Cognitive Literary Studies Research Articles

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies: An exploration of arguments

In the review, I examine the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies , a volume edited by Lisa Zunshine (2015), from the perspective of selected arguments found in the essays.

An Analysis of ‘Closure’ and ‘Equilibrium’ in Mathew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook in the Light of Gestalt Psychology

The present paper moves in the line of cognitive literary studies. Its project is to interpret Mathew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook in the light of the theories of Gestalt psychology. Quick portrays a pair of mentally unbalanced protagonists suffering from the loss of their partners. Analyzing the psychological aftermaths which befall these figures afterwards, this paper attempts to highlight some facts through Gestalt therapy. As such, this paper tries to show the role of ‘Closure’ in the psychological imbalance of Quick’s characters, arguing that in their search for ‘Equilibrium’ they pass through a phase of neurotic problems. Deciphering part of the novel’s message as such, this paper elaborates upon the life of some mentally damaged guys who come to help each other in order to pass normal and healthy lives.

Cognitive Literary Studies and the Status of Interpretation: An Attempt at Conceptual Mapping

What is the role of interpretation—the close reading of individual texts—in cognitive literary studies? In attempting to come to grips with this vexed question, my article focuses on the complex divides that separate the practice of interpretation from cognitive-scientific research. I argue that cognitive literary studies can only fulfill their potential by moving beyond interpretation, and I survey lines of research that have already put into practice this intuition. Secondly, I explore a heuristic use of interpretation, where insights from cognitive science are leveraged—in what I call a “cognitive thematics”—to illuminate a background of metacognitive questions.

Associationist Philosophy, Cognitive Literary Studies, and Objective–Subjective Habits of Mind

AbstractThis article discusses the lasting impact of associationist philosophy on studies of Romantic and Victorian literature. Associationism, which involves belief that “mental and moral phenomena may be accounted for by association of ideas” (OED), combines habits of thinking with habits of feeling. The suggestion that detectable patterns of thought impact personal preferences and social decisions has special significance in scholarship about sympathy and distance. The explosion of scholarship within cognitive theory and the arts, spearheaded by Nicholas Dames, Sean O'Toole, Anne Stiles, Laura Otis, Lisa Zunshine, and many others, has offered powerful insights into attention, recollection, and the understanding of the self through literature. Analyses of narrative form and affect by scholars such as Amanda Anderson, Sarah Winter, Catherine Robson, and Suzanne Keen underscore how associations dictate and shape sympathetic interactions. This article argues for productive overlap between these strains of scholarship. Together, the works suggest that insights into habits of mind can and should be applied to the social realm.

