many former slaves.8 After the 1867 Soldiers Fair, Myra re­ sumed reading law with her husband. Dur­ ing this second stage of legal education, she was determined to obtain her law license.9 In 1868, she founded the Chicago Legal News, a weekly newspaper devoted to conveying news important to the legal profession in a timely manner.10 Bradwell realized that too much time elapsed between the passage of laws and their publication and between the pronouncement of opinions and their pub­ lication. Her venture into legal publishing and her attempt to become a lawyer, accord­ ing to the American Law Review, was the “first serious attempt by a woman to share in the labors of the law...

The analysis of a novel's plot and characters are challenging and time-consuming tasks in literary criticism. Typically, humanities scholars want to describe and compare characters' personality traits, their roles, their relationships, and the evolution of these aspects over the course of a novel. Nowadays, due to the digitization of literature, humanities scholars can be supported in these endeavors with computational methods. In this paper, we present an approach that offers several means to analyze the plot and characters of a novel visually. Analysts can easily switch between an adjacency matrix and a node-link representation, which provide an overview of the characters and the relationships between them. Both views enable analysts to select different text ranges of the novel for studying the commonalities and differences of the character constellations within these ranges. We offer interactive visual representations to help investigate the relationships between the characters in more detail. Additionally, we link the visual representations with the novels' texts to support the inspection and verification of previously generated ideas and hypotheses. To demonstrate the benefits and limitations of our approach, we present two usage scenarios. The first one is based on a fictitious analysis and the second one discusses applications that were carried out during joint workshops with humanities scholars. Finally, we present and discuss the insights gained by an expert study and the design decisions of our approach.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Twining, W. (1997) Law in Context: Enlarging a Discipline (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Twining, W. (1967) Pericles and the plumber. Inaugural Lecture, Belfast. Published in shortened form in Law Quarterly Review, 83, p. 396. Twining, W. (1994) Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School (London, Sweet and Maxwell). Twining, W. & Miers, D. (1976) How To Do Things With Rules (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Twining, W. (1980) Goodbye to Lewis Eliot: the academic lawyer as scholar. Presidential Address, Society of Public Teachers of Law, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law, 15, pp. 2–19. See Twining, W. (1998) Imagining Bentham, Current Legal Problems, pp. 1–36; Twining W. (1989) Reading Bentham (Maccabean lecture), LXXV Proceedings of the British Academy, pp. 97–141; Twining, W. (1999) Jeremy Bentham and general jurisprudence (First Eckhoff Memorial Lecture), Tidsskrift for Rettsvitenskap, 112, pp. 381–407. See e.g. Twining, W. (1973) Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson); Twining, W. (1968) The Karl Llewellyn Papers (Chicago, University of Chicago Law School; Twining, W. (1993) Karl Llewellyn's unfinished agenda: law in society and the job of juristic method, Chicago Papers in Legal History, 1993. Twining, W. (2002) The Great Juristic Bazaar (London, Ashgate). Twining, W. (2000) Globalisation and Legal Theory (London, Butterworth); Twining, W. (2009) Implications of globalisation for legal scholarship, in: A. Halpin & V. Roeben (Eds) Theorising the Global Legal Order (Oxford, Hart), pp. 39–59; Twining, W. (2005) Have concepts, will travel: analytical jurisprudence in a global context, International Journal of Law in Context, 1, pp. 5–40. Twining, W. (2007) General jurisprudence, University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review, 15, pp. 1–59; Twining, W. (1996) General and particular jurisprudence – three chapters in a story, in: S. Guest (Ed.) Legal Positivism Today, (Aldershot, Dartmouth), pp. 119–146; Twining, W. (2009) General Jurisprudence: Understanding Law from a Global Perspective (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Twining, W., Kamenka, E. & Summers, R. (1986) Sociological Jurisprudence and Realist Theories of Law (Berlin, Duncker and Humblot). Twining, W. (2009) Institutions of law: globalization, non-state law and legal pluralism, in: M. Del Mar & Z. Bankowski (Eds) Law as Institutional Normative Order (London, Ashgate); Twining, W. (2009) Normative and legal pluralism (Bernstein Lecture), Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law, 20, pp. 473–517. Twining, W. (1964) The Place of Customary Law in the National Legal Systems of East Africa (Chicago, University of Chicago Law School). Twining, W. (2008) Surface law, in: H. Petersen, K.L. Kjaer & M.R. Madsen (Eds) Paradoxes of European Legal Integration (Ashgate, Aldershot). Twining, W. (1989) Reading law (Seegers Lectures), Valparaiso Law Review, 24, pp. 1–33. Twining, W., N. Gold, & MacKie (1989) Learning Lawyers' Skills (London, Butterworth). Twining, W. (1991) Lawyers' stories, in: R. Kevelson (Ed.) Action and Agency (New York, P. Lang), pp. 317–389. Twining, W., Anderson, T. & Schum, D. (2005) Analysis of Evidence, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Twining, W. (1980) Debating probabilities, Liverpool Law Review, 11, pp. 51–64. Twining, W. (1982) Taking facts seriously, in: N. Gold (Ed.) Essays on Legal Education (Butterworths, Toronto), pp. 51–76; Twining, W. (2007) Taking facts seriously again, in: P. Roberts & M. Redmayne (Eds) Teaching legal Scholarship (Oxford, Hart), pp. 65–86. Twining, W. (1986) Taking skills seriously, Commonwealth Legal Education Newsletter, No 43, Appendix. Reprinted in Journal of Professional Legal Education (1986) and Learning Lawyers Skills, op. cit.). Twining, W. & Quick, E. (1994) Legal Records in the Commonwealth (Aldershot, Dartmouth). Twining, W. & Uglow, J. (Eds) (1981) Legal Literature in Small Jurisdictions (Ottawa/London, Canadian Law Information Council & Commonwealth Secretariat). Twining, W. (2009) Punching our weight? Legal scholarship and public understanding (The SLS Centenary Lecture), Legal Studies, 29, pp. 519–533. Twining, W. (1983) Law for Non-Lawyers: Some Preliminary Reflections (London, Commonwealth Secretariat). Twining, W. (1979) Legal education for all, in: D Mitchell (Ed.) Legal Studies and Legal Education for Non-Lawyers (Sydney, Butterworths), pp. 1–13. Twining, W. (1987) The camel in the zoo, in: I. Shivji (Ed.) The Limits of Legal Radicalism (Dar es Salaam, Faculty of Law, University of Dar es Salaam). Twining, W., O'Donovan, K. & Paliwala, A. (1970) Ernie and the centipede, in: A. Jolowicz (Ed.) The Division and Classification of the Law (London, Butterworths). Twining, W. (1973) The bad man revisited, Cornell Law Review, 52, p. 275; Twining, W. (1997) Other people's power: the bad man and English Positivism, 1897–97, Brooklyn Law Review, 63, pp. 189–223. Twining, W. (1973) The way of the baffled medic, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law, 12, p. 348.

