Showing papers in "Poetics Today in 2011"

Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions

Abstract: Suzanne Keen is the Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University

Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses

Abstract: Research that suggests the primacy of the emotions provides the context for a study of some of the processes sustained by the emotions during literary reading. In particular, the early processing of emotion in response to language, including narrative, is shown by several ERP (evokedresponse potentials) studies that focus on the first 500 msecs of response. These studies suggest the possibility that emotion plays a key role in subsequent cognitive processing, including the making of inferences, invoking the reader’s memory, or relating empathically to a character. Emotions evoked in these ways during literary reading embody a number of distinctive processes, and some of their implications are then examined here. These include selfreference (e.g., autobiographical memory), which may occur more often in response to literary than to other texts; anticipation (e.g., suspense, forming goals for characters), which also seems more frequent among literary readers; an inherent narrativity of emotions that prompts us to construe situations in narrative terms; a capacity of emotion to integrate experiences, whether through similarities across conventional boundaries or through a process in which one emotion modifies another; and a tendency to animism, the interpretation of objects and events through human emotions, especially in the early phases of response, prior to consciousness. 1. Psychology and Narrative Psychological studies of readers’ responses to narrative have so far paid little attention to the role of emotion and feeling, despite the extensive study of emotions that has been pursued by scholars in the fields of cognition and neuropsychology in the last decade or more. Hence, the special issue of this journal on Narrative and Emotions represents a timely 324 Poetics Today 32:2 development, offering new perspectives on some significant and, in certain cases, longstanding problems in narrative theory. The intended contribution of the present article is exploring the narrative functions performed by the ordinary emotions of the reader.1 My emphasis will fall on three particular aspects: (1) on the processes that shape narrative understanding initiated or sustained by the emotions, not on the emotional states that result from specific episodes or narrative endings; (2) on the reader’s experience of emotions while reading, not on emotions as a pathway to elaborating new interpretations of literary texts; and (3) on what it may be about the experience of emotions while reading literary narrative that makes such response distinctively literary, not on the phenomena of emotion in narrative discourse in general. Let me now explain the assumptions embedded in some of these statements. While interpretation is typically what literary scholars do, my approach is not concerned with them. My interest lies in how ordinary readers experiencing ordinary emotions construe literary narrative. Among readers who read for the pleasures and challenges that literary narratives afford, that is, “ordinary” or “common” readers, acts of interpretation as practiced in literature classrooms or scholarly writing are rarely to be found. While readers are interested, often intensely, in the significance of a literary text, this is because it engages them in reflecting on their own experience, or their sense of culture, or history. When such readers, moreover, empathize with the predicament of a protagonist, the everyday emotions and where they may lead hold the attention, enabling readers to immerse themselves in the text, and facilitating their recognition of the human significance of the experiences unfolding on the page. It is the properties and processes of such ordinary emotions that I examine here; in particular I look at how they are initiated, at their preconscious powers, at their relationship to the reader’s sense of self, their integrative capacities, and several other issues. The main emphasis, that which constitutes the new ground reviewed here, is the primacy of feeling or emotion as a process. This view, resting on recent research that has reversed the previous halfcentury’s priorities in the emotioncognition relationship, argues on neuropsychological evidence in particular that emotion is at the basis of, and shapes the purposes of, all cognitive activity (Ellis 2005: 17; Prinz 2004: 34–39). As Meir Sternberg (2003: 313, 382) pointed out several years ago, cognitivists made the mistake of setting “cognition against (at least above) emotion” under the 1. As Noël Carroll (1997: 191) has argued, we need to pay more attention to the gardenvariety emotions of readers responding to fiction. He mentions emotions such as fear, awe, pity, admiration, anger, in contrast to the desire or castration anxiety that is the concern of psychoanalytic treatments of emotion. Miall • Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses 325 influence of “the party line that would put the cognitive before the affective (in temporal, causal, analytic, and/or scalar order).” This shift in perspective requires us to specify what distinguishes emotion and what processes it brings to narrative reading. Where possible I point to empirical research on the responses of readers that helps support the account of emotion proposed. This is an agenda that will leave little space for other key issues, particularly those belonging to narratology (for a treatment of feeling touching on narrative perspective, however, see Miall and Kuiken 2001); nor will I attempt to define emotion or feeling (Damasio 2003: 28–30, 85–86), or consider whether emotions form a natural kind (Griffiths 1997). 