“Bergamo on a Postcard”; or, A Critical History of Cognitive Poetics

“Bergamo on a Postcard”; or, A Critical History of Cognitive Poetics Nicholas Myklebust AS NOTED IN the introduction to this issue, Mark Bruhn deftly frames cognitive poetics as a question of “exchange values” (406; emphasis in orig.). But exchange implies equipoise, and even if protocols for a genuinely collaborative exchange between literary studies and cognitive science can be implemented, one nevertheless may doubt whether such values add to the complex work of teasing out distinctions essential to reading a poet such as Wallace Stevens. This essay serves two complementary purposes: it briefly outlines three representative cognitive-poetic perspectives to provide context for a sustained, critical engagement with cognitive literary studies; and it gestures toward values that have been, and continue to be, exchanged between disciplinary programs. It is important to state at the outset that cognitive poetics does not represent a unified program; it claims no invariant set of precepts and offers no singular methodology. In fact, even to label the scholarly work identified with this constellation of perspectives cognitive poetics neglects the very diversity that drives and sustains such research. Rather, this “cognitive turn,” a phrase popularized by Charlotte Frick and Gerard Steen, describes a sea-change in criticism following the “linguistic turn” of structuralism and poststructuralism.1 Precipitated in part by the rise and growth of cognitive linguistics in the 1980s and the emergence of cognitive psychology and neuroscience in the 1980s and 1990s, that sea-change reflected both a general dissatisfaction with the state of literary scholarship in the final decades of the twentieth century and a cautious interest among literary critics in forging partnerships with the nascent mind sciences. Importantly, this turn did not entail a “fixed set of paradigms and practices” but instead disclosed a “broad . . . territory” of “family resemblances” (Stockwell, “Cartographies” 591). It may be more accurate, then, to regard cognitive poetics as a point of contact for diverse perspectives whose shared interest lies in the relation between existing critical practices in literary theory and emergent empirical practices in cognitive science. These family resemblances can be traced to three major assumptions that form the core of cognitive approaches to literature: [End Page 142] the notion that meaning is embodied, and that mind and body are continuous; the notion that . . . categories are provisional, situationally dependent and socio-culturally grounded in embodiment too; and the notion that language and its manifestations in reading and interpretation is a natural, evolved and universal trait in humans, continuous with other perceptual and tactile experience of the environment. (Stockwell, “Theory” 137–38) Supplementing this core, a host of minor assumptions fill out the “territory” of the cognitive map: that universal cognitive constraints shape the production and reception of literary texts; that literature is an “expression of everyday capacities” (Turner 4); and that aesthetic experience arises from organized interference with default cognitive processes. Different styles of cognitive poetics develop these assumptions into often complementary but occasionally clashing perspectives. Like the apple and potato peoples in Stevens’ letter to Alice Henderson cited in our general introduction, cognitive-poetic practitioners sometimes do not see one another’s goals as “reasonable” (CPP 938).2 As I hope to show, this incongruence of perspective can advance our gains and goals as literary critics. Just as the tension between acts of perception can render a single object—a potato, say—multiple, increasing rather than diminishing its significance, so the tension between shared assumptions and stylistic nuances in various cognitive-poetic frameworks can clarify rather than confuse the study of literature. Taking the productive value of difference as a starting point, in this article I trace the genealogical contours of three styles of cognitive poetics: cognitive neo-formalist, conceptual-integrative, and enactive-scientific approaches. I do so in order to show, first, how each responds to, and evolves from, longstanding questions in literary criticism; second, how a kinship with the critical tradition invites us to view cognitive poetics as a critical perspective in its own right, rather than as a competitor with literary theory; and third, how redrafting the boundaries of disciplinary scholarship can extend the literary ecological niche and enrich our engagement with Stevens’ poetry.3 Although it has acquired currency within literary culture only in...

Once upon a Mind: Literary and Narrative Studies in the Age of Cognitive Science

The two books under review, Paul Armstrong’s How Literature Plays with the Brain and David Herman’s Storytelling and the Sciences of the Mind , provide an opportunity to assess the claims and significance of cognitive literary studies some fifteen years after its emergence as an identifiable interdisciplinary field.

Neuroscience and Modern Fiction

Introducing a special issue on neuroscience and modern fiction, this essay surveys current work on literature and brain research, outlining the issue’s structure and guiding philosophy. To map out what is at stake in such readings, the introduction offers a sustained reading of Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star , placing it into a larger social and historical context that reveals its extensive engagement with (often popular) neuroscientific source material. This reading provides an entry point into a consideration of the asymmetrical historical distribution of cognitive literary studies, especially their comparative neglect of post-1900 fiction, and sets the scene for the essays that follow.

The Ethics of (Fictional) Form: Persuasiveness and Perspective Taking from the Point of View of Cognitive Literary Studies

The persuasive power of narratives, which has been demonstrated in a host of psychological experiments, offers a rewarding field of research for literary studies in general and ethical criticism in particular. If fictional as well as factual narratives can change the beliefs of readers, then they are ethically meaningful to disseminate values, emotional dispositions, and cognitive practices. Building on recent research in psychology and literary studies, this article explores in three steps the ethical value of fictional narratives. First, the persuasive power of narratives is discussed from a cognitive perspective, which includes consideration of the ethical consequences of taking the perspectives of others. Second, these insights are connected to a delineation of narrative conventions, which can foster the kind of deeper understanding associated with altruistic behavior. In the third part, pertinent narrative strategies are discussed from an ethical perspective. A brief conclusion summarizes the most important results and sketches some fields that merit exploration in future studies of ethical criticism.

