Theory of Literature

The Act of Reading

Psychonarratology is an approach to the empirical study of literary response and the processing of narrative. It draws on the empirical methodology of cognitive psychology and discourse processing as well as the theoretical insights and conceptual analysis of literary studies, particularly narratology. The present work provides a conceptual and empirical basis for this interdisciplinary approach that is accessible to researchers from either disciplinary background. An integrative review is presented of the classic problems in narratology: the status of the narrator, events and plot, characters and characterization, speech and thought, and focalization. For each area, Bortolussi and Dixon critique the state of the art in narratology and literary studies, discuss relevant work in cognitive psychology, and provide a new analytical framework based on the insight that readers treat the narrator as a conversational participant. Empirical evidence is presented on each problem, much of it previously unpublished.

Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response

A Thematics of Character@@@Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative

Traditionally, stylistic analyses of drama have tended to concentrate on the analysis of dramatic texts rather than dramatic performances. This has been on the basis that no two performances of the same text are entirely alike, and that accurate critical discussion is therefore impossible unless we can be sure that everyone concerned has seen the particular performance we are analysing (Short, 1981). Nonetheless, some performances of plays incorporate production elements that seem to add substantially to the original play script, and which arguably guide our interpretation of the play. In such cases, a stylistic analysis which ignores these production elements is arguably impoverished and incomplete. There appears, then, to be some tension between being methodologically rigorous and producing a complete stylistic analysis of a play which takes into account production and performance elements. However, in the case of plays which have been filmed this methodological problem can be circumvented, since the fi...

Integrating multimodal analysis and the stylistics of drama: a multimodal perspective on Ian McKellen's Richard III:

The grammar of narrative is . . . fraught with the same ambiguities - arising from the same social ambivalences - that distinguish the biogrammar itself. Male versus female, self versus kin, kin versus non-kin, group versus group - these gene-bred antagonisms are embedded in a social life that is always demanding (through gene-bred imperatives) their resolution. Robert Storey I no longer believe in individuals; rather, I think of scapegoats, sent out by their families-of-origin to do battle with their new spouse over whose family they will recreate. Carl Whitaker I Psychological literary criticism has sent out generations of scholars to do battle with recalcitrant imaginative texts, armed most often with the psychological tools of an early twentieth-century intrapsychic psychology that no longer answers all the interesting questions posed by those standing on the brink of the twenty-first (Livingston 93; Storey, Review 354; Mimesis 207). While classic psychoanalysis and its variations are all widely used in literature departments these days for the analysis of character, and have been for several generations (Almond and Almond, 1996; Bleich, 1996; Skura, 1981, 1992; Wright, 1984), most practitioners of real-world therapy have long since moved on to many other theoretical models (Corsini et al., 1989). Even very recent psychoanalytic literary models that seek to incorporate contemporary psychological thinking - including recent versions of ego psychology (Kohut, 1984), language-oriented Lacanian theory (Gallup, 1985), and narrative (Brooks, 1994; Bowie, 1993) - are still tied to many classic and, in my opinion, no longer tenable Freudian ideas such as the Oedipus complex, the (singular) unconscious, and drive-reduction versions of mental processes (Eysenck and Wilson, 1973; Grunbaum, 1984, Validation 64-65, 178-79, 204-28; Masson, Assault 113; Morson and Emerson 28-30; Spence 112-17). One of the more widely used therapeutic models in the "real world"family systems therapy (hence, fst) - has barely made a ripple in the ocean of literary criticism from which most of us try to keep from drowning (Bump, 1991, 1993; Cohen, 1991; Knapp 1983, 1996; Womack, 1996). Indeed, why this is so - why the discipline of literary criticism has virtually ignored the contemporary social sciences while at the same time deifying one pseudoscientific model from the nineteenth century - remains somewhat of a mystery to this day (even though there has appeared in recent years a certain restlessness with the status quo) (Morrison, 1968).(1) Elsewhere I have asked this same question and tried to give some answers (Knapp, Striking, chapter 2), but, beyond attributing such a massive cultural lag to the negative reasons associated with cognitive authority (hero worship), sheer inertia, and careerism, as well as the more positive one of loyalty to an ideational system one finds personally congenial, I have not been able to fully resolve this question in my own mind even though others besides me have tried (Holzner and Marx 109-10; Crews 55; Storey, Mimesis 37-38; Murray 93). Hence, the reader will have to proceed without an imprimatur from what Robert Pirsig might call the contemporary psycho-critical Church of Reason, and to explore actively some hitherto unfamiliar yet highly interesting new territory.(2) Since literary characters are endlessly fascinating anyway, one may well profit, when thinking about them, by looking at this most ancient of literary conventions (or codes) with newer spectacles (Milowicki and Wilson 219; Margolin 105). However, the issue before us here is less to finish certain old and perhaps unresolvable matters but to pose new and fascinating questions. What would happen to our understanding of many literary characters in/and imaginative texts if critics were to analyze them using the intellectual tools and insights from family systems theory (fst)? What shifts in thinking would be required, especially if one grants that psychoanalysis and almost all of contemporary literary criticism are one and the same? …