The rise of a new paradigm of literary studies: The challenge of digital humanities

Two developments in legal studies over past generations are the development of a critical discourse and literature addressed to shortcomings of legal education, and the development of a rich, rewarding body of work in interdisciplinary legal studies, often referred to as law and society scholarship or socio-legal studies. To date, these two developments have been largely independent of one another, although scholarship in law and society or socio-legal studies has much potential to complement or reform legal education in many of the respects where it has been found to be problematic or lacking. A brief survey of many of the concerns which have been voiced about legal education, with significant attention to ‘internal’ critiques offered by legal scholars and educators themselves, is offered with the constructive goal of suggesting the relevance of social scientific scholarship and instruction for legal education, broadly conceived to include pre-law education, continuing legal education, dual degrees and paralegal studies. Important issues include the inevitably interdisciplinary nature of legal studies, issues of civics and public service, critical and reflective approaches to law, professionalism and ethics, specialization and multi-disciplinary practice, and skills training and legal practice more generally. Given the great potential for social science to contribute to legal education in many ways that are responsive to the internal critiques of legal education, it is well worth addressing difficult questions about how legal education could incorporate relevant social scientific scholarship and instruction.

The appearance of an extract from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in the context of a legal research methods book is seemingly incongruous. 'Law and humanities' is an all-encompassing term that has become used relatively recently to refer to a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to law, legal education and legal research. Law and humanities scholarship has at its core the so-called 'law and literature' movement, and this remains the mainstay of the discipline. The focus upon narrative and storytelling calls for a literary approach, particularly narrative theory, so as to understand the construction of narratives within the courtroom and within law more generally. The field of law and humanities offers then a credible means to adopting a qualitative approach to legal research, which attaches importance to human concerns and values, rather than focusing on the more quantifiable principles that derive from a more scientific, positivist approach.