Intertextuality as a Postmodern Narrative Strategy in the Novelette “The Burning War of the Mind” by Tolen Abdikov

The article researches the novelette “Parasat Maydany” by the Kazakh writer T. Abdikov in its Russian version—“The burning war of the mind”—one of the best examples of the national literature of Kazakhstan of the first decade of this century. The aim of the study is to determine the role of intertextuality in the discourse of the writing as a narrative strategy for translation of the authorial intention and reflection to the reader through a combination of “own” and “foreign” words in the text. The main research method is narratology, particularly its contemporary theoretical developments in the field of communication strategies of the narrator with the narratee directly in the text, and the author with the reader—by means of the text. Individual approaches of receptive aesthetics and cognitive literary studies were also used for understanding the internal motives of the protagonist of the novelette, finding some mechanisms to influence the reader and to predict the reader’s reception on intertextual inclusions in the writing. The study revealed features of the narrative structure of the novelette, representing the strategy of intertextual games with the reader as a way for the author to interact with the reader by encoding intertext semantics of the writing and its desired decoding by the reader.

How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art by Paul B. Armstrong (review)

Reviewed by: How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art by Paul B. Armstrong Nancy L. Easterlin How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art, by Paul B. Armstrong; 221 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. What gives particular objects and performances the qualities that lead to their categorization as “art”? In literary studies, recent theoretical approaches that emphasize sociocultural context have dampened enthusiasm for inquiry into the aesthetic, not simply directing attention elsewhere but frequently asserting that the entire category is the constructed handmaiden of sociopolitical power. But this decades-long eschewal of the aesthetic has perhaps had its day. In How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art, Paul B. Armstrong notes this neglect and proposes that neuroscience offers some important insights into aesthetic activity. The goal of Armstrong’s book is to demonstrate the correlation between aesthetic activity and brain structure and function. Relating this goal in his introductory chapter, Armstrong notes—in a nod to Norman Holland, one of the fathers of cognitive literary studies—that the significant explanatory gap between neuroscience and literary analytical practices limits the former as an interpretive tool. Nevertheless, in Armstrong’s view, neuroscience is far enough advanced for scholars to draw inferences about the literary reading process. Moreover, the new field of neurophenomenology is continuous with the speculative tradition of Continental phenomenology and with reader response theory, fields to which Armstrong links his observations through the book. In his words, “the correlations between neural and phenomenological accounts of the temporality of cognition as nonlinear, horizonal, and reciprocal have important parallels not only in Heidegger’s description of the hermeneutic circle as a structure of anticipation but also in Iser’s conception of reading as a to-and-fro process of consistency building” (p. 21). Armstrong posits that, while the aesthetic tradition has often, contradictorily, sought the essence of art in harmony on the one hand and disunity on the other, the interplay between harmony and disunity is at the core of aesthetic response. Because it emphasizes the brain’s fundamental plasticity, in Armstrong’s view, [End Page 267] neuroscience confirms the insights of phenomenology and the psychological tradition of William James. Thus, in chapters two through four, Armstrong ties findings about cognitive and perceptual functions to the concept of play, broadly conceived. Noting at the outset that reading is not directly linked to perception (sight or hearing), Armstrong reviews research on reading and language, demonstrating that language processing is not on the whole a localized activity. Following neuroscientists including Francisco Varela and Stanislas Dehaene, Armstrong promotes the notion of a highly plastic, or “bushy,” brain with many connections between diverse areas and much flexibility of function. Sensibly inferring from this that “a ‘bushy,’ decentered brain would not be likely to have aesthetic experiences located in only one area of the cortex,” Armstrong supports his claim with neuroimaging studies (p. 42). Following contemporary work in neuroaesthetics as well in insisting that aesthetic processing is not categorically distinct from other kinds of processing, Armstrong speculates that “the ways in which art’s harmonies reinforce or rewire neuronal assemblies may have a distinct impact on modes of perception and cognition in everyday life” (p. 47). In this manner, Armstrong moves from the complexity and plasticity of brain processes to inferences about aesthetic function. Thus, the “to-and-fro process of consistency building” mirrors the functionality of the brain. For instance, distinct brain areas process different aspects of vision (immediate stimulus, orientation, shape, and color), and this fact, along with the evidence of optical illusions and experiments in word recognition, points to the interplay between perception and cognition that constitutes seeing. The evidence that the brain is open to ambiguity and plays with divergent syntheses of visual information harmonizes with Elkhonon Goldberg’s research on novelty, which suggests that cortical areas dedicated to routine and to open-ended operations are simultaneously activated in the experience of novelty. From this, Armstrong surmises that art and the aesthetic break predictability by engaging in a to-and-fro of routine and novelty. Extending this argument further, Armstrong claims that the brain’s temporality...

