Showing papers in "Style in 2013"

Flaubertian Aesthetics, Modernist Ethics and Animal Representation in Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa

Abstract: In Flaubert's "A Simple Heart," old Felicite has her dead parrot Loulou stuffed and mounted, then idolizes it as an incarnation of the Holy Ghost. The tale is narrated in Flaubert's typical detached, almost clinical style, but the final sentence brings an unexpected turn. As Felicite dies, we see through her eyes "a gigantic parrot soaring above her head" ((Tuvres 11.177; translations are mine). This potentially melodramatic ending is surprisingly stirring and, because the narrator withholds comment, hard to interpret. It might redeem Felicite's mundane life--or mock her superstition. Or perhaps conflating real animal and spiritual symbol signals a failure to see things as they are. This is the reading I'll pursue, for I am intrigued by how much an animal qua animal plays into the ending's ambiguities. In the animal, Flaubert finds a way to foreground the ethical implications of his artistic theories and practice. Literary animals distinctively highlight the ethics of style because animals uniquely challenge notions of sympathy, knowledge, and meaningful communication. The responsibility they force upon us is especially acute in modernism, with its epistemological skepticism and rejection of sympathetic identification. From the snail in Woolf's "Kew Gardens" to Cummings' grasshopper, animals foreground perspectivai and representational problems that test literature's stylistic limits. Few modernists are as attentive to these issues as Ernest Hemingway. His love of killing animals aside--for now--Hemingway strives ethically to match his style to their peculiar otherness. In Green Hills of Africa especially he depicts animals in Flaubertian style: impersonally but accurately. Thus they are recognized as real fellow-creatures rather than symbols or objects, yet respected as beings inaccessible to human ways of knowing and relating. Green Hills is modernist indeed, repeatedly shifting the narrative spotlight from the hunt to the animals beyond the hunter's drama. In brief but significant moments, it shifts from its primary genre, the trophy-hunting memoir, and becomes a naturalist's tale. This is not to deny Hemingway's troubling relationship with animals. He revels in meting out death, and though he insists on the "mutual respect" involved in "real killing" (Death 127, 232), he scarcely questions his right to deploy such a fatal brand of respect. Bullfighting may be "a tragedy" in which the bull dies the hero's necessary death (Death 6), but can we sanction the killer who casts himself as Fate? When Francis Macomber literally feels for the lion he shoots, his sympathy is less compassionate or responsive than colonizing; as Ruth Mayer notes, "the contact imagined is strictly unidirectional, demarking an extreme form of takeover or intake" (256). Hemingway's treatment of animals merges with his paternalistic, even hostile misogyny, orientalism and racism (as Cary Wolfe convincingly argues in his excellent discussion of Hemingway in Animals Rites). Green Hills of Africa is typically deemed the worst offender. Later works like True at First Light are more sympathetic towards animals, revealing, according to Ryan Hediger, Kevin Maier, and Carey Voeller, the dawning of a kinder outlook. This assessment might apply to the real Hemingway who killed real animals but learned to do it less wantonly. But the stakes are more complicated once the killings are narrativized. Narrativization adds to animal ethics the problem of representation and the various ironies that attend distinctions between author (henceforth "Hemingway"), narrating-1 ("the narrator") and narrated-1 ("Ernest"). Indeed, it is because he narrates himself killing animals that Hemingway so ably foregrounds the ethics of animal representation. His narratives alienate us, or appeal to us in distasteful ways, but this alienation highlights rhetorical nuances that might otherwise pass unnoticed. Recoiling from his hunting scenes, we are more disposed to see style apart from content; and this separation, possible only conceptually, is a good initial step towards understanding how content and style work together to produce ethical responses. …

Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction

Abstract: Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 290pp. ISBN 9780470974575. "Who would ever think of learning to live out of an English novel?" --Anthony Trollope Just like broccoli, so too is reading fiction good for you. Well, not exactly. However, with his claim that stories function as simulations of the social world, cognitive psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley argues that reading novels, short stories, poems, and dramas enable us to better understand other people and navigate the complexities of social life. Oatley proposes to develop what he sees as a neglected field of inquiry--the "psychology of fiction." Geared towards "general readers, psychologists, literary theorists, and students" (x), Such Stuff as Dreams aims to demonstrate "how fiction enters the mind, how it prompts us toward emotions, how it affords insights into ourselves and others, how it is enjoyable, [and] how it has been shown to have worthwhile effects on readers" (7). Oatley's central premise (borrowed from Shakespeare and others) is that fiction is a "guided dream" or "a model of the world" that offers readers a glimpse "beneath the surface of the everyday world" (2). Oatley draws upon the results of his research group's experiments with readers, along with recent scientific techniques such as brain scans (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), to demonstrate reading as a process of simulation. "Narrative stories are simulations that run not on computers but on minds" (17). The recent discovery of mirrors neurons, the "smart cells" in our bodies constitutes the neural underpinnings of reading as a process of simulation. Mirror neurons are cells in the brain that fire both when an action is observed and when that same action is enacted by the observer. Citing recent fMRI evidence that brain regions track different aspects of a story, Oatley explains that "recognition of an action in the imagination when we hear or read about it involves brain systems responsible for initiating that action"; thus, "readers construct an active mental model of what is going on in the story, and can also imagine what might happen next" (20). Oatley sees readers as participating in a collaborative relationship with the writer--when we read, we create "our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, and our own reenactment." Oatley suggests that "with the idea of fiction as world-creating, and also world reflecting, we can understand something of what happens psychologically when we engage with fiction as readers or audience members" (18). That there is constant interplay between author, reader and text is not exactly news. Wolfgang Iser first conceptualized reading as an active practice of meaning making in The Implied Reader (1978), though he focused more on features of the text rather than psychological processes. For Iser, the novel was the genre in which reader involvement coincided with meaning production. (1) Later, in The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (1993), Iser explained how the literary text brings "into view the interplay among the fictive, the real, and the imaginary." (2) More recently, in Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (2004), David Herman has emphasized narrative as an instrument of mind, describing the processes by which readers co-construct narrative worlds as "worlding the story" and "storying the world." Strangely, Oatley's entire discussion of creativity and imagined worlds--"we write our own versions of what we read" (62)--neither extends nor nuances Iser's or Herman's far more developed theories of fiction as a sense-making activity. Building on Brian Boyd's theory in The Origin of Stories (2000) that fiction originates in play, Oatley says that "pretend play" (make-believe or "what if") involves discovery--we become things we are not (27). Our ability to engage in such imaginative play as children becomes the basis for how we later create, understand, and enjoy stories. …

A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

Abstract: Nancy Easterlin A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and interpretation Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 2012315 pagesWe so-called literary Darwinists-Nancy Easterlin and I count ourselves membershave yet to find a very cozy home among our fellow academics One of the most recent and prominent of responses to our work is an article in Critical Inquiry by Jonathan Kramnick, in which, putatively sobered by the attention it has received, particularly outside the academy, he offers an attempt "to take seriously the central premises of the Darwinian program in literary studies" Predictably, the article, like the response to its critics that appears a year later, is nothing of the kind: it is an attack upon his own caricature of that program-as bad theory hatched from bad science resulting in criticism incapable of saying anything important about literary texts or formsNancy Easterlin's book should change all of this It is, without exception, the best work yet in the field, and represents a high-water mark in literary theory and criticism Easterlin is a committed Darwinian-that is, she accepts the evolutionary scenario as sufficient explanation for the existence of human beings, for their behavior, their thinking, and their handiwork, including literature-but she is also a pluralist who thinks that "biocultural criticism," ideally practiced, would "not employ an a priori model that it presumes has application to the vast majority of literary texts" (34) Her arguments "maintain a philosophically coherent view of human beings while illustrating how different applications of interdisciplinary research can illuminate the human problems" dramatized in literature (34) The research is wide-ranging and sophisticated-encompassing evolutionary, developmental, and cognitive psychology; bioepistemology, cognitive linguistics and rhetoric, and more-and the analyses of individual poems, stories, and novels that this research helps illuminate are not only "important" but often dazzling in their complexity, subtlety, and lucid precision Easterlin does not take as her goal a '"move closer to science' by discovering 'an adaptive function that is specific to art or literature proper,"' as Kramnick claims all literary Darwinists do; rather her aim is "to demonstrate to literary specialists that literature may be for many things and that a biocultural approach has broad application across literatures, topics, and subfields" (34) She also does not accept the claim of Joseph Carroll (whom Caleb Crain early anointed the "pope" of literary Darwinism [37]) that "the primary purpose of literary criticism, as an objective pursuit of true knowledge about its subject, is to identify the specific configuration of meaning in any given text or set of texts" (23) Literary meaning, though not "endlessly deferred in any radical sense," can never be recovered "objectively" for Easterlin, since reading is a "dynamic, interpretive," and so inevitably subjective process, "and it is in that process that meaning is configured and, perhaps, knowledge is glimpsed" (23)If Easterlin is a Darwinian, then, she is a "doubting Thomas" (Crain's phrase [37]) to Carroll's pope She asserts, against such "homogenizing" of literary Darwinists as we find in Kramnick, that, "in point of fact, [they] have only one shared assumption: that findings about human psychology and behavior might prove illuminating for the study of human artifacts" (11) The "might" in that sentence dike the "perhaps" in the one that concludes the previous paragraph) suggests the real strengths of Easterlin's approach: she is, although a true believer in an evolved "human nature," modest and cautious in her extrapolations of that belief, generous in her contextualizing of literary texts, framing them not only biologically and culturally, as her title suggests, but also socially, historically, and biographically, and alert always to the fact that literary texts are artful products of human meaningmaking, not (or not always) the musings of a species mulling its eternal concerns, as Carroll and his disciples seem sometimes to interpret them …