2. The Primacy of Emotion How might we understand the claim that feelings and emotions are primary when reading literary narrative? A preliminary indication of the validity of this claim is provided by an informal study I carried out recently in one of my classes, involving thirtytwo students. I asked the students to read a short story by Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour,” and choose two passages that they found striking; they then wrote a short commentary on their responses to the two passages. Analysis of the components of the responses (105 in all) showed that 16 percent referred to plot, 7 percent were selfreferential, 6 percent were on stylistic aspects, and 5 percent on the historical context of the story. However, 45 percent of the comments referred to the students’ own feelings while reading (e.g., amusement, conflict, confusion, curiosity, empathy, excitement, or irritation), while another 12 percent referred to the feelings of characters. Over half of the comments thus involved feeling, suggesting that feeling was a major component of readers’ experiences of this story. But the status of such comments remains in question. Are they an outcome of a prior interpretive process? Do they in themselves embody (at least in some instances) such a process? Or do they initiate acts of interpretation? And what further role might they play in developing the reader’s understanding? To consider this, I first look briefly at the interpretive context in which such feelings play a part. While we now know something of the cognitive processes of response to narrative, including findings from empirical work in the discourse processing paradigm (e.g., Bloome 2003), little of this work has addressed the issues at stake in literary as opposed to nonliterary narrative. Indeed, some distinguished scholars have argued that the same processes operate in both realms. Walter Kintsch (1998: 205), for example, claimed that “The comprehension processes, the basic strategies, the role of knowledge and 326 Poetics Today 32:2 experience, as well as the memory products generated, are the same for literary texts as for the simple narratives . . . used in our research. . . . The difference is in the ‘what,’ not the ‘how.’” Yet how the comprehension processes are taken up or motivated may demonstrate important differences in the case of reading a literary narrative. In an important respect, the question is one of priorities, as I suggest below: given the rate at which a reader processes the verbal stream of a narrative, sentence by sentence, the limited processing capacities of the human mind suggest that not all the comprehension and inferential processes that have been demonstrated by empirical researchers can be activated in parallel. Moreover, which processes are implicated must be determined, at least in part, by the reader’s sense of salience: what the reader at the moment may feel to be significant. The problem can be demonstrated by considering the range of inferential processes that have been proposed. In a recent paper (Miall 2008) I listed several of these, as follows. In discourse processing, Graesser and his colleagues (e.g., Graesser, Singer, and Trabasso 1994) suggest, on the basis of empirical studies, that six types of inference are generated online automatically, that is, within 650 milliseconds (msecs) of initial exposure to a narrative text. These include referential inferences (such as resolving anaphoric references), causal antecedents (enchaining the current proposition to what came before), a superordinate goal (i.e., the aims of a character), and a character’s emotional reaction. What is not generated automatically, but may be realized subsequently, includes causal consequence, reader emotion, author intent, and several other classes of inference cited by Graesser et al. Another class of inferences, socalled intermediate inferences that explain the consciousness of a character, is outlined by Alan Palmer (2004: 177). In cognitive linguistics, metaphoric mappings are said to provide an inferential basis for interpreting narrative (e.g., Popova 2002). Deixis theory provides another source for inferences, establishing and tracking the spatiotemporal context of a narrative (Duchan et al. 1995). The role of different representations of time in structuring narrative understanding (such as the