Romanticism, Medicine, and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852 by Gavin Budge

BOOK REVIEWS 575 Thoroughly informed and conceptually sophisticated, Literary Advertising and the Shaping ofBritish Romanticism has unusual clarity, economy, and lev­ ity. As does Lee Erickson in his more abstract account of the economics of literature, The Economy of Literary Form, Mason enjoins us to take less for granted in our reading of periodical literature. Of course the suspicion Mason counsels cannot be easily contained. Like the “universal acid” ofold science fiction, it eats through whatever it touches. Reviews emerge within a system in which critics carry out a dual role, as cultural arbiter and commercial middleman. Ifperiodical criticism is bound up with advertising and “advertising logic,” it cannot rise above the charge of being a testimo­ nial. One might well expect Mason’s account to end in either the disgust of Adorno at yet another betrayal among the intelligentsia or the uncritical celebration of neo-liberal economists at yet another triumph of the invisi­ ble hand. But the scrutiny he recommends has positive value as well. Ma­ son regards Romantic era reviews as “some of the best and most woefully neglected writing of the age” (142). Reviews, like the magazines in which they appear, deserve the same critical rigor that we apply to poems and novels. In sorting out the complex strands of the “common genealogy” of literature and advertising, Mason wisely reminds us that we must know more about this strange relation before we say what it might mean. Mark Parker James Madison University Gavin Budge. Romanticism, Medicine, and the Natural Supernatural: Transcend­ ent Vision and Bodily Spectres, i~Sg-i8s2. London: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. viii+295. $110. The body has been making inroads into Romantic studies for over a dec­ ade now, with scholars from perspectives as varied as affect theory, the his­ tory ofmedicine, and cognitive literary studies exploring the complexity of Romantic writers’ concern with their own embodiment. While Gavin Budge’s Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural shares this con­ cern, it is more interested in the relationship between embodiment and idealism, a perspective registered by the title’s double reference to the “Natural Supernaturalism” of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and M. H. Abrams’s magisterial 1971 study ofthe same name. Budge’s book examines the “Ro­ mantic invocation ofa dual epistemological perspective, in which visionary intuitions are not reducible to the body but neither can the embodied character of perception be ignored” (8). He argues that Romantic and post-Romantic writers seeking such visions drew not on German Idealism, SiR, 54 (Winter 2015) 576 BOOK REVIEWS a key element in Abrams’s study, but on the Scottish Common Sense school of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. Their epistemology of a “transcendent language of perceptual signs” (7) offered writers a middle way between empiricism and idealism, in which embodied perception could, ifrightly understood, provide access to a transcendent real. Unfortu­ nately, as Budge argues, the dominant theories ofnineteenth-century med­ icine made authenticating such access difficult. Seemingly genuine mo­ ments of perceptual transcendence might instead be the fraudulent “bodily spectres” ofirritated nerves or an upset stomach. As a result, health—which Budge interprets as a body regulated so as not to mistake hallucinations for authentic visions—became a concern for any artist with an idealist bent. His book tracks this concern through the work of six such artists, begin­ ning in the eighteenth century with Ann Radcliffe and concluding in the mid-nineteenth with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. Budge has recently edited a collection on the Common Sense tradition’s Romantic reception (Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Com­ mon Sense, 1780—1830 [Bucknell, 2007]), and his continued investment in recognizing this lineage shows in the current study. Indeed the book seems less concerned with revising our understanding of Romanticism’s relation­ ship to medicine than it does with reframing certain medically-inflected readings—such as the influence of Erasmus Darwin’s treatise Zoonomia on Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads—within the philosophical context of the Common Sense school. (Walter Jackson Bate’s absence from this study— his 1946 From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, not even listed in the bibliography—is puzzling, given that his landmark work...

