Judith P. Saunders

Bio: Judith P. Saunders is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Chemistry (relationship) & Political sociology. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 3 publications receiving 8 citations.

Hawthorne's Theory of Mind: An Evolutionary Psychological Approach to "The Minister's Black Veil"

Abstract: "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836) is one of Hawthorne's most widely acclaimed, most often anthologized tales. (1) Inspiring lively critical debate, this story about a man who hides his face has generated a large body of secondary comment; discussions of the story frequently begin by cataloguing previous critical approaches and conclusions. The protagonist's purposes have been analyzed, for example, from historical, biographical, theological, psychoanalytical, intertextual, receptionist, and semiotic perspectives. The veil itself has been variously interpreted as the locus of human sinfulness, of Puritan revivalism, of religious absolutism, of misanthropic isolationism, of heroic self-sacrifice, of sexual fearfulness, and of indecipherable ambiguity. (2) Whatever the critical approach to this story--"perhaps Hawthorne's most enigmatic" (Boone 165)--readers' reactions typically contain an element of uneasiness, sometimes exasperation. The effect of the veil is so powerful, and the motives of its wearer so dismaying, that readers frequently come to share the discomfort it provokes in the story's secondary characters: disabling socially important communicative mechanisms, the veil fosters confusion and antagonism. The emerging field of evolutionary psychology offers powerful explanatory insight into these responses; indeed, the set of cognitive adaptations known as Theory of Mind (TOM) is central to the development of plot, character, and theme in Hawthorne's absorbing narrative. The story showcases everyday reliance on ToM, at the same time investigating mechanisms that undermine its effectiveness. Much recent research in cognitive science has explored the human propensity to create a "theory of mind," that is, to form hypotheses about the mental states of others. We ascribe to every individual "a mental world of thoughts, ideas, imaginings," and we further assume that this interior realm of "beliefs, desires and feelings" is the source of externally manifested behavior (Butterworth et al 1). We seek to understand and anticipate the actions of those around us, consequently, "by searching for and reaching out to their underlying mentalities" (Butterworth et al 1). Whether or not we give conscious attention to it, "a coherent conception of the mind is central" to our everyday social functioning (Wellman 8). Our "ability to reflect on [our] own mental states, as well as those of others" appears to be a "cognitive specialization" unique to the human species (Povinelli and Preuss 418). Indeed, the complex collaborative features characterizing human communities would be impossible without "an evolved neuropsychological mechanism for coding and manipulating information" about the inner workings of minds (Butterworth et al 1). Like the rest of the "evolved architecture of the human mind," the "machinery" of ToM is "the carefully crafted product of thousands or millions of generations of natural selection"; its functioning is "universal and automatic" and contributes to a "shared reality" that transcends culture (Tooby and Cosmides xii). The evolutionary advantages of ToM, or "mindreading," to a social animal are compellingly clear (Baron-Cohen 21). "As members of an intensively social, cooperative, and competitive species, our ancestors' lives depended on how well they could infer what was on one another's minds" (Tooby and Cosmides xvii). An ability to discern anger (and thus evade violence), to detect friendly overtures (and thus build alliances), or to suspect deception (and thus avoid being cheated) would bring clear fitness benefits. The development of mindreading skills would have constituted an evolutionary "breakthrough": those individuals capable of making "realistic guesses about the inner life of ... rivals," those who could "picture what another was thinking about and planning to do next," would reap enormous "biological benefits" (Humphrey qtd. Baron-Cohen 21). Recognizing the significance of ToM as a probably recent "evolutionary innovation" in the human species, researchers have explored both its developmental calendar (e. …