Despite a clear case for thinking skills in legal education, the approach to teaching these skills often appears to be implied in law curricula rather than identified explicitly. Thinking skills could be taught as part of reading law and legal problem solving. However, learning the full suite of thinking skills requires active teaching strategies which go beyond exposing students to the text of the law, and training them in its application by solving problem scenarios. The challenge for law teachers is to articulate how to learn legal thinking skills, and to do so at each level of the degree. This article outlines how the nexus between three component skills: critical legal thinking, reading law, and legal problem solving, can be put to work to provide a cohesive and scaffolded approach to the teaching of legal thinking. Although the approach in this article arises from the Smart Casual project, producing discipline-specific professional development resources directed at sessional teachers in law, we suggest that its application is relevant to all law teachers.

Earth system science indicates the existence of planetary boundaries. Several of these ecological limits have been transgressed, raising serious human rights concerns. Concurrently, persistent poverty and significant economic disparities continue to challenge societies and human rights law and scholarship. How to reform economies to respect planetary boundaries and at the same time address deprivation and socio-economic inequalities is the subject of a rich ‘degrowth’ literature. Surprisingly, this literature received minimal attention from human rights scholarship. Building upon Raworth’s influential concept of Doughnut Economics, this paper aims to bridge this gap by investigating whether human rights can encompass ecological limits (outer circle of the doughnut) and how these limits relate to social priorities embodied in human rights law (inner circle of the doughnut). To do so, the paper is structured along two sub-sections. The first section examines the relevance of core planetary boundaries, particularly biosphere integrity and climate change, within the context of human rights law. In the second section, the paper addresses the relationship between the inner and outer circle of doughnut economics from a human rights perspective. Drawing on critical literature, the article problematizes the ‘growth paradigm’ in human rights practice but also offers alternative readings. In this final part of the article, the author demonstrates how central doctrines of ESC rights, such as progressive realization and non-retrogression, could be interpreted in a way agnostic of economic growth.

This submission for PhD brings together five publications that illustrate how my work has had an impact on legal education at Liverpool John Moores University, and further impact on the external higher education landscape. It demonstrates how extrinsic evidence and action research methods were used to develop aspects of the curriculum and overall academic experience of law students. The impact of these innovations was analysed with qualitative and quantitative education research methods, which are rarely used in legal education. The development of this research is traced from 2001 and details how it grew from a desire to improve the law student experience, into a body of education research that has had impact both in law and other higher education disciplines. The articles in this submission are published in high quality higher education journals, an achievement which is still relatively unusual in legal education. Four of the five are published in journals ranked in the top twenty for higher education research by Googlescholar and academics (Tight, 2017). They form a coherent body of education research with demonstrable results for legal education and beyond. The first indication of impact is that, together, these publications have been cited 180 times. The original findings in these publications are discussed such as the discovery that self-awareness literature and diary-keeping can help students in their transition to university. Other discoveries include findings that: reflective practice has intrinsic value in higher education regardless of whether students become ‘good’ reflectors; the importance of a long transition process rather than a traditional induction process and; the benefits of student voice and participatory action research for legal and other higher education disciplines. This submission discusses how this body of research has impacted on students, law staff at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), colleagues in other disciplines and outside LJMU. The impact of these innovations in bringing reflective practice, self-awareness literature, and the use of diaries to legal education for the purposes of helping to improve retention rates and student performance is demonstrated (Publications 1 and 2). Analysis was undertaken using qualitative education research techniques, particularly the use of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), which is uncommon in legal education. Publication 3 highlights the value of a longer transition process and the value of quantitative education research techniques in legal education. Publications 4 and 5 take legal education development into the emerging area of student voice by employing participatory action research with students. This type of research is also rare in legal education. The potential of this approach to gathering data, analysis and publication, which might influence on-going conversations about the development of legal education, including testing learning environments that prepare students for the Solicitor’s Qualifying Examination is discussed. The methodological reasoning for using the chosen methods of research is also discussed, as is the general need to test innovations in law curricula. In summary, these publications illustrate the use of education research methodology and methods that are seldom employed in legal education. The sustainability of this approach, the value of communicating with students and potential further research that could be informed by these publications is deliberated. A final conclusion drawn is that there should be more engagement from legal scholars with the external education research community.