Family Systems Psychotherapy, Literary Character, and Literature: An Introduction

Literary scholars consider themselves to be expert in writing about literature or teaching literature but not necessarily in writing about the teaching of literature. The latter field is likely to be thin, in both senses--less productive of scholarship than the fields of rhetoric and language and less conceptually developed. (John Guillory) Socrates himself begins [...] when he says, on behalf of Hippocrates, who wants to "study professionally" with the eminent Protagoras: "he would be glad to be told what effect it will have on him" [...]. What effect will it have? How will he be changed? By his teacher? Specifically. What strikes me about this question is how obvious and basic a one it seems to be for a teacher to be asking. And how rarely it is asked. What effect will it have? Important particularly in the part of our work that prepares others to become professionals at what we do. For such a question places the pedagogical transaction at the center of the problematic. (Paul Kameen) It is the question that is wrong because it assumes that we are responsible for the effects of our teaching whereas, in fact, we are responsible only for its appropriate performance. That is, we are responsible for the selection of texts, the preparation of a syllabus, the sequence of assignments and exams, the framing and grading of a term paper, and so on. [...] There are just too many intervening variables, too many uncontrolled factors that mediate the relationship between what goes on in a classroom or even in a succession of classrooms and the shape of what is finally a life. (Stanley Fish, "Aim") So set 'em up Joe; I've got a little story you oughtta know. (Frank Sinatra) 1 In a recent PMLA note, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher-Joeres, the editor of Signs, spoke about both the difficulties and exhilaration of doing interdisciplinary work. She argued that both "feminism and interdisciplinarity alike [for example] stress collaboration," but that such joint ventures were often limited because the "metalanguage of disciplinarity assert[ed] itself, controlling and limiting what interests us" (319). I will argue in this essay that much the same could be said about our own internal division between ourselves as teachers of literature and as literary scholars and critics (Cuban 76, Kameen 168-70). Those who insist, not without some merit, that the two should be synergistic often substitute what should be for what (all too often) is in a world of merely semiperineable boundaries (Nelsen and Watt 285). We all want to be good teachers and good scholars, but we have found relatively few models for learning how to do both well (Levine, Foreword xii; McGann 157; Showalter 39). Fortunately, the times, they are a-changing as many look anew at the joys of classroom transactions (Guillory; McGann; Scholes, Crafty; Showalter). Teaching as a Belle-Lettres research topic is refreshingly in the air at the turn of the new millennium, but thus far, that literary generation previously focused on theory sometimes seems to be rediscovering the pedagogical wheel. Even so, rediscovery can be a good thing that may often lead us back to the reasons why we teach the humanities at all (Charles Anderson 86, Nell). Although at least some recovery of the obvious might seem necessary to those who have only recently come to literary pedagogical consciousness, much has happened in the educational world during the last twenty-five to thirty years that has gone far beyond the lecture-paper-final examination model that once dominated literature classrooms. After flower-power temporarily shook up the often-staid practices of the previous generation, many have extolled the virtues of the newer, pedagogically more interpersonal reader-response alternatives to the earlier paradigmata, but these too have undergone rethinking (Rabinowitz and Smith). Indeed, almost a decade ago, thinkers in one scholarly essay had even developed a rather loose sort of plot-line: "The profession has moved from raising questions about texts, to raising questions about readers, to raising questions about the conditions of possibility for any reading, to raising questions about how we teach students to read" (Downing et al. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.38.1.50