Ideas of Order: Artists Describing the Arts

Abstract: Discussing the adaptive functions of human art, Joseph Carroll highlights its role in organizing the capacity of the mind to envision circumstances beyond the immediate. Able to conceptualize future problems and pleasures, to anticipate a multiplicity of outcomes for any event, to speculate about individual motives or group dynamics, and even to foresee their own mortality, humans occupy a mental universe far larger than their actual physical and social environment. "The Brain--is wider than the sky--," as Emily Dickinson observes (Poem 262). The uniquely anticipatory, creatively constructive characteristics of human psychology have proven to be a source of strength for the species, ensuring "behavioral flexibility" in handling "contingent circumstances" (122). At the same time, however, these abilities are the source of "potential chaos" and "psychological exile" for the restlessly hypothesizing individual mind (Wilson 224-25). By ordering and interpreting the welter of interior hopes, fears, and schemes, art counters psychic chaos and isolation: deliberately shaped artifacts--in paint, in music, in words--seek to teach, to console, to cheer, or to inspire. The ordered completeness of the imagined worlds artists construct is underscored by their recognition of the fragmented, confusing character of human consciousness. Without assistance such as that supplied by art, individuals tend to become lost in the dismaying multiplicity of their own projections, memories, and hypotheses. The sometimes overpowering richness of the external environment is magnified, on a moment-by-moment basis, by an avalanche of interior responses to it. In consequence, as Wallace Stevens points out, "we live in a constellation / Of patches and of pitches, / Not in a single world" ("July Mountain"). No one has described the "thousand odd, disconnected fragments" comprising individual awareness better than Virginia Woolf: "hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting," the contents of the "rag-bag of odds and ends within us" tease and exasperate (Orlando 78). Seeking to understand the self as "nothing but one self," its life's experience as "a single, downright, bluff piece of work," the individual is confronted instead with a hodge-podge of interiority that recklessly overlays sense impressions with the "capricious" effects of memory, apprehension, and desire (310, 78). The result, Woolf avers, is that "nothing [can] ever be seen whole": "body and mind [are] like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack" (307). This "chopping up small of body and mind" threatens to annihilate identity: one feels "disassembled" by a myriad of "separate scraps" all simultaneously attempting to define the self and direct its thinking (307). Woolf goes so far as to speculate that consciousness is an amalgam of "many different people ... all having lodgement ... in the human spirit," each manifesting its own eccentric "sympathies, little constitutions and rights" (308). Prufrock, T.S. Eliot's famous antihero, poignantly illustrates the psychologically debilitating problem of the "proliferation of possibilities" Woolf so vividly evokes (122): he finds himself immobilized by his capacity to project negative outcomes. The frenzied activity of his mental operations ("a hundred indecisions ... a hundred visions and revisions" which "a minute will reverse") stands in ironic contrast to his social paralysis: "And how should I presume?" ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"). Artists seek to counteract the chaos within, Carroll points out, by fashioning "an imaginative universe," an alternative "virtual world" in which the plethora of possibilities generated by the mind assumes a satisfyingly cohesive, coherent, and aesthetic form (127). Literary artists have sought repeatedly to articulate this crucial feature of their work: the creation of a compelling parallel universe. They have employed powerful metaphors to describe the fictive realities into which they propel their readers. …

Evolutionary Science and Literary Design: Teaching Huxley's Brave New World Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Abstract: The authors, faculty at a small, private liberal arts college, have collaborated many times in interdisciplinary pedagogical ventures, linking evolutionary science with literary study. One of us is an animal behaviorist in the Biology Department, the other a literary scholar in the English Department. Our goal is to lay the groundwork for a scientific understanding of human behavior, including cognitive and emotional functions, thus enabling students to analyze literature in an evolutionary context, as an artifact of the adapted mind. Readings from the biological sciences provide evidence that mental life is inextricably rooted in human physiology, that patterns of motivation and behavior are susceptible to shaping by natural selection. For purposes of this discussion we collapse the experience of many semesters into description of a single, team-taught course: Evolution, Behavior, and Literature. In addition to offering a panoramic overview of our course design, including its goals, structure, calendar, readings, and assignments, we present some of the strategies and benefits of our collaborative pedagogy. To lend specificity to these descriptions, general comments are grounded in an illustrative example, focusing on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. We identify a few key topics in evolutionary psychology and cognition pertinent to interdisciplinary analysis of Huxley's book, situating these within the framework of the course. I. Course Design This 200-level class was designed for a general population of lower-division students. Typically students enroll in the class in order to fulfill a General Education requirement in literature or in science. Given the number and variety of offerings in these subject areas, it is unlikely that students will be forced into the course; we can assume that most choose it willingly, motivated by an interest in interdisciplinary exploration. Course objectives and expectations necessarily include those prevailing college-wide for General Education classes, which are expected to introduce undergraduate students to foundational concepts, terms, methods, and materials in a targeted subject area--or in two subject areas, in the case of dual-listed courses such as ours. We plan readings and assignments, necessarily, for maximum efficiency and impact. Once the biologist has identified concepts and topics essential to an introductory understanding of evolutionary science, her colleague chooses compatible literary materials: narratives, poems, and plays in which issues such as mate selection, intersexual competition, parental investment, and kin selection assume recognizable importance. The foundations of literary study, from cultural-historical context to figurative language and prosody, can be introduced effectively with almost any texts, given sufficient variety in genre. It is feasible, consequently, to select literary works highlighting a few central issues in evolutionary science, thus enabling students to undertake Darwinian literary analysis even at the introductory level. Students must acquire a basic understanding of evolutionary theory before they can engage in meaningful interdisciplinary applications of it. In devising the course calendar, accordingly, we front-load scientific concepts and materials. After the introductory session, in which basic information about both fields of study is presented and discussed, we devote eight class periods exclusively to evolutionary theory. These sessions are taught principally by the biology professor, and assigned readings feature the opening chapters of Robert Wright's book, The Moral Animal, augmented by pertinent materials from John Alcock's textbook on Animal Behavior and selected readings from other sources (see the calendar of topics and readings in Appendix I). A short list of concepts to which students are introduced includes the following: natural selection, proximate mechanisms and ultimate goals, adaptation and adaptive value, the evolution of behavior, Bateman's Principle, the ancestral environment, reproductive value and reproductive strategies (male and female), differential parental investment, inter- and intrasexual competition, dominance hierarchies and status. …

