CONVERSATIONS ON COGNITIVE CULTURAL STUDIES “In Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics, Frederick Luis Aldama and Patrick Colm Hogan illu- minate the myriad implications of cognitive studies for the study of literature. Scrutinizing issues ranging from subjectivity to aesthetics to history and politics, they seek ever greater precision in our methods and assumptions. This lively critical dialogue is sure to spark much- needed thought and discussion.” —Sue J. Kim, author of On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative “Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies gives a strong sense of cognitive studies in their present state of organization, as represented by two of its most respected and best informed spokesmen, who are seen grappling with basic and, in some cases, still unresolved prob- lems in aesthetics.” — Irving Massey, professor emeritus of English and comparative literature, University at Buffalo CONVERSATIONS ON COGNITIVE CULTURAL STUDIES LITERATURE, LANGUAGE, AND AESTHETICS Frederick Luis Aldama AND Patrick Colm Hogan THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aldama, Frederick Luis, author. Conversations on cognitive cultural studies : literature, language, and aesthetics / Frederick Luis Aldama and Patrick Colm Hogan. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1243-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1243-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9346-1 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9346-8 (cd-rom) 1. Psychology and literature. 2. Cognitive science—Philosophy. 3. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Hogan, Patrick Colm, author. II. Title. PN56.P93A43 2014 801'.92—dc23 2013028050 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vi Prologue vii 1 Puzzling Out the Self 1 2 Verbal Art and Language Science 32 3 On Matters of Narrative Fiction 79 4 A Scientific Approach to Aesthetics 116 5 Situating History, Culture, Politics, and Ethics in Literary Studies 149 Works Cited and Suggestions for Further Reading 187 Index 197 AcKNOWLEDGMENTS An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “Puzzling Out the Self: Some Ini- tial Reflections,” English Language Notes 49.2 (2011): 139–60. We are grateful to the editors, Julie Carr and John-Michael Rivera, for permission to reprint. Herbert Lindenberger, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Irving Massey, Robyn War- hol, and James Phelan provided very helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Our editor at The Ohio State University Press, Sandy Crooms, was invaluable in the process of planning, evaluating, and produc- ing this book. vi PROLOGUE The following dialogues, which took place at various times between 2010 and 2012, focus on the place of cognitive science in the study of culture, particu- larly literature. For readers unfamiliar with the field, cognitive science is a recently developed approach to the study of the human mind. It integrates a range of disciplines including anthropology, cognitive psychology, computer science, evolutionary biology, linguistics, and others, with empirical studies of human and nonhuman mental processing. Beyond biological and social sci- ences, the contributing disciplines include art history, musicology, and, most important for our purposes, literary criticism and theory. In each case, the traditional discipline (e.g., literary study) is enhanced by the contributions of general cognitive scientific theory and research while at the same time the general theory is itself advanced and refined by research in the disciplines, again including literary study. Cutting across the traditional academic disci- plines, cognitive science also comprises a number of subfields, including cog- nitive neuroscience, which focuses on brain research; social cognition, which treats the interaction of human minds in, for example, shared tasks; and affec- tive science, which examines human emotions or motivation systems. These subfields in turn combine with one another and with traditional disciplines to produce further areas of research, such as social neuroscience (the study of the operation of the brain in social interaction), neurolinguistics (the study of the neurological processes of language and speech), and so on. vii viii • Prologue Thus cognitive science is, in part, a research program shared across a range of disciplines and subfields. But that alone would not give the field much coherence. It is, in addition, defined by a set of theoretical principles about “cognitive architecture.” Cognitive architecture comprises structures (the enduring organizational categories of the mind), processes (the operations that occur within the structures), and contents (the objects on which pro- cesses operate). For example, most cognitive scientists would agree that there are different types of memory, thus different memory structures. These include episodic memory (concerning events that one experienced), skills memory (concerning how to do things, such as ride a bicycle), semantic memory (con- cerning meanings and facts), working memory (what we keep in mind at any one time), and so on. These involve processes, such as memory storage and retrieval, as well as contents (the memories themselves). The example of memory may seem to suggest that cognitive architecture is isolated and, so to speak, inward-oriented. However, cognitive architecture is at the basis of social interaction as well. For example, one important component of social cognition is “Theory of Mind” (ToM). ToM is simply the means by which we come to understand what other people are thinking or feeling. The cases of memory and ToM are instances of what is sometimes called “phenomenological” or “mentalistic” architecture. This sort of architecture is to some extent intuitively comprehensible, since it is based on our ordinary understanding of various mental structures and processes. We all know intui- tively what “memory” is, even if we do not spontaneously organize it in the way that is done by cognitive scientists—and certainly not with the precision and empirical guidance of cognitive scientists. There is also a “neurocogni- tive” architecture correlated with this mentalistic architecture. The neuro- cognitive architecture comprises the structures and processes of the human brain—for instance, the regions of functional neuroanatomy. Thus, in speak- ing of neurocognitive architecture, we might refer to the hippocampus. It is a crucial part of current cognitive science that the phenomenological architec- tures are continually revised by reference to the neurocognitive architectures while the neurocognitive architectures are understood by reference to the phenomenological architectures—as when we speak of the operation of the hippocampus in episodic memory. Beyond these two basic architectures, we may also distinguish different sorts of cognitive theory. The basic architectures are fairly general. The theo- ries tend to be more particular and are often developed in relation to specific cognitive domains (e.g., language). For example, different linguistic theories accept that there is something along the lines of semantic memory, but they specify and explain this in sometimes very different ways. These differences Prologue • ix are often related to the theories’ precise relation to basic architectures. Thus in linguistics we may distinguish theories that stress mentalistic architecture from theories that stress neurocognitive architecture. The former find one influential form in Noam Chomsky’s work, which is based on sets of rules with variables. The neurocognitive approach appears in a rather abstract form in Connectionism, which posits only networks of interlinked neuron- like units with distinct activation patterns. Cutting across this division is a distinction between theories that rely solely on general architecture and those that draw on a specialized architecture for the domain at issue. For exam- ple, both “Generative” linguists, such as Chomsky, and “Cognitive” linguists, such as George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker, stress a mentalistic architecture (though they draw on neurocognitive research in formulating and developing that architecture). However, Generative linguists tend to maintain that the general architecture must be supplemented by principles specific to language, whereas Cognitive linguists try to explain language processes by principles available in the general architecture.1 The example of language is particularly apt here for the obvious reason that language is fundamental to literature. Thus understanding language is presumably fundamental to our understanding of literature. A simple, com- municative model of literature involves at least four components: 1) a speaker or author, 2) a listener or reader, 3) an utterance or text, and 4) a social and historical context. We have used this basic structure to organize the topics for our dialogues. The first chapter addresses the fundamental element of any communicative act, the component most obviously related to cognitive neuro- science—the person, the self, either as speaker or as hearer. The final chapter turns to the social and historical context. This may