Narrative Space and Readers' Responses to Stories: A Phenomenological Account

Abstract: 1 Introduction This article explores how, in readers' discussion of literary narrative, the mental imagery evoked by spatial descriptions can become bound up with emotional responses and with judgments about the thematic (ethical, social, aesthetic) relevance of the text Narrative space remains relatively under-theorized in narrative theory and related disciplines, and I would like to advance our understanding of this domain of storytelling by developing a phenomenological account centered on the concepts--derived from human geography--of "meaning-making" and "sense of place" One of the underlying assumptions of narrative theory--both in its structuralist and in its post-structuralist phase--is that readers' interest in narrative is sparked and sustained by the temporal dynamic that weaves together a set of events and existents Thus, story and characters are the key factors that influence readers' meaning constructions: as Marie-Laure Ryan succinctly puts it, "people read for the plot and not for the map" ("Cognitive Maps" 138) On this view, spatial references play a relatively minor role in narrative: at best, their function is to form a backdrop to the events and actions represented by a story In recent years, however, supported by the "narrative as world" metaphor (with its inherent spatiality), post-classical approaches to narrative have begun to explore the spatial dimension of stories (2) In line with this research effort, and building on the hypotheses advanced in my "The Reader's Virtual Body," this article seeks to show that, in some scenarios, narrative space does take on an added importance, guiding readers' responses by "tingeing" emotionally and evaluatively their engagement with the narrative text Rather than being a mere container, narrative space becomes, in these cases, a site of negotiation of the lived, experiential qualities conveyed by a story I make a case for this view of narrative space by analyzing a corpus of online reviews of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) McCarthy's Pulitzer-prize winning novel brings new life to the popular genre of post-apocalyptic fiction through the author's idiosyncratic style, which matches the bleakness of the storyworld he creates: short declarative sentences stripped bare of punctuation, monosyllabic dialogues, and descriptive passages rich in technical or archaic terms Set after an unspecified disaster has destroyed all life on earth apart from a handful of humans, The Road narrates the quest for survival of two characters--a man and his young son--in a dying world Yet the desolate landscape of The Road and the characters' existential condition reinforce each other in a spiral that contributes significantly to readers' emotional and evaluative engagement with the novel I provide more detail about the corpus of online reviews--and about my methodology--in section 2 For now, let me point out that the qualitative analysis I carry out is informed by the same phenomenological principles that guide my approach to narrative space (see section 3) Broadly speaking, phenomenological inquiry in the social sciences lays an emphasis on people's lived experience of situations, using first-person reports to explore the significance of those situations beyond any theoretical preconception or agenda (see Moustakas 21-22) The "applied" phenomenology that is practiced in the social sciences--and that I practice in this article--should therefore be distinguished from phenomenology as a philosophical school Yet there are many parallels between these projects: firstly, my account places a premium on readers' experience of narrative space as it emerges from the reviews of The Road, attempting to go beyond the objectivist conception of space prevailing in narrative theory (this is my version of the "phenomenological reduction") Secondly, my account leverages a number of phenomenological insights into people's interaction with space, focusing (in section 4) on four different aspects of the sense of place created by McCarthy's novel …