Current Conversations in the Teaching of College-Level Literature

The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer. By Jonathan Gottschall. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2008. xii, and 223 pp. $34.99 paper. I. This double issue of Style seems an especially appropriate place to review Jonathan Gottschall's new book. Almost as a retort to some of the respondents in this issue who demand what could be called a variation of "show me the money," Gottschall employs adaptationist thinking to investigate what are perhaps the most widely discussed literary works in western culture: Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. Gottschall's book started out about ten years ago as a dissertation under the direction of the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, who has since founded the exciting interdisciplinary program in the evolutionary studies of the humanities and sciences (EvoS) at SUNY Binghamton, and if even only some of their graduates produce books as interesting as the one under review, then both they and we may look forward to some fascinating times ahead. Gottschall quotes the Homeric scholar, John Myres, as "savoring his understatement [that it] is not easy to say anything new about Homer ... after more than 2,500 years" (2), but the former continues by suggesting that, if it is to be done, the novelty must come from one of two places: "discoveries of new evidence, or applications of new perspectives" (10). The Rape of Troy is one of the latter, and "analyzes Homeric conflict from the perspective of modern anthropology and evolutionary biology; it is best described as an evolutionary anthropology of conflict in Homeric society" (3). In his account, "Homeric society" "refers not so much to Homer's fictional construction as to a specific scholarly reconstruction of the real world from which the epics emerged" (3; emphasis in the original). Summarily stated, The Rape of Troy (RT) begins by noting how close to "sudden violent" death Homeric men (and women) habitually lived during what Gottschall calls the "Late Dark Age" of Homeric society (11), the period of time following the collapse of Mycenaean culture in the late thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC, or roughly between 800 and 650 BC (22). His arguments comprise three major issues: I) The "patterns of conflict in Homeric society converge beautifully with those described by anthropologists and ethnographers across a strikingly diverse spectrum of non-state societies" of the kind typically found in the "small, poor villages" of the Dark Age Greeks (3, 23). For Gottshall, "all forms of Homeric conflict result from direct attempts, as in fights over women, or indirect attempts, as in fights for status and wealth, to enhance Darwinian fitness in a physically and socially exacting ecological niche" (3). II. His second argument states that "patterns of violence in Homeric society are tantalizing consistent with the hypothesis that Homeric society suffered from an acute shortage of available young women relative to young men. The institution of slave-concubinage meant that women were not equally distributed across the circum-Aegean world [but were] concentrated in certain communities" and often within the "households of powerful men" (4). Later in the book, Gottschall supports this claim by pointing to some basic biological facts: males have "small, cheap sperm" in contrast to females' "large, nutritious, and expensive eggs," and the consequence of this imbalance for sexually reproducing species is the "fundamental shortage of female reproductive capacity relative to male demand" (44-5) under any circumstances. When the absolute number of females generally is held artificially low, the "value" of a female's reproductive capacity thereby "rachets up ... [as does the] costs that males are willing to "pay" for access to it, measured in the currency of risky competition and/or other costly physical and behavioral traits" (45). …

The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer

I. Introduction As I write, highly respected critics are claiming the demise, over the last 15 years or so, of high "THEORY" - so dominant in the 1980s and early '90s (Eagleton 2003) - and a concomitant critical turn toward the real (or mimetic) world, however "real" is defined (Boyd 2009; Carroll 2008; Gottschall 2008a; 2008b; Palmer 2004; Zunshine 2006; 2007). This critical "back to the future" includes a growing interest in human psychology as a useful tool for literary critics who have developed a renewed concern for, among other things, literary character. Witness, for example, the large increase in critical studies in Family Systems Theory (FST) analyses (Cooper 2004; Davis and Womack 2002; Knapp 1996; 2004; 2006; Knapp and Womack, 1997; 2003; Sadowski 2003; Womack 2000). Literary criticism has been even more explosive with new studies in cognition and literature (Gerrig 1993; Gerrig and Allbritten; Hogan 2003; Richardson and Spolsky 2004; Zunshine 2006; 2007), bio-evolutionary psychology (Carroll 1995; 2004; 2008), neuropsychology (Holland 2004; 2009; Miall 1995), as well as in socially situated cognitive psychologies (Herman 2002; Howe 2007; Sawyer 2005). Indeed so many new directions have emerged in these last few years that merely cataloging them would take us far beyond the scope even of this double issue. What the editors intend here instead is a sampling of essays employing cognition, Family Systems Theory (FST), studies in temperament, empirical analyses of literary problems, and bio-evolutionary criticism - approaches that have moved well beyond the hitherto dominant psychological critical paradigmata associated with Freud, Jacques Lacan, and psycho-analytic criticism generally. While the dominant topic will be literature, we also include an essay each on film and on music, in the hopes that they provide interesting models for future research in those two fields. To begin understanding the differences between the older psychological models associated with Freud, Horney, and Lacan, for example, and the newer psychologies, one needs to think in patterns very different from the past and to employ vocabularies more commensurate with discourses often found in the sciences from which these critical tools are derived. Detractors might query whether some basic ideas shared by each - borrowing from the social sciences, employing linguistic research, looking at human cognition, or thinking about human beings in their social world rather than as semi-isolated monads - really comprise new ideas or are merely "terminological variants" (Mellard 2; Smith 769; Weber 517). And while such may still appear alien to some, literary critics have already done this before: taken disciplinary elements (such as Freudian psychology, for example) that are external to the reigning critical model and by adapting it, familiarizing it, and thereby making the formerly uncanny its own. The most obvious example: from the 1920s to almost the present, criticism and psycho-analysis have blended into one for the purposes of examining literary texts (Skura 368ff.). Even a brief summary of the difficulties and limitations of psychoanalytic theory and its off-shoots in Lacan and other neo-Freudian critical models would take up some valuable space here to cover well-ploughed ground, when our primary interest is in the future. For those practicing literary critics not previously versed in psychological criticism, look among other venues to essays by Knapp (1996, chapters 1 & 2; 2004), and Knapp and Womack, (1997; 2003). While it is quite clear that many human behaviors may not always be reflected in the fictional behaviors of characters - who may be created for several reasons other than simply mimetic reflection - there are good arguments to suggest that each of these new psychologies for literary study has become a valuable tool for readers and critics nonetheless (Phelan 1989; Rabinowitz 1987, 128ff). Many readers of essays and books devoted to the newer psychologies (several discussed in this volume) have often asked if one could specify, both in theoretical and in practical terms, how these new paradigmata differ from the assumptions employed in Freudian and neo-Freudian criticism. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.44.1-2.1