Resisting Focalisation, Gaining Empathy: Swedish Teenagers Read Irish Fiction

Resisting the will to empathise with a focalised character is assumed to be difficult for young readers, yet empirical evidence on how they actually respond is limited. This paper combines recent insights gleaned from cognitive literary studies with a small-scale empirical study of thirty-five Swedish adolescents reading an Irish short story in order to investigate how teenagers respond to a text which is strongly focalised through a single character. The students were asked to rewrite the events in the story from another character’s point of view. Their texts were coded and analysed, as were follow-up interviews with six students. The findings indicate that Swedish-speaking teenage readers rarely have difficulty resisting focalisation, but they often struggle with irony.

Who signs the “empirical facts”?

One of the most ambitious forms in which literary theory’s aspiration toward a democratic universality was recently manifested followed from the so called cognitive turn induced by discoveries in modern biology. Its declared objective was to root the idea of literature in the unconscious empirical level of its reception, situated below and beyond the conscious hermeneutic level of its understanding. The first such turn toward the deep and constitutive structure of the empirical was undertaken by the Empirische Literaturwissenschaft put forth during the 1980s under the aegis of radical constructivism of the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela; the second and more “scientific” one, proposed in the first decade of our century, pertains to what has been alternatively called the neuroaesthetics of literature, the biological literary theory, or cognitive literary studies. Both turns emerged in the German academic milieu. Both here and in the Anglophone world arguments rose against the elite bourgeois spirit of hermeneutically-oriented literary studies, by trying to establish a purely empirical frame for the reception of literature in order to introduce a universal intersubjective basis to replace the elevated subjective platform of literary studies. Without neglecting their different shaping of the basic distinction between cognition and experience, I insist that both finally reduce experience to cognition in a manner reminiscent of that which Benjamin has criticized in Kant. In his early Program of the Coming Philosophy Benjamin objects to the subordination, in Critique of Pure Reason, of empirical consciousness to transcendental categories of pure consciousness which ultimately turns experience into a mechanical unity. Though this critique may not exactly hold for Kant, as is testified by more recent readings that depart from his transcendental schemes, I will try to demonstrate that it holds for recent cognitive literary studies. This is why Benjamin’s linguistic structuring of experience, the addressed blind spot of his polemics notwithstanding, remains highly instructive. It mobilizes the concept of human mimetic ability as do the recent cognitive literary studies, to be sure, but dismantling behind the future-oriented democratic intention of the latter the hard-core bourgeois tradition. While Benjamin’s seemingly past-oriented approach to experience revitalizes the “antiquated” concept of similarity, it turns out to be opening much more democratic vistas for literary studies.

Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions

* Foreword* F. Elizabeth Hart * Introduction * Isabel Jaen and Julien J. Simon * Section I: Cognitive Literary Studies Today *1. An Overview of Recent Developments in Cognitive Literary Studies Isabel Jaen and Julien J. Simon * Section II: The Cognitive Sciences and Literary Theory in Dialogue*2. Why Literature Is Necessary, and Not Just Nice, Richard J. Gerrig*3. Theory of Mind in Reconciling the Split Object of Narrative Comprehension, Joseph A. Murphy * Section III: Neurological Approaches to Literature *4. Don Quixote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction, Norman N. Holland* 5. The Mourning Brain: Attachment, Anticipation, and Hamlet's Unmanly Grief, Patrick Colm Hogan*6. The Literary Neuroscience of Kafka's Hypnagogic Hallucinations: How Literature Informs the Neuroscientific Study of Self and Its Disorders, Aaron L. Mishara* Section IV: Language, Literature, and Mind Processes*7. Blending and Beyond: Form and Feeling in Poetic Iconicity, Margaret H. Freeman*8. A sermon in the midst of a smutty tale: Blending in Genres of Speech, Writing, and Literature, Michael Sinding*9. Counting in Metrical Verse, Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle*10. Fictive Motion and Perspectival Construal in the Lyric, Claiborne Rice* Section V: Literature and Human Development*11. Education by Poetry: Hartley's Theory of Mind as a Context for Understanding Early Romantic Poetic Strategies, Brad Sullivan*12. Leafy Houses and Acorn Kisses: J. M. Barrie's Neverland Playground, Glenda Sacks* Postscript: The Psychology of Fiction: Present and Future, Keith Oatley, Raymond A. Mar, and Maja Djikic * Contributors* Index

Reading imaginatively: The imagination in cognitive science and cognitive literary studies

Abstract I argue that literary studies can contribute to the “imagery debate” (between pictorialist, propositionalist, and enactivist accounts of mental imagery). While imagery questionnaires are pictorially configured and conflate imagining and seeing with pictorial representation, literary texts can exploit language's capacity for indeterminacy and therefore elicit very different imaginative experiences, thus illuminating the non-pictorial qualities of mental imagery.

Afterword: The Future of Cognitive Literary Studies

Las investigaciones recientes de la cognición en las neurociencias, psicología y antropología pueden contribuir mucho al análisis literario sin reintroducir el fantasma del determinismo. Este ensayo estudia los acercamientos emergentes más interesantes para el estudio literario. Los modelos de “estudios cognitivos culturales” y “la cognición ecológica” proponen la interdependencia del cerebro (el cual ha sido imaginado como una serie de redes) y la comunicación social y se usan para combinar el estudio cognitivo y las ideologías culturales. Hace dos décadas, Lakoff y Johnson afirmaron que el uso de la metáfora es fundamental en la cognición; Fauconnier y Turner proponen la etiqueta de “conceptual blend” para explicar la manera en que el cerebro une las redes integrativas para formar las metáforas. La teoría de prototipos, que redefine la manera en que los humanos construyen y usan las taxonomías para conceptualizar el mundo, ilumina procesos literarios como la formación de modelos de género y período, y también el papel de la categorización en el mundo social.