The year’s work in stylistics 2012:

Abstract: In the UK, the national Research Excellence Framework (REF) is almost upon us. For the uninitiated, this is a regular assessment of the research outputs and environment of university departments throughout the country, the outcome of which impacts on the amount of research funding departments can expect for the next round of the cycle. Unsurprisingly, pressures are high since so much is riding on the results. The assessment is controversial, not just because of the lack of clarity surrounding the assessors’ methods but because its critics argue that the REF (and Research Assessment Exercise, or RAE, before it) have changed the nature of publication, with academics favouring short articles rather than long projects in order to ensure the requisite number of outputs by the time the census date comes round. My own bugbear about the process is more to do with the reductive nature of the exercise, in which value is automatically ascribed to simple metrics. Hence, high levels of research funding and large numbers of completed PhDs are a Good Thing, regardless of the intrinsic quality of the research produced. Related to this emphasis on metrics is the concept of journal impact factors. Although the REF does not currently take account of these, they can be used by universities to provide an indicative assessment of the quality of an academic’s research, as well as to pressure academics to publish in particular journals. These measures may well play a part in a university’s decision about whether to submit a particular academic to the REF. The problem, of course, is that impact factors are inherently flawed. They also lead to game playing, in which some journals are overburdened with submissions at the expense of others. Unfortunately, this issue has come to affect Language and Literature too, in particular ‘The year’s work in stylistics’. The problem is that our impact factor is currently being affected by the number of articles in Language and Literature that cite other articles published in the journal (‘self-citation’). My regular practice of providing a round-up of what has been published in the journal over the past year is therefore negatively skewing our impact factor. This

Darwinian Literary Analysis of Sexuality

Abstract: A product of imaginative and aesthetic energies, literature offers unique insight into universals of human nature. Unsurprisingly, literary plots and themes focus persistently on activities with direct or indirect impact on fitness. Historically and cross-culturally, narratives return with unfailing regularity to topics emphasizing erotic desire, courtship tactics, marital strife, and family relationships. Situated by their authors in diverse social and physical environments, fictional evocations of sexual behaviors and choices are as complex and varied as the behaviors themselves. Individual texts do not merely illustrate the operations of evolved adaptations; scrutinizing these in specific contexts, they invite reader responses ranging from celebration to defiance. Deft handling of rhetorical devices such as point of view, metaphor, allusion, and irony enables writers to explore the multifaceted psychosocial impact of sexual impulses and choices. Literary Darwinists examine the richly detailed representations of eros in fiction, drama, and poetry, remaining alert to the evolutionary implications of the motives and actions portrayed.

The Deconstructible Allegory of the Failed Author-Reader Communion : Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil : A Parable" (中井紀明教授退任記念号)

Abstract: In 1836, one year after the publication of “The Young Goodman Brown” in New England Magazine, “The Minister’s Black Veil” appeared in The Token. The successive publication of the works seems to suggest they shared a particular theme in common. True or not aside, Goodman Brown fantasizes that the people, young and old, men and women, people whom he thinks pious and lofty, gather in the woods to participate in a Black Mass. Brown completely ceases to rely on the goodness of the people, including his allegorically named wife, Faith, after hallucinating “their secret deeds : how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their houses ; how many a