Correcting for The Corrections: A Darwinian Critique of a Foucauldian Novel

Abstract: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001) is a major novel--a family drama that broadens into an ideological critique of late capitalism in the twentieth century. The critical response to his novel suggests the magnitude of his achievement: a flood of enthusiastic reviews in high-profile venues, a National Book Award, and a substantial handful of scholarly commentaries by academic literary critics. The Corrections is Franzen's third novel. His first two established him as one of the better minor postmodern novelists, someone to watch, but not someone in the same league as Pynchon or DeLillo. The critical and commercial success of The Corrections transformed Franzen into one of the two or three most prominent contemporary American novelists. The review in the Christian Science Monitor offers a representative assessment. "The Corrections represents a giant leap for Jonathan Franzen--not only beyond his two previous novels, but beyond just about anybody else's" (Charle). (1) My critical response to The Corrections diverges from that of most reviewers and academic critics. I think Franzen lacks generosity and conforms timidly to current ideological conventions. He minimizes or suppresses positive family emotions and ironizes common moral norms. A smug and facile postmodern skepticism hovers over all aspects of the domestic and social life depicted in the novel. Because he envisions his characters from within the limitations of his own persona, he often gives an implausible, distorted, and impoverished depiction of their inner lives. From my evaluative perspective, imaginative sympathy and truth of representation are inherently valuable attributes in literary depiction. They imply seriousness and honesty in an author's conception of his subject. Apart from judgments of literary value, failures of verisimilitude naturally prompt readers to probe the nature of a distorting bias, asking what specific impulses might have deflected the author from giving a true account of his subject. I shall argue that in Franzen's case the distorting bias results from interactions between his ideological stance and more intimate, personal aspects of his identity. Those more personal aspects are rooted in the family dynamics depicted in the novel. The Corrections is not precisely and literally autobiographical, but three of its main characters--the mother, the father, and the oldest son--are clearly based on members of Franzen's family. (2) The childhood experiences of another character, the second son, seem intimately autobiographical. Whether literally true or not, the depicted experiences give symbolic form to central features in Franzen's attitude toward his parents. As an adult, the second son adopts a Foucauldian ideological stance indistinguishable from Franzen's own. Though not an academic, Franzen is an intellectual. He is well-read in affective neuroscience and in "popular sociobiology" (Freedom 192). His outlook is not, however, essentially biocultural. In an essay about his father's Alzheimer's, he reflects on his "conviction that we are larger than our biology" (How To Be Alone 33). He acknowledges that he recoils from the idea of "the organic basis of everything we are" and explains that he prefers to "emphasize the more soul-like aspects of the self" (19). For Franzen, as for many contemporary intellectuals, resistance to the idea of an organic basis does not translate into religion; it translates into ideology. The intuitive belief in the autonomy of the human soul manifests itself as a belief in the autonomy of culture. Franzen was an English major at Swarthmore in the late seventies and there became enamored of "Theory" (Farther Away 9-11, How To Be Alone 59-60). Describing his sense of vocation at the time he began writing his first novel, Franzen says, "In college I'd admired Derrida and the Marxist and feminist critics, people whose job was to find fault with modern world. I thought that maybe now I, too, could become socially useful by writing fault-finding fiction" (How To Be Alone 246). …