Introduction to “Cognitive Cervantes”: Integrating Mind and Cervantes’s Texts

En este articulo introductorio se justifica la importancia de incorporar los estudios cognitivos a la critica cervantina, y se presentan los articulos que conforman esta coleccion especial. ********** THE SENSES, FEELINGS, INTERPLAY of minds, development of characters, and their well-defined voices and subjectivities constitute some of threads of narrative fabric woven by Cervantes. This fabric, which seems to never fray or fade with passage of time, leaves modern reader still standing in awe of and behavioral dynamics between master and squire, well as humanity infusing representation of characters in Don Quixote. This special cluster presents a collection of essays that incorporate approaches to study of Cervantes's texts. Cervantes represents first effort to bring together work of scholars examining Hispanic literature, and more specifically Cervantes's writings, in relation to human cognition. (1) With its focus on and its processes, approach facilitates examination of dimension of literary texts, which is particularly salient in Don Quixote and other Cervantine texts. Salvador de Madariaga's Guia del lector del QUIJOTE published in 1926 is perhaps first foray into this dimension of Cervantes's texts. Subsequent studies of Don Quixote have largely been carried out by medical doctors or from a psychoanalytic standpoint and have often centered on its protagonist and his alleged madness, particularly those coming from medical field. (2) essays in this issue, however, focus for most part on Sancho (Jaen, Reed, Wagschal, Wehrs, and Connor) and less central figures; female characters like Marcela and Dorotea (Wehrs); or outsiders (to borrow Amy Williamsen's term) like Zoraida (Wehrs), Ricote (Wehrs, Connor), Maritornes (Wagschal), and even Rocinante (Wagschal). They also consider aspects of novel that have not been sufficiently explored, such as embodiment and intentionality, two main themes that pervade nascent field of Spanish literary studies. Finally, it is important to note that a approach to Don Quixote is especially innovative and relevant to Cervantine studies, not only because it allows us to take a step further in our investigation of novel, but also because of its dialogue with both early modern and present-day knowledge about mind. Such dialogue is made possible by interdisciplinary nature of field. (3) Following a brief discussion of this interdisciplinary nature, I will briefly introduce above-mentioned areas of study (embodiment and theory of mind) and will review, in second half of this introduction, individual essays, highlighting promise each holds for study of Cervantine and early modern texts. Cognitive literary studies is an interdisciplinary endeavor with des to realm (the sciences) as well as to a variety of literary traditions, chiefly English tradition, but also Spanish, French, German, etc. The sciences are not a monolithic enterprise. In fact, they represent a variety of disciplines and areas of study whose focus is understanding of mind/brain. (4) As Howard Mancing reminds us in his overview essay, there are two levels of inquiry and discussion when talking about human cognition: mind and brain, brain being physical organ and its activity. To borrow his description, the is what brain does. In essays, discussion may be taking place on one or both of these levels, and readers should be cognizant of this fact. Therefore, a cognitive scientific or (cognitive) psychological approach will mainly refer to mind or study of mental processes and will make no claim as to neurology of brain. …

Reading Latour: Reassembling the Social

Notes on Bruno Latour, Reassembling: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, with some consideration of compositionism. These ideas are developed with ideas and concepts from cognitive science, literary studies, music, and extensive examples from the world of contemporary graffiti.

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

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). …

Using Insights from Cognitive Literary Study to Teach ESL / EFL Reading

The paper presents an attempt to use literary texts to build ESL / EFL learners’ critical thinking skills and intercultural competence. The proposed approach emphasizes the dialogic nature of the writer-reader relationship in texts; informed by cognitive literary studies, it taps students’ affective response to fictional characters while also grounding their instinctive understanding in close reading. A small-scale study conducted to test the effectiveness of this method is also discussed. It is claimed that the subjects, undergraduate ESL students, benefited from the approach by becoming aware of their active role in creating meaning and learning to step outside their culturally determined perspective. With the importance of reading authentic texts well established in the field of language teaching, magazine articles, essays, and short stories for several decades now have been featured prominently in ESL / EFL course descriptions. More often than not, however, tasks and activities based on these texts tend to involve merely shallow cognitive processing. For example, literature is sometimes seen merely as a source of vocabulary and sentence-level comprehension exercises or drills in skimming, scanning, and speed-reading. What is more, even if a fictional narrative is chosen for its interesting theme, students are encouraged to talk about their personal experiences and allowed to completely depart from the text and its meaning. Consequently, important opportunities for developing critical thinking and building cultural knowledge are overlooked. It goes without saying that reading in a foreign language is especially difficult. Challenges associated with advanced reading comprehension have been extensively discussed by researchers (for a comprehensive review see Bernhardt, 2011; Grabe, 2009; Grabe & Stoller, 2002; Koda, 2005). At the same time, regardless of where one stands in the debate on literature learning and language acquisition, one has to agree that reading extensively is important and that reading narrative fiction can be enriching and empowering. The dilemma for ESL teachers is finding accessible texts and choosing appropriate methods of presenting them to students. The way of reading proposed in the present paper is informed by the cognitive approach to literature. It emphasizes honing students’ analytical skills while also teaching them to read with pleasure and confidence.