!CURRENT THEMES AND NEW DIRE C TIONS Edited by Isabel Jamn 6 Ju ien Jacques Simon g z 9 9 i } i a 9 1 I a COGNITIVE LITERARY STUDIES COGNITIVE APPROACHES TO LITERATURE AND CULTURE SERIES EDITED BY FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA, ARTURO J. ALDAMA, AND PATRICK COLM HOGAN COGNITIVE LITERARY STUDIES Current Themes and New Directions EDITED BY ISABEL JAEN AND JULIEN JACQUES SIMON UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS d.ebAustin Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture includes monographs and edited volumes that incorporate'cutting-edge research in cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, narrative theory, and related fields, exploring how this research bears on and illuminates cultural phenomena such as, but not limited to, literature, film, drama, music, dance, visual art, digital media, and comics. The volumes published in this series represent both specialized scholarship and interdisciplinary investigations that are deeply sensitive to cultural specifics and grounded in a cross-cultural understanding of shared emotive and cognitive principles. Copyright 2012 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved First edition, 2012 First paperback edition, 2013 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/about/book-permissions Q The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Cognitive literary studies : current themes and new directions / edited by Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon. - 1st ed. p. cm. - (Cognitive approaches to literature and culture) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-292-75442-3 1. Literature-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 2. Literature and science. 3. Cognition and culture. I. Jadn, Isabel, 1970- II. Simon, Julien Jacques, 1974 PN55.C646 2012 8o9'.93356-dc23 2011038987 CONTENTS Foreword vii F. Elizabeth Hart Acknowledgments xv Introduction i IsabelJaen and JulienJ. Simon SECTION I. Cognitive Literary Studies Today ii CHAPTER ONE. An Overview of Recent Developments in Cognitive Literary Studies 13 IsabelfJain andJulien J Simon SECTION II. The Cognitive Sciences and Literary Theory in Dialogue 33 CHAPTER TWO. Why Literature Is Necessary, and Not Just Nice 35 RichardJ. Gerrm CHAPTER THREE. Theory of Mind in Reconciling the Split Object of Narrative Comprehension 53 Joseph A. Murphy SECTION III. Neurological Approaches to Literature 71 CHAPTER FOUR. Don Quixote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction 73 Norman N. Holland CHAPTER FIVE. The Mourning Brain: Attachment, Anticipation, and Hamlet's Unmanly Grief 89 Patrick Colm Hogan CHAPTER SIX. The Literary Neuroscience of Kafka's Hypnagogic Hallucinations: How Literature Informs the Neuroscientific Study of Self and Its Disorders ios Aaron L. Mishara Vi COGNITIVE LITERARY STUDIES SECTION IV. Language, Literature, and Mind Processes 125 CHAPTER SEVEN. Blending and Beyond: Form and Feeling in Poetic Iconicity 127 MargaretH. Freeman CHAPTER EIGHT. "A sermon in the midst of a smutty tale": Blending in Genres of Speech, Writing, and Literature 145 Michael Sinding CHAPTER NINE. Counting in Metrical Verse 163 Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle CHAPTER TEN. Fictive Motion and Perspectival Construal in the Lyric 183 Claiborne Rice SECTION V. Literature and Human Development 199 CHAPTER ELEVEN. Education by Poetry: Hartley's Theory of Mind as a Context for Understanding Early Romantic Poetic Strategies 201 Brad Sullivan CHAPTER TWELVE. Leafy Houses and Acorn Kisses: J. M. Barrie's Neverland Playground 219 Glenda Sacks POSTSCRIPT. The Psychology of Fiction: Present and Future 235 Keith Oatley, Raymond A. Mar, and Maja Djikic Contributors 251 Index 255 FOREWORD F. ELIZABETH HART THIS BOOK EXPLORES the intersections of literary studies and cognitive science, contributing to a growing body of literary research emerging over the past twenty years in response to developing theories of "embodied cogni tion."1 Turning gradually away from models of the mind as computer-like or as functionally autonomous, today's cognitive scientists increasingly view the mind as complexly integrated with the biological brain, and they view both the brain and the mind as organically situated within-indeed structurally en abled and constrained by-the body.2 The implications of this paradigm shift reach far, spanning across important domains of philosophical inquiry and consequently academic disciplines. In their 1999 study Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff and Mark John son describe embodiment theory in a way that shows how it combines the priorities of phenomenology, epistemology, and ontology: "Cognitive sci ence provides a new and important take on an age-old philosophical prob lem, the problem of what is real and how we can know it, if we can know it. Our sense of what is real begins with and depends crucially upon our bodies, especially our sensorimotor apparatus, which enables us to perceive, move, and manipulate, and the detailed structures of our brains, which have been shaped by both evolution and experience" (17). In such a view, perceiving, knowing, and being become intricately intertwined, collapsing category boundaries that may forever shift the terms of academic analysis. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences-literature, fine arts, history, philoso phy, anthropology, and linguistics-are being drawn to embodied cognition, some influenced by the rise of connectionism (and other symptoms of non linear dynamic systems theory, with which embodied cognition proves highly compatible). Decades of exposure to postmodern philosophies have condi tioned humanists and social scientists toward interdisciplinarity in general and toward more context-friendly models in particular. Eschewing "liberal" Viii COGNITIVE LITERARY STUDIES notions of a human essence-of a humanity that can be circumscribed and ontologically distinct from its surroundings - these scholars strive to place the human within its larger material, social, and cultural contexts. It may seem odd at first to consider how their curiosity has led them to cognitive science, a discipline so apparently distant from their interests and (usually) their formal training. But shifts in the humanities and social sciences have occurred in tan dem with changes in the sciences, and the result so far has been a small-scale and tentative but also energizing recognition of mutual interests. The Literature and Cognitive Science Conference held in the spring of 2006 at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and for which I was privileged to serve as co-coordinator with Alan Richardson of Boston College, constituted an important step in this collaboration. The researchers who attended were, for the most part, humanists or fine arts researchers: literary critics, philoso phers, and theatre and performance specialists. But the event also attracted a handful of scientists, including cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and empirically oriented philosophers of mind. As a group these researchers rep resented a degree of interdisciplinarity that is on the rise in academia and that is indicated by the founding and flourishing of various scholarly organizations dedicated to the crossing of these major divides. These include (but are not exclusive to) the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), incor porated in 1985; Harvard University's "Cognitive Theory and the Arts" semi nar, established in 2001; Yale University's "Literary Theory, Cognition, and the Brain" seminar, begun in 2005; and Purdue University's "(Co)Ignition" discussion group, founded in 2008 as part of Purdue's Center for Cognitive Literary Studies. Evidence of the Connecticut conference's success soon fol lowed in the form of similar gatherings at Bucknell (2007), Purdue (2007), and Haverford College (2008) and in the inauguration of two new book series by scholars who had been among the conference's participants: the University of Texas Press's Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture (edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Arturo J. Aldama, and Patrick Com Hogan) and Pal grave MacMillan's Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance (edited by Bruce McConachie and Blakey Vermeule). The present volume features the work of some of the scholars who have been engaged in these interdisciplinary conversations (at the University of Connecticut and elsewhere). Through it, the editors hope to demonstrate that, just as the study of the mind is becoming an evocative new way to approach the problems of literary analysis, so too are literary studies becoming interest ing and useful to scientists. Literary scholars bring training and insight to the analysis of acts of reading, writing, and interpretation-acts symptomatic of FOREWORD IX uniquely human and general-level cognitive capacities that are extremely dif ficult to test using empirical methods. Literary texts may serve as laboratories in which language processing, narrative comprehension, creativity, memory, emotions, and many other cognitive functions are brought intensively into focus - and are, in a sense, isolated and performed for study- thus bespeak ing instances not just of extraordinary cognition (what has traditionally drawn literary critics) but also of general or "everyday" cognition (what now appeals to scientists' interests). Researchers of all kinds variously trained in the work ings of brains, minds, and texts stand to gain from a conversation that brings their differing methodologies