In the UK, 2013 saw the end of the most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF) consultation. It is interesting to note how this exercise appears to have affected publication strategies, with 2013 being a comparatively light year for British academics in terms of volume of published work. Fortunately, while quantity may be down, quality is most certainly not. It is also gratifying to note that those colleagues outside the UK and unaffected by REF-related matters have continued to publish the excellent work that is a hallmark of our discipline. This is where we begin this year’s review.

The year’s work in stylistics 2013:

There's much vital convergence of knowledge happening inside the labs, classrooms, and offices of the academy today. It's the kind of snap and crackle scholarship and research happening in the humanities that promises much return for our time and labor. The promise of a renewed vitality in the humanities has grabbed mainstream headlines. In interview with The New York Times' Deborah Solomon, Stanford professor Terry Castle remarked, "The smartest literary scholars right now are interested in evolutionary psychology and brain science--how we may be hardwired for fiction-making, aesthetic appreciation and the like" (January 17, 2010). Also in The New York Times Patricia Cohen considers how the so-called "science of English" could well "answer fundamental questions about literature's very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?" (C1). Natalie Phillips caught the media's eye with news of her fMRI experiments that measured the brain's response to passages from Jane Austen; the scans mirrored those of people who would actually be physically doing what was described in the passages. (See Damien Gayle's "The Ultimate Brain Workout" in the Daily Mail October 9, 2012.) And, so, too, did Lisa Zunshine's Teagle Foundation funded research grab headlines; Zunshine along with a team of researchers used fMRI technology at the Haskins Laboratory in New Haven to study modernist literature. As Alissa Quart sums up, "Neurohumanities has been positioned as a savior of today's liberal arts" ("Adventures in Neurobiology" The Nation May 27, 2013). Any large claims aside, it is true that today there are neuroscience centers (Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford, the Ohio State University) that seek to actively collaborate with humanities scholars. And, it is true, too, that in literature departments in the U.S. and other parts of the world we see several prominent scholars turning increasingly to the advances in the sciences (cognitive, neurobiological, evolutionary, developmental psychology, among others) as a tool to better understand the phenomena of literature. Some of the more prominent scholars that come readily to mind include: Porter Abbott (UC Santa Barbara), Mark Bracher (Kent State University), Brian Boyd (University of Auckland, New Zealand), Joseph Carroll (University of Missouri-St. Louis), Mary Crane (Boston College), Nancy Easterlin (University of New Orleans), Richard Gordon (University of Georgia), Jonathan Gottschall (Washington & Jefferson), Elizabeth Hart (University of Connecticut), David Herman (the Ohio State University), Patrick Hogan (University of Connecticut), Emma Kafelanos (University of Washington St. Louis), Sue J. Kim (University of Amherst), Joshua Landy (Stanford), Lalita Pandit-Hogan (University of Wisconsin), Irving Massey (University of Buffalo), Bruce McConachie (University of Pittsburgh), Alan Richardson (Boston College), Robert Storey (Temple), and Biakey Vermule (Stanford). I mentioned already Lisa Zunshine (at the University of Kentucky) who is one of the pioneers in the use of a cognitive approach to literature--and is the focus of this review essay. In the widely acclaimed 2006 published Why We Read Fiction we see the beginning of her use of cognitive science to shed light on how fiction (novels, films, television shows) exercises our Theory of Mind capacity--our capacity to infer and attribute mental states to others and ourselves. In her follow-up book, Strange Concepts and The Stories they Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (2008), Zunshine widens the scope from a singular focus on Theory of Mind workouts (as she identifies them elsewhere) in fiction, to consider how our distinctive mental proclivity to ascribe a function to objects (a chair to sit on) and an essence to living creatures (the posited unchanging, ungraspable spirit or soul) can throw light on how authors and artists create strange configurations in their making of novels, films, TV shows, and art. …

Frederick Luis Aldama

Papers

What the Brain Sciences Might Tell Us about Our Making of and Engaging with Strange Fictions