Maya Textures: Conceptualizing Contemporary Indigenous Poetics, Patterns, and Performances Sophie Esch Paul M. Worley, and Rita M. Palacios. Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge. Arizona UP, 2019. 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8165-3427-2. Latin American literary studies have always been characterized by a certain unease when it comes to their main object of study: literature. From Ángel Rama’s La ciudad letrada to John Beverley’s Against Literature, Latin Americanists have been painfully aware that literature is a practice of power and close to power. Ever since writing in the Latin script was introduced and used by the European invaders to administrate, dominate, and represent the native population of the American continent, literature has been an instrument of power, a power generally held by white or mestizo elites. Recent decades, however, have led to an increased production by and visibility of non-white and non-mestizo voices. In this context appears Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge by Paul Worley and Rita Palacios. Their book continues the pattern of critical skepticism towards literature, but by centering indigenous intellectual production. In the introduction, the authors expressly state that this is not a book on literature, literary criticism, or literary theory (3). In this case, the distance to the literary has to do with a desire to move beyond narrow European Alphabet-centric conceptions of literature or writing in order to better conceptualize contemporary indigenous cultural forms of expression. In their attempt to unwrite the idea of Maya literature, they employ the Maya concept of Ts’íib, a term for cultural creation and recording that encompasses textual writing, performances, and pattern-making and which is inherently dynamic, social, and interconnected in nature. Understanding Ts’íib as “a multimodal site of cultural production (textile, textual, architectural, divinatory, or agricultural” (19), throughout the book’s seven chapters, Worley and Palacios discuss different dimensions and examples of ts’íib. The works analyzed include a wide range of examples of contemporary indigenous art and writing in Maya or Spanish from Mexico and Guatemala and include artists/pattern-creators belonging to different Maya groups such as K’iche, Kaqchikel, Tsotsil, Tseltal, Yucatec, Jakaltek, and Tz’utujil. Chapter 1 relates ts’íib to other Maya concepts such as cha’anil, k’anel, and cholel and discusses it in relation to the colonial legacy of European-style writing. Chapter [End Page 165] 2 focuses in particular on textiles as object-texts in practices of Maya weavers in Chiapas. Chapter 3, on the other hand, explores the intersection between writing and weaving in the poetry of Calixta Gabriel Chiquín and Ruperta Bautista. Chapter 4 focuses on the meaning of traditional Maya dress (traje), gender, and identity politics in the works of poets Humberto Ak’abal and Rosa Chávez in Guatemala. Chapter 5 analyzes contemporary decolonial practices in relation to the colonial-era books of Chilam Balam. Chapter 6 posits the bilingual poetry of Waldemar Noh Tzec as an act of rebellion aimed at creating a new plurilingual imagined community. Chapter 7 then pays attention to Maya visual art and the tensions that arise from Western conceptions of art and craft. The University of Arizona Press is a premier publishing venue for indigenous studies, and increasingly so the subfield contemporary indigenous literatures, a position it further strengthens with the publication of Unwriting Maya Literature. There is much to be commended about the book. For one there is the spectacular cover featuring art created by Taller Leñateros (and designed by Leigh McDonald), which captures the book’s argument beautifully. Taller Leñateros, founded in 1975 by the Mexican American poet Ámbar Past in San Crístobal de las Casas, is a largely female Maya Tsotsil cooperative focused on the preservation and dissemination of Maya culture that produces books, prints, and papers using traditional Maya techniques and natural materials. Secondly, there is the fact that the authors dared to co-author a book, making the book a rare gem within humanistic scholarship in the US still too focused on the single-authored monograph. But thirdly and most importantly it needs to be commended for its invaluable contribution to indigenous, Maya, and Latin American...

Several years ago, I wrote a paper on some of the general problems for humanists associated with the use of technology in teaching and scholarship. The paper contained a fantasy about a next-century scholar who was able to write a major multimedia monograph on that great literary artist, Jacqueline Susann. I will not subject those of you who escaped that paper to a complete rendition of the fantasy. Through hyperbole it attempted to establish that scholars of the future will have access to amounts and kinds of information of which we can only dream, and that such access will make possible a kind of scholarship and teaching that is quite difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish at present. The title of this paper derives from that other essay, which imagined what sort of work might be done on Susann in the future and how such works of literary genius might be assessed by a technologized, poststructural critique of the genre of popular fiction that she helped to initiate. The title of the resulting imagined monograph was Valley of the Trash: Jacqueline Susann and the Semiotics of Mediocrity in Late Twentieth-Century American Literature. I thought myself rather clever for using an example combining both the power of emerging technologies and important trends in humanistic scholarship and teaching. My intention was only partially satirical, for it seemed to me then-as now-that scholarship in the humanities has significantly broadened and deepened in both method and sources and that this expansion of the ambit of scholarly work is remarkably well-suited to the power the new technologies offer. Name your discipline-social history, literary criticism, art history, philosophy, area studies of any kind-and I think you will agree that what scholars are now doing matches beautifully the capacities of electronic technology to locate information, access it, and analyze it. The paper was actually quite prescient, if I do say so myself, since it predicted that technologies we now associate with the World Wide Web would soon make images, sound, and full-motion video available to anyone with a desktop computer of reasonable power. Three years later that technology is exploding, and we are only at the beginning! So I can feel quite smug and proud of myself. However, I have also come to recognize that my naivete about the economic context of technological change was much more impressive than my prediction of universal access to the diaries and library check-out cards of Jacqueline Susann. I understood then that technology is not free. In that paper and in a series of essays on similar subjects I emphasized that the financial resources required both to put such technology on the professorial desktop and to create the electronic information to which it would provide access were not trivial. I worried aloud a good deal about where the dollars would be found. Now, with the National Endowment for the Humanities on the block and public support for higher education dwindling, I am a good deal more concerned. Technologist friends had assured me that there was nothing to worry about, that everything would soon be so cheap that we would be foolish to be concerned about a phenomenon-the high cost of technology and electronic information-that was likely to be transitory in any case. While I did not accept this argument entirely, it did seem to me that the history of technology indicated that consumer technologies tend to decline in price until they are either replaced or disappear.