The Human Species and the Good Gripping Dreams of H.G. Wells

Abstract: H.G. Wells (1866-1946) has a peculiar place in literary history. He had ambitions as a realist novelist, a satirist, a journalist, and a historical commentator. Though his greatest ambitions were directed toward large-scale political reformation, history has judged otherwise. He is now remembered almost exclusively for his early fantastical stories. The attention given to Wells in academic literary study has been sporadic, sometimes enthusiastic and sometimes mildly apologetic (McLean "Wells Studies"). Nonetheless, his popular appeal has endured. The Invisible Man was first adapted for film in 1933, and the stories and characters of Wells's science fiction treasury continue to proliferate in worldwide popular culture. His early novels are cross-cultural classics continuously in print, and they have influenced several subgenres of science fiction.Wells's early fiction is compelling in part because he had an imaginative grasp of human evolution. He was bom seven years after Darwin's On the Origin of Species had located humanity in the tree of life, and he was taught evolutionary biology by Darwin's disciple T.H. Huxley. He was one of the first literary authors to achieve success by depicting the human species in an explicidy Darwinian guise. Wells combined his knowledge of evolutionary biology with a rich selection of past and present imaginative and sociological ideas. By developing a worldview that aimed at a full scientific understanding of human behavior, he achieved breadth and originality. Some of his early science fiction and speculative sociological prose contains visions of future events, habits and technology that still impress modem readers with their prescience. He saw human development clearly enough to predict both tank warfare and Wikipedia ('The Land Ironclads" 1903, World Brain 1938). But he also predicted and supported a worldwide totalitarian state that would be guided by self-transcending rationality, eliminating those who failed to live up to the "new needs of efficiency" (Anticipations 317). The weaknesses of that vision are not just moral. From a modem evolutionary perspective, Wells's view of the needs and possibilities of the human species has important limitations.Literary scholars have not yet situated Wells in the context of modem evolutionary science. Because of the broad split between the humanities and the natural sciences that C.P. Snow identified in speaking of the "two cultures," explanations of Wells's fiction have been set apart from the progress of scientific knowledge. Up until a few decades ago, criticism on Wells was guided largely by traditional humanistic methods and concerns: a focus on historical and biographical facts, metaphorical re-description, and an appreciative channeling of style (Bergonzi; Crossley; Hillegas; Philmus and Suvin). During the last few decades, criticism has been informed by the theories of ethnicity, class, and gender associated with postmodern cultural studies, and it has been governed by poststructuralist assumptions of indeterminacy and anti-intentionalism (Beer; Glendening; McLean "Wells Studies"; Richter; Rieder). Such criticism has seen Wells as a locus for intermingling cultural influences. It has focused largely on how scientific narrative affected literary narrative in his early fiction, tracing the effect of select thinkers and debates, and explaining how particular ideas found their way into his texts (Glendening; McLean Early Fiction; McLean "Wells Studies" 1-8; Richter 62-67). Consequently, scientific knowledge about the human species has developed without more than indirectly influencing our understanding of Wells's fiction.In this article, I will use an interpretive framework that incorporates knowledge from the evolutionary social sciences as well as cultural-historical and biographical factors. I will focus on the early fiction for which Wells is most remembered, particularly The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau. He himself called those works "playful parables" and likened them in effect to a "good gripping dream" (Wells ''Preface" vi, iii). …

Teaching Literary Darwinism

Abstract: A Historical Overview During the late 1980s, profoundly dissatisfied with the poststructuralist ideas that had come to dominate departments of English, I was casting about for ideas sufficiently general and basic to provide a new framework for literary study. In 1990, I read Darwin's On the Origin of Species and Descent of Man. I had more or less always known about the theory of adaptation by means of natural selection, and had accepted it, but had not really thought much about it. As a student and professor, I had been preoccupied with studying languages, literature, and cultural history. Biology seemed relatively remote from my professional scholarly concerns. I finally got around to reading Darwin chiefly because he was in one of my special areas of scholarly interest: Victorian non-fiction prose. Understanding an idea theoretically and absorbing it imaginatively are different things. Reading Darwin's own works had a massive and instantaneous impact on my imagination. For the first time, I fully understood that all things human, including language and culture, are necessarily embedded in biological processes that extend back for billions of years. No idea could have been more general and basic. The Darwinian vision gave me the framework I needed for constructing a literary theory I could use. About the same time that I was reading Darwin, I became aware that the social sciences were undergoing a watershed shift toward evolutionary thinking. That research program was still in its early stages but already had important things to say about motives, emotions, cognitive processes, gender, childhood development, family bonds, and social interaction. All those topics are obviously relevant to the subjects depicted in literature. I already knew, of course, that in most current literary theory psychology was dominated by Freudian ideas and social relations by Marxist ideas. Language had been colonized by the Derrideans, and gender appropriated by the feminists. I had strong reservations about the validity of all those theories, and thus also about the way they blended into the poststructuralist amalgam. Feeling confident that empirically grounded ideas coherently integrated within an evolutionary matrix could provide a better alternative, I set out to integrate evolutionary social science with literary theory. The first main fruit of that effort was Evolution and Literary Theory (1995). All my subsequent work has been a continuation of the research program sketched out there. During the past two decades, while developing Darwinist ideas for literary study, I've also been teaching courses that incorporate evolutionary research. In total, I have taught twenty-five courses that contain substantial evolutionary material--all but one at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, either seminars in the graduate program in the English department or seminars in an interdisciplinary undergraduate Honors College. (The exception was an intensive summer graduate seminar in Denmark.) Those twenty-five courses group into two distinct sets that have interlaced chronologically through the twenty years: (1) a graduate seminar in literary theory that I have taught fourteen times; and (2) eleven interdisciplinary seminars, eight for undergraduates, and three for graduate students. My home page contains a sample syllabi and sample paper topics: http://www.umsl.edu/~carrolljc/. The appendices to this essay also contain sample syllabi. The course in literary theory, "Introduction to Graduate Studies," is divided into two parts: basic concepts in literary theory and a survey of the various current theoretical schools. Since poststructuralist theory has not changed substantially in the past twenty years, most of the components of this course have remained fairly stable. Only one component, literary Darwinism--evolutionary literary theory and criticism--has been highly volatile. It has increased in the proportion of the course devoted to it, and it has changed dramatically in content several times. …

