Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability by John Savarese (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability by John Savarese Sasha Tamar Strelitz John Savarese. Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability. Ohio State UP, 2020. 192p. Part of our inherited understanding of Romanticism is that poetry exists as ruminations on and exercises of the inner workings of the mind. The movement’s fixation on the interior landscape—on thoughts and feelings—took form in the late eighteenth century, drawing influence from earlier movements such as the German Sturm und Drang (storm and stress). For both the German predecessor and its more broadly European successor, the shift towards emotion was a purposeful resistance to the Enlightenment’s staunch adherence to reason. Romantics preferred Maine de Biran’s turn of René Descartes’ rationalist statement Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”)—Volo, egro sum (“I will/desire, therefore I am”). But, what if our inherited knowledge of Romanticism divorces its fidelity to the sciences? What if Romantic poetry functioned as a sort of response to the early cognitive sciences? John Savarese’s Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability strives to reinscribe the relationship between Romanticism and science. His book-length recovery of Romanticism’s interrelation with the sciences takes an interdisciplinary approach to reading Romantic poetry with keen awareness of its ties specifically to the [End Page 134] early cognitive approaches produced contemporarily with the artistic movement. Savarese shows that Romanticism’s interrelation with science “reinforce[s] the Romantic idea that poetry was most at home in the inward domain of thought and feeling” (2). After all, cognitive functions include but are not limited to emotions. With his focuses on James Macphereson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott, Savarese reinforces the notion that early cognitive approaches to poetry are more diverse than remembered by post-Romantic inheritors. By reading these poets’ work through a cognitivist lens, which he claims recovers Romanticism’s own “cross-disciplinary ‘turn to phenomenality’,” Savarese spotlights the close relationship between the science of sensation and Romantic poetry (Richard Sha qtd. in Savarese 2). His resuscitation diverges from our inherited understanding of Romanticism, as the book traces and investigates the movement’s “exploration of interiority [as] thoroughly enmeshed in the emerging language of physiological psychology and the embodied mind,” which was not faithfully transmitted through time by the post-Romantic memory (2). As featured in the title, “other’s minds” and “science of sociability” are central to Savarese’s inquiry. In the introduction, he points to the post-1980s “cognitive turn” in literary studies, or what Lisa Zunshine previously termed as “cognitive cultural studies” as central to his methodology (7). Using cognitive cultural studies as a theoretical gateway, Savarese reimagines Romantic literature as scientifically-informed accounts focused on the mind’s social powers—social powers that are understood as in-built or natural. Therefore, the poetry not only elicits from private consciousness, but also the mind’s social powers as related to the social contexts the person involves herself in. In other words, Savarese troubles the notion that Romantic poetry elicits solely from introspection or affective intensity, but instead he posits that it relied on “social intelligence[…]social recognition, agent tracking, and perspective-taking” (4). For instance, the chapter on Wordsworth applies the previously established cognitivist methodology to poetic moments in order to better understand the poet’s own assertion that Nature, or larger yet, his external environment played an active role on his mental life (106). By understanding the mental structures Wordsworth built to process the world around him—“These chiefly are such structures as the mind / Builds for itself ”—through the cognitivist lens Savarese offers, the reader rethinks the external location of the poet’s creative [End Page 135] agency in Nature (Wordsworth qtd. in Savarese 131). The central purpose of Romanticism’s Other Minds is to offer a prehistory of cognitive approaches to literature in order to reinscribe the fact that Romanticism was born alongside a fledgling cognitive science. Therefore, the book is a recovery project whose methodology is borrowed from Alan Richardson, who applies neuroscience in British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, which is...