The success of legal clinics is mainly due to the idea that they can give a professionalizing connotation to the degree courses in law, while the evocation of the realist tradition, of law in action, and the reference to social justice seem relegated to the mere function of a legitimising myth. Only if characterized by a precise theoretical option that clearly distinguishes normative text from norm and identifies the hiatus between the two as the space of the jurist, can legal clinics be at the heart of a radical change in legal education. Even the orientation towards social justice is not implicit in any clinical experience. Only by configuring a legal clinic as a laboratory for students to learn how to use legal fantasy to transform the private troubles of marginalized people into claims that can be brought before a judge, does the clinic contribute to these individuals’ access to justice.

In this paper, I develop the groundwork for an imaginative legal education, drawing on historical works of literary and legal studies. After describing the role of the creative imagination (contrasted with repetitive fancy), I turn to imaginative arguments in legal discourse, arguing that they develop law understood multidimensionally – as a form of life and meaning. Although well recognized in theory, the role of imaginative legal education is not systematically applied in continental European educational practice. I take it to be a result of a doctrinal and a detached approach to jurisprudence in European law schools. The doctrinal criticism of interdisciplinary legal education draws on the worry that law, seen as a result of imaginative work is not objective, and thus as contradicting the ideal of the rule of law. In my view, it is exactly legal imagination that, if properly used, guarantees basic rights and secures social expectations in a democratic society.

Response Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (bio) Let me begin by expressing gratitude to the editors of Victorian Studies for dedicating this review forum to Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2021) and for the invitation to reflect on my project in response to and in dialogue with these three reviews. I also want to express my thanks to the reviewers for the time they have spent with my book and its arguments. As a scholar I have learned and benefited from the work of these three critics, and it is a privilege now to be in the position to respond to their responses to my work. Written scholarship is at its most interactive in forums such as this, and from 2020 to 2022, interaction has been a resource in short supply, so I am all the more grateful for the exchange.1 Extraction Ecologies is a study of the rise of industrial extraction and of the ways in which the industrialization of underground resource extraction interacted with literary form and genres from the 1830s to the 1930s. This is the book's particular contribution, but the book is also, more broadly, a prehistory of the literature and culture of climate change and the Anthropocene, one that is intended to explore the roles of language and culture, of genre and discourse, in extenuating and, sometimes, mitigating the environmental degradations of extractive industry and imperial extractivism. How can humanities scholarship possibly intervene in environmental catastrophes of such long duration and awful extent? Contemplating such scales and degrees in the course of writing this book has certainly led me to a perspective of critical humility, which Extraction Ecologies expresses in part by establishing limits on what it attempts to achieve. And yet, in my view—and I presume most readers [End Page 450] of this forum will agree—humanities scholarship can and does work slowly and collaboratively to influence and change language and thought. In terms of this broader goal, Extraction Ecologies is one contribution among many: a book written at the precipice of a new era, feeling and thinking its way toward a new understanding of the modern world, in dialogue with other writers and critics in the environmental humanities. Even should the worst catastrophes be averted in the era to come—and I remain hopeful that they will, despite mounting evidence to the contrary—it is evident that we are living through a moment of acute social and environmental change. Much suffering is already happening; much is yet to come. A beast of some manner of roughness is slouching toward Bethlehem, and whether that roughness translates to two degrees or five degrees Celsius is yet to be determined. Critics witnessing the dawn of this base new world are perhaps inevitably drawn to reconsider the past that birthed this rough beast—including its literary histories. Narrative and discourse are, of course, central to the culture that has produced and been produced by the long exhaustion, to use my term from the book. Such a realization raises questions about the work of criticism: Have we been asking the wrong questions of literature? Has literary criticism been too apt to treat texts as immune from environmental concerns? Has it participated in the pernicious conceptual opposition between humans and nature that many environmental thinkers see at the root of modern ecological crises? Reading texts differently is surely no protection from wildfires, hurricanes, and wet-bulb temperatures, but the way we read texts is a symptom of and a guide for patterns of thought and perception, and it is remarkable, in this moment, to work one's way through a portion of the literary archive and to realize how little of the environmental knowledge of this archive has been reckoned with by critics at all. My book seeks to explore the epistemological and representational dimensions of extractivism, a term that I define in two ways: as, to use my book's words, a "complex of cultural, discursive, economic, environmental, and ideological factors related to the extraction of underground resources on a large, industrial scale" (6), and as, to use Naomi Klein's words, a "resource-depleting model," a "nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the...