Masculine and Feminine Rhymes: Their Structural Effect

Abstract: Introduction One of my basic assumptions in the study of poetry is that versification does something to poems that cannot be reduced to meaning. (1) This article is an attempt to capture a small part of that "something." I will explore two insufficiently understood cognitive principles that govern the perceived effects of certain stanza forms. One concerns the so-called masculine and feminine rhymes; the other concerns the observation that in a series of parallel items, other things being equal, "the longest comes last" is the well-formed order. The two principles overlap to some extent, because the feminine rhyme is also longer than the masculine. But precisely this overlap points up that a different principle too may be at work here, that the feminine rhyme tends to be more "plastic," the masculine more "rigid." Poets may exploit these principles to achieve opposite effects. If, for instance, they want their stanza to have a relatively rigid, abrupt effect, they may prefer the "shortest comes last" order. This observation can be extended from rhymes to line length as well which, in turn, may throw the so-called ballad stanza, for instance (where a longer line alternates with a shorter one), into a new perspective. Until now I had to regard this structure as a fossilized remnant of cognitive processes active at the time of its creation; this new perspective may account for the perceived effects of such structures in the present too. The terms "feminine" and "masculine" rhymes were adopted from French, where they refer to endings with or without a mute e respectively, whether the word does or does not suggest gender (thus, for instance, the verbs "passe" or "danse" too constitute "feminine" rhymes). In English, German, Hungarian and other languages the terms came to mean rhymes that bear linguistic stress on their penultimate or last syllables, respectively. Thus, the terms "feminine" and "masculine" rhymes refer to different phenomena in French and the other languages which, nevertheless, tend to have similar poetic effects. In English, feminine rhymes are rare owing to the scarcity of words with a stress on their penultimate syllable. Feminine rhymes are, therefore, sporadic in English, and only rarely assume structural significance (as, for instance, in Excerpts 11 and 12). Consequently, the majority of my examples will necessarily come from other languages, French, German and Hebrew, and only a minority from English. When discussing the perceptual qualities of rhyme, one must distinguish four aspects: the Gestalt structure of rhyme patterns, the semantic and the phonetic structure of rhyme words, and the different effect of assigning linguistic stress to the last or the penultimate syllable of the rhyme word(s). I have elsewhere discussed the first three of these aspects at great length (Tsur, "Rhyme"; Toward a Theory: 111-132). The present inquiry goes into greater delicacies of the latter two issues. I made heroic efforts not to refer to the semantic aspect. Gestalt psychology offers a convenient theoretical framework for handling the perceptual qualities of rhyme patterns. So, I will briefly summarize its relevant principles. The terms "good shape" or "strong Gestalt" refer to the conditions in which stimulus patterns tend to be perceived as unified. The fundamental law of Gestalt Theory is the Law of Pragnanz: the psychological organization of a stimulus pattern will always be as "good" as the prevailing conditions permit. This does not mean that the shape will always be good, only as good as the prevailing conditions permit. The simpler a structure, the better its shape. Complexity is determined by the number of structural features of a stimulus pattern. A structure is simple in an absolute sense when it has few structural features; in a relative sense, when it organizes a greater number of structural features in a relatively simple pattern. A couplet is simple in the absolute sense, because it has only one structural feature: a rhymes with a; and is also symmetrical. …

