Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 

About: Interdisciplinary Literary Studies is an academic journal published by Penn State University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Narrative & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 2161-427X. Over the lifetime, 217 publications have been published receiving 544 citations. The journal is also known as: ILS.

Information Bodies: Computational Anxiety in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

Abstract: Cognitive science-based enactive theories of perception afford surprising insight onto a less examined component of perceptual experience: perceptual entrainment through the embodied encounter with tools. My analysis of the body/tool/perception nexus in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) introduces the concept of perceptual entrainment in two steps: first I explain Alva Noe’s claim that perception is virtual—that it takes place as an active process of environmental investigation rather than through computer-processing-like brain activity. I then take Noe’s approach to perception a step further by examining how tool use directs and amplifies our perceptual focus. I argue that in Snow Crash , tools contain within them ideologies of repression that emerge precisely at the “technological interface,” moments when characters in the novel engage with tools that interpellate them, enable them to wield power, or blur the boundaries between control and abjection. This article analyzes the novel’s computational anxiety —the fear of loss of self identity via an informational/mathematical determinism mapped by the tool that entrains our perception.

Changed by Literature? A Critical Review of Psychological Research on the Effects of Reading Fiction

Abstract: Our article reviews empirical work that claims to provide evidence for the psychological benefits and effects of engaging with literature. Psychological research has considerable potential for addressing the limitations of traditional reader-response theories, especially if such research is conducted in an interdisciplinary context where literary scholars can actively shape the experimental setup. In the first part of the article we consider the work carried out in this connection by psychologist Keith Oatley and literary scholar Frank Hakemulder, calling attention to a number of important issues that, in our view, haven’t been adequately addressed in their empirical studies. In the second part we turn to our more positive arguments, suggesting that the investigation of the psychological effects of reading cannot abstract from phenomenological data based on readers’ own self-reports. Building on philosophical and psychological views of the self as a narrative construction, we argue that the analysis of readers’ life stories may offer important insights into how literary reading can have an impact on readers. The descriptive, qualitative, phenomenological route is less fraught with presuppositions and normative assumptions than Oatley’s and Hakemulder’s approaches, and deserves being taken into serious consideration.

Biopoetics and Hermeneutics: The Postal Metaphor in Il Postino

Abstract: This article is a reading of a novel and film that promotes the primacy of language in human affairs. An interdisciplinary approach combines Heideggerian hermeneutics with Darwinian literary criticism. From a Heideggerian perspective, one's existence is essentially the hermeneutic activity of interpretation, since one's being (Dasein) primordially entails a situated, questioning, self-interpretation. The questioning of what it means to be is an integral aspect of a projective hermeneutics. The critic's intense and passionate questioning of one's temporal facticity forms the basis of a practical form of criticism. Darwinian literary criticism also presupposes what it means to be human is to share a universal, evolved human nature that includes an "instinctive tendency to acquire an art," or language. Practically speaking, an innovative fusion of Darwinian literary criticism, or biopoetics, with Heideggerian hermeneutics is appropriate because both perspectives acknowledge a primordial understanding as the basis for all interpretation. Further, from both perspectives, the question is not simply whether narrative structures inform and influence human experience, but the degree to which narratives are specifically designed to transmit information and knowledge about the precarious human condition.

Theory of Mind as a Pedagogical Tool

Abstract: Zunshine demonstrates how a cognitive narratological perspective on theory of mind (ie, our evolved cognitive capacity to see people’s observable behavior in terms of their underlying mental states, such as thoughts, feelings, desires, and intentions) offers an instructor a new tool for collaborative classroom exploration of representations of fictional consciousness In particular, Zunshine tells of her experience of asking students to write up “missing” passages from Edith Wharton’s short story “Xingu,” following their discussion of the story’s construction of social minds, an approach that draws on theoretical perspectives that either directly represent theory of mind (Zunshine’s “sociocognitive complexity” and Alan Palmer’s “intermental thinking”) or are highly compatible with it (Suzanne Keen’s “strategic empathizing”) Having used research on theory of mind to teach a wide range of texts on both graduate and undergraduate levels, Zunshine centers her article on the immediate classroom payoffs of this approach as well as its relationship with other, more established pedagogical strategies

Voyages in the Verbal Universe: The Role of Speculation in Darwinian Literary Criticism

Abstract: By the end of the eighteenth century, the achievements of the Enlightenment had led to a perception that science and the literary arts were competing modes of endeavor, and a moment's reflection shows us that this sense of disciplinary competition dies hard. Indeed, one of the chief occupations of literary studies today is in still sorting out the relationship between itself and other disciplines. It is not that earlier eras were blissfully void of feelings of interdisciplinary rivalry for two thousand years, literary critics from Aristotle to the Renaissance humanist Sir Philip Sidney had pitted literature against such humanistic disciplines as philosophy and history, claiming that these fields are, respectively, too abstract and too tied to facts to provide the moral and spiritual enlightenment available through literature but that the threat to literature now emanated from a different sphere (Aristotle 32-33; Sidney 105-07). So it is that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth echoes Sidney's remarks on philosophy, but his target is now science: scientific knowledge is difficult and learned, whereas poetic knowledge is coterminus with our own existence. Later English romantic and Victorian poet-critics, also opposing poetry to science, followed Wordsworth in asserting the emotional and consequently moral effectiveness of literature. Thus, some two decades after Wordsworth penned the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Shelley insists that, in contrast to scientifically conceived moral systems ("ethical science," in Shelley's phrase), poetry activates the imagination and, in so doing, facilitates sympathetic responsiveness to others (487-88). And again, toward the end of the century, attuned to the intellectual trends of his time and influenced deeply by Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold claims that feeling is linked to conduct and that literature, which addresses our feelings, is therefore necessary in promoting our impulse toward moral behavior. In short, the competition between science and literature is no doubt a phenomenon of the past several hundred years; nonetheless, it is worth remembering that literary study has always defended itself against and defined itself in relation to some other discipline, whose threat may be accordingly actual or illusory. If, then, a marked pattern of nineteenth-century literary criticism was to elevate literature above science in the process of defending its viability, a contrary tendency to assimilate scientific and pseudo-scientific research and models to literary studies emerged simultaneously toward the end of that century, and es-