The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (review)

Abstract

Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Theories and Romantic Texts. Johns Hopkins up, 2010. 194 pp. Rather than resisting research and social power of sciences, field of literary studies has new opportunities to leverage scientific discoveries, particularly in psychology and neuroscience, to argue for its own enduring relevance. Scholars can draw on intellectual freedom and breadth that have always been part of literary studies and that allowed literary scholars (Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, for instance) to make such inroads across disciplines during turn to theory in 1980s. A similar openness to interdisciplinarity places literary scholars at forefront of reconfiguring visual studies in 1990s, through work of W. T. J. Mitchell, Mieke Bal, and others. The Neural Sublime begins with precisely this question: namely, What do literary studies stand to gain from greater engagement with recent work in neuroscience and ... sciences of brain and mind? (ix). Richardson does not claim to provide single answer but delivers six essays in which he experiments with different clusters of research in cognitive sciences as starting points or interpretive Gestalten for readings of Romantic texts. Richardson claims to take iconoclasm of New Historicism further making more pronounced and extensive use of models, theories, and findings arising from recent work in neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology (xi). He suggests that he develops might be called kind of neural historicism. By this, he intends reading of literary texts in their cultural and intellectual contexts but guided by interpretive questions which derive from cognitive sciences. As Richardson notes, mind's embodiment or materialist conceptions of have certainly been thinkable at various points in history, including during Romantic period (13). One question for scholars then is how to think through coincidence of patterns in Romantic-era texts in relation to what we are currently learning about brain and mind (12). Richardson wisely chooses to adopt discoveries in cognitive science as rubric for seeing patterns in, or new avenues into, series of issues which have not been resolved in Romantic literary studies: problem of delineating specifically Romantic version of sublime (chapter 2); relationship between Romantic concepts of imagination, genre of apostrophe and primacy of visual (chapters 3 and 4); persistence of representation of sibling incest in Romantic writing (chapter 5). As Richardson argues, noting coincidence between current representations of and mental behaviors and literary representations of past represents beginning not end, of process of literary interrogation (15). Richardson outlines some of theoretical stakes involved in new disciplinary configuration known as cognitive literary studies. In his introduction, Cognitive Historicism, he points out for instance that literary analyses informed by cognitive sciences have tended to produce synchronic literary readings. These have focused on more abstract sets of issues in areas ranging from narrative and narrative theory, literary poetics (imagery, metaphor), discourse theory, pragmatics, and even acoustics (2). He sees less attention paid to diachronic: to matters of literary history including contextual richness of New Historicist literary approaches. He therefore argues for a middle course between realism on one side and cultural relativism on (3-4). Evolutionary literary theorists stand too close to objectivist realist perspective, tending to treat literary texts ahistorically. approaches of middle ground, such as those of Mary Thomas Crane, Ellen Spolsky, or Elizabeth Hart, include materiality of brain in their understanding of texts and their production, acknowledging the profound effect of cultural and other environmental factors in shaping perception and representation, yet resisting relativism of poststructuralist theory (4). …