Peak‑marking Strategies in Old English Narrative Prose

Abstract: "peak is a zone of turbulence in the otherwise placid flow of discourse" --Longacre, "Spectrum" 351 1. Introduction Narrative is today probably the most thoroughly studied among the different discourse types and narratives still inspire students of language, literature, life history, folklore, and psychology, among others. Research, primarily in text and discourse linguistics but also in other fields, has shown that narratives in all languages are highly structured as to their beginnings and endings, participant tracking, episode marking, storylines, and grounding distinctions. What is particularly interesting is that narrative structuring has been shown to be signalled on the surface of discourse by various markers. Quite often these markers are features whose use remains obscure until they are examined from the perspective of the whole text or discourse. In 1976, Longacre used the terra mystery particles for these markers; nowadays, they are referred to as discourse markers, pragmatic particles, pragmatic markers, discourse particles and a myriad of other terms in text and discourse linguistics and pragmatics (cf. e.g., Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen; Foolen: Lenk). Though both narrative structure and Old English are well-researched fields of inquiry, one feature of the organization of narrative text in Old English has attracted only little attention: the signalling of the peak of the story. Old English is a particularly interesting object for a study of this structural property of narratives, because Old English narrators could make use of a discourse marker, pa 'then', to signal the foregrounded main line of the narrative text and to mark the structural organization of the narrative in cooperation with other text-structuring signals (Enkvist, "More", "Problems"; Enkvist and Warvik; Foster; Hopper; Warvik, "Connective"). The purpose of this paper is to show how, in addition to its other functions, this discourse marker could be employed to highlight the peak in the progress of the narrative, through variation and interaction with other structuring signals. By comparing the ways of marking the peak in a sample of Old English narratives representing different prose genres, this study identifies preferences and general trends in the choices among alternative strategies. 2. Peak-marking strategies The existence of a high-point, climax, turning-point, or peak is referred to in studies of different aspects of text structure, where this feature is used to elucidate and explain various phenomena, usually in narrative discourse. A general framework for describing properties of the peak is outlined by Longacre, who discusses peak-marking strategies in a variety of languages. He "use[s] the term PEAK to refer to any episode-like unit set apart by special surface structure features and corresponding to the Climax or Denouement in the notional structure" (Grammar 24). In his framework, climax "corresponds to the point of maximum tension and confrontation in a story", while denouement "corresponds to a decisive event that makes resolution of the plot possible" ("Discourse peak" 84). Either one or both of these may be marked as the action peak of the story. Longacre further notes that in addition to the action peak a narrative discourse may have a thematic or didactic peak. Other types of discourse, which do not focus on actions to the extent that narratives do can obviously have only thematic or didactic peaks. The present study is limited to action peaks, which could be identified on the basis of content features (cf. below). Peak-marking is connected to two text-organizing principles, or patterns of narrative organization. One is grounding, that is, the distinctions between levels of foregrounded or main-line material and backgrounded or downgraded, secondary material (Warvik, "Grounding"); Longacre uses the term spectrum for the repertoire of signals for these distinctions ("Spectrum"). …