New Psychologies and Modern Assessments: Rethinking Classics in Literature, Including Film and Music

Richard Cronin has observed that in Shelley's poetry, as in his life and thought, "there is an ever-present drive towards a rejection of conventional controls" countered by the recognition that "controls, systems, conventions, are humanly necessary" (35). These contrary pulls, as Cronin calls them, make Shelley's attitude toward literary genre problematic and make further genre-linked critical approaches to his poetry very challenging, so much so, in fact, that little genre criticism exists in modern Shelley studies. Yet, as Jennifer Wallace points out, "Shelley was an extraordinarily diverse writer, experimenting with genre far more than either Keats or Byron" and maintaining an active dialogue throughout his life with the forms offered by literary tradition (4). This is not to say that Shelley's generic experiments are poetic imitations. Genre for Shelley is unfixed and mutable. Envisioning genre as a "process [. . .] subject to the flux of history," he judges poetic accomplishment by the degree to which a writer expands or modulates generic conventions and consequently alters them for the future (Cronin 33). "Every great poet," Shelley asserts in "A Defence of Poetry," "must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification" (484). The contrary pulls that Cronin detects in Shelley's poetry, and which problematize the status of genre in the poems, are sometimes activated or exacerbated by Shelley's genre choices. They indicate Shelley's sophisticated understanding of the mutability of genre while they figure that mutability in the poetry itself. The "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" exemplifies how Shelley employs genre and genre-linked features in innovative and figurative ways. The poem is in dialogue with the classical hymn, a genre to which tradition grants unusual structural flexibility and in which writers, including Shelley, find both a positive support and a challenge to their innovative skill. The classical hymn presupposes fundamental separation while aspiring to unity, and so provides Shelley with inherent contrary pulls, or inherent dialectics, congenial with his aim to contain an effusive, inspiring power in poetic form. That "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" struggles between containment and effusion is not disputed by critics today, but Shelley's modern readers recognize that dialectic as working primarily in language itself. Questions of genre are frequently passed over, and, despite the generic claim of Shelley's title and the features of classical hymn that appear in the poem, critics are reluctant to come to terms with hymn. In fact, critical discussions of the generic resonances of the "Hymn" often rest on misapprehensions about genres that Shelley himself did not share, particularly that genres exist immutably and apply equally to all past and present literary works. Adopting a vague exemplar of the Christian hymn, for instance, recent readers of Shelley conclude that the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is an ironic hymn or simply an ode (Cronin 224; Curran 58; Fry 8; Hall 136). Observing the critical confusion surrounding its genre, Stuart Curran writes that the poem "seems to present us with a generic crux" (58). But largely overlooked by commentators, the tradition of classical hymn can be brought to bear in ways that both supplement our understanding of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and illustrate Shelley's shrewd employment of genre to oppose its potential to become fixed and inert. Modern critics of Shelley discern a dialectic of containment and effusion in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." Primarily, they understand that dialectic as operating in language itself. For Tilottama Rajan, it is the mechanism of a "Romantic deconstruction" that "unfixes," "disseminates," "disarticulates," and "disrupts" ostensible meaning and unity, so that the poem "survives not as what it originally was but as a series of [indeterminate] self-transformations" (292, 283, 296). …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.33.1.43

John V. Knapp

Papers

Family Systems Psychotherapy, Literary Character, and Literature: An Introduction

Current Conversations in the Teaching of College-Level Literature

The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer

New Psychologies and Modern Assessments: Rethinking Classics in Literature, Including Film and Music

The Spirit of Classical Hymn in Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"