Reviewed by: Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists Claiborne Rice Hogan, Patrick Colm . 2003. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. London and New York: Routledge. $85.00 hc. $19.95 sc. 244 pp. The cognitive revolution that has affected so many areas of contemporary thought is currently capturing literary studies as part of its stronghold. In addition to the many popular cognitive scientists who have extended the discipline's reach into the literary mind, like Steven Pinker or George Lakoff, we have begun to see an impact on current literature and also literary criticism. Patrick Colm Hogan's aptly named book, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists, is a solid introduction to the growing range of artistic forms and functions amenable to explanation in the cognitive sciences. For many years now, Hogan has been a prolific scholar of literature who is fully conversant with what we have come to call "theory." His many books and articles rewardingly engage highly theorized sub-topics within literary studies, such as influence, social and cultural identity, professionalism, law, and colonialism, from a serious philosophical, psychoanalytic, and, now, cognitive scientific perspective. Like all of Hogan's work, the current volume is significantly informed by his easy familiarity with the literature, art, and philosophy of many distinct non-Western traditions. The book argues for the cognitive study of the arts because of the benefits such study offers to both the humanities and the cognitive sciences. Specifically, the issues familiarly addressed by humanists (Hogan's term for [End Page 242] humanities scholars) are rarely treated effectively by neurobiologists or psychologists who see in certain instances of art fodder for their own pet theories. Only practicing humanists comprehend the complexity and range of humanities questions and, as such, can be expected to see how what we are beginning to learn about functions of the mind and body can best be applied to humanistic concerns. Such complexity and range in turn challenges cognitive scientists to refine their models and methods. The book's opening chapter, "My Favorite Things," introduces the procedural model that a cognitivist approach to art suggests by analyzing the form of John Coltrane's famous version of the tune "My Favorite Things." Though much less is known specifically about how humans process music than, say, vision, music is a good place to start because it avoids some of the issues of "meaning" that language processing entails. In the course of introducing readers to certain basic concerns of cognitive science, such as short- and long- term memory structures, segmentation, and structuration, he also offers explanations of basic art appreciation issues like boredom, improvisation, and listener variability. Chapter two, "Is It Cognitive Science Yet?", moves on to a lengthier discussion of elements of cognitive science theory that will play a role in all of the analyses to follow. He introduces an overall framework of cognitive science approaches that helps guide the reader through the labyrinth of technical terminology. Briefly, three stages of analysis pertain to any cognitive science approach to a problem: conceiving of the problem in terms of information processing, specifying the exact steps (an algorithmic sequence) that will lead from input to output, and identifying the cognitive architecture that will be necessary for dealing with the problem. Cognitive architecture, in its turn, is understood as having three separate components: structures, processes, and contents. Structure refers to "the general organizational principles of the mind" (30), such as the distinction between long-term and short-term (working) memory. Content usually refers to representations or symbols that have specific locations in structures. Finally, processes are structurally constrained operations that are performed on contents. For example, our mental storehouse of words, the lexicon, is a substructure of our long-term memory system that provides structural links between individual words; the activation of one word primes, or prepares, many other words for access. The meanings of each word, in this view, are representational contents, and formulating a sentence for pronunciation would be a process that at some point involves accessing the lexicon to retrieve the phonemic profile for the appropriate words. Because of the complexities of mental contents and...