Empathetic Hardy: Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Strategies of Narrative Empathy

Abstract: Suzanne Keen is the Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University

Prelinguistic and Preliterate Substrates of Poetic Narrative

Abstract: Despite its long oral and unrecorded history, literature means for most people printed texts and reading. Yet shades of this preliterate past remain and con- tinue to affect our responses to written literary forms today. Studies of mothers' interactions with prelinguistic infants reveal "proto-"aesthetic characteristic s that babies prefer to adult-directed speech, suggesting that adult psychology and experi- ence grow from and build'upon inborn motives and preferences. Synthesizing con- temporary concepts and findings from developmental psychology, ethology, evolu- tionary psychology, paleoarchaeology, and neuroscience, this article describes five "proto-"aesthetic devices and three "principles of salience" that universally inhere in mother/infant interaction and that remain important substrates of emotional response to literature. The article argues that our sensitivity to some nonverbal, emotional, and aesthetic aspects of literary narrative and other arts originated in an adaptive social context in our evolutionary past. 1. Aesthetic Receptivity in Adults Arises from ^ inborn Predispositions of infants

Ian McEwan's Neurological Novel

Abstract: Drawing on cognitive science, literary critics such as Mark Turner have affirmed that for human beings thinking is crucially bound up with narrative. This essay examines how Ian McEwan in his novel Saturday (2005) adds a specifically affective element to the human engagement with narrative through a focus on the neurobiology of consciousness. By castihg a neurosurgeon as his protagonist, McEwan attends to what damaged brains caii reveal about how story-loving human beings "mind" the world. Moreover, in this essay the work of Gerald Edelman in neuroscience and Lisa Feldman Barrett in psychology is cited to bring together disparate fields in affirming that affective feelings convey information about tbe interface between self and environment. By setting the novel in a single day in London, after g/11 and during preparations for war in: Iraq, McEwan affirms a constructivist theory of knowledge, in which individuals and collectives —including novelists— participate in making up meaningful presents and livable futures. Saturday provides a meditation on how we might further bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences of mind through cautious collaborations based on the biological rootedness of storytelling, the centrality of feeling to thinking, and a shared empiricism that embraces human activities of interpretation balanced by testing, calibration,

Introduction: Exchange Values: Poetics and Cognitive Science

Abstract: Theory of literature, literary criticism and interpretation, literary and cultural history, semiotics of culture, linguistics, rhetoric and communications, cultural anthropology, cognitive studies, translation theory: . . . the common denominator of all this diversity is the ambition to understand literary and cultural texts both in their own right and in the context of other . . . systems; to develop advanced theories of literature, communication, and culture, and advanced methods of research; and to integrate the study of literature within the evolving larger field of the human sciences and ultimately that of the sciences at large.

Harmonious Madness: The Poetics of Analogy at the Limits of Blending Theory

Abstract: This essay explores the ways in which Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (1792-1822) analogical poetics at once anticipates and challenges contemporary cognitive-scientific models of conceptual structure and creativity, particularly conceptual integration or blending theory. 1 outlines the logical and motivational aporias that at present limit the explanatory value of cognitive models with respect to conceptual conflict and creativity, and then samples significant parallels and provocations to these models in English romantic theories of poetic imagination, focusing especially on Shelley’s suggestive hypotheses concerning the projective processes that drive novel metaphoric conceptualization. To empirically validate and elaborate these hypotheses, 2 marshals the evidence of 20th-century literary-critical responses to Shelley’s poetics as enacted in his 1820 ode “To a Sky-lark.” These evaluatively divergent commentaries nevertheless converge in their descriptive accounts of the peculiar cognitive effect induced by Shelley’s complexly metaphoric verse, which orients attention not to emergent meanings or achieved mental representations but rather to the underlying process of cognition that precedes, produces, and ceaselessly surpasses any such products of cognition. 3 explains this surpassing effect in terms of the poem’s insistent violations of “directionality” constraints on metaphoric projections from one conceptual domain to another. These violations complicate and frustrate deeply ingrained habits of conceptualization, impeding compositional processes and thereby soliciting them into introspective view. The analysis thus illustrates a reciprocal exchange: the systematic deviances of Shelley’s verse can be exactly captured by an analytic imported from cognitive science; in return, those deviances may serve to push the boundaries of cognitive-scientific theory and improve its experimental access to otherwise hidden complexities of mind.