Style, the Narrating Instance, and the "Trace" of Writing

Abstract: I begin this essay with two passages--one from Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants,' the other from Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses--representative of two of the most influential prose stylists of the twentieth century: He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. (214) Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himslf into a ball, spread-eagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. (3) Approaching these two passages in terms of voice, narratology would allow us to classify both as subsequent narration by extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators. But it would provide little scope to say anything about the palpable stylistic difference between Hemingway's terse, declarative sentences, and Rushdie's pyrotechnic, "chutnified" language that attempts to absorb the rhythms of Indian speech into the cadence of English prose. My first question, then, is what understanding of voice would result from narratological attention to an author's individual style? As a result of the foundational distinction between author and narrator, narrative theory has traditionally been less concerned with prose style--how a narrative is written--than with storytelling methods--how a story is narrated. When narratology has addressed style it has either been in the broadest sense of the "how" as opposed to the "what" of narrative, drawing upon stylistics to highlight the linguistic phenomena that facilitate narrative discourse, or, in the more restricted sense, to identify expressive features of language that will help distinguish a narrator's voice from a character's, particularly in represented speech and thought. Discussing style in An Introduction to Narratology, Monika Fludemik writes: "the use of register, idiolect and dialect is a surface-structure strategy which, at a deeper level, allows us to differentiate between the narrator's and the character's discourses" (70). She goes on to point out that: "A literary critical analysis of the style of an author, on the other hand, which is the kind of investigation of individual style we meet most frequently in literary studies, is to a large extent narratologically irrelevant" (71). Given recent attention to the "real" author, I think individual style is not so much irrelevant as it is methodologically challenging for narrative theory. (1) My goal in this paper is not to prosecute a case for style as an analytic category of narrative poetics. Instead I want to investigate the various ways in which style has been invoked to renovate Gerard Genette's key concept of narrative voice in the wake of critical theory--similar in its rejection of authorship, but different in its critique of formalism--while still keeping at bay the traditional function of style as a marker of authorial identity. I will focus, in particular, on how voice and style oscillate around the concept of "trace." As is well known, Genette claims that narrative discourse, which he equates with "the text itself' (27), is an intermediary through which we gain access both to the signified story and the act that produces the narrative. This producing activity, however, is not that of the author's writing, but the narrator's enunciating. Genette argues that while the instance of writing is unknowable, the narrating instance can be recuperated through textual analysis of the "traces" that it leaves in the narrative discourse: "our knowledge of the two (the events and the action of writing) must be indirect, unavoidably mediated by the narrative discourse, inasmuch as the events are the very subject of that discourse and the activity of writing leaves in it traces, signs or indices that we can pick up and interpret" (28). …

When "Surge" Signifies Rapid Increases of American Combatants Sent to Foreign Warfare: Classical Enargeia for Contemporary Metaphor

Abstract: The welcoming banner proclaimed "Mission Accomplished." On I May 2003, wearing sage green flight gear, President George W. Bush landed by U.S. Navy jet on an aircraft carrier off San Diego and announced victory by American armed forces in Iraq. With swift military might, Americans overcame Saddam Hussein's forces, ended the Iraqi dictator's regime, and brought him to trial for hangman's justice. Nevertheless, increasing deaths ensued for Americans--from rocket-propelled grenades, ubiquitous Kalashnikov assault weapons, and increasingly improved, lethal varieties of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices)--in streets and alleys of Fallujah, Karbala, and Baghdad itself. By 1 May 2004, of 532 American service personnel killed in Iraq, 421 died after "Mission Accomplished" and 807 more deaths occurred from Memorial Day 2006 through Memorial Day 2007 (Carpenter 8-9). Americans' martial "mission" in Iraq could be "accomplished" only by more troops with "boots on the ground," and in his State of the Union Address on 10 January 2007, President Bush announced his deploying more combatants there. With growing public disfavor of continuing warfare, however, doing so could elicit comparisons to Vietnam in the 1960s and President Lyndon Johnson's crumbling credibility. Although "surge" is not in President Bush's 2007 State of the Union Address, a more rhetorically advantageous wording became necessary; and his decision morphed into metaphor, whereby in a radio address of 12 April 2008, President Bush could say, "fifteen months ago this week, I announced the surge." By January 2009, more than 4,000 American troops had died in Iraq. By October 2009, commentary about that continued warring compared American martial endeavor to colonial warfare in 1913. Against Somalia's legendary "Mad Mullah," who "prefigured the rise of Osama bin Ladin--and the 'forever war' between Islam and the West," British politicians argued for "a more aggressive stance--a 'surge,' in today's parlance" (Bartholet 42-47). When "surge" is everyday "parlance" and a literal word for a mode of warfare, its destructiveness, and continuing casualties, the metaphor merits inquiry. In a widely used dictionary, primary definitions of "surge" are "1. a) a large mass of moving water; wave; swell; billow, b) such waves or billows collectively. 2. a movement of or like that of a mass of water; violent, rolling, sweeping, or swelling motions: as the surge of the sea." Now, with ubiquitous computers and sophisticated home entertainment systems, Americans also know "surge" as "3. a short, sudden rush or excess of electric current in a circuit" (for which our surge protectors prevent damage). Quoted in 2007 newspaper commentary entitled "Words of War: Terms Carefully Chosen," George Lakoff noted how language "frames" political discourse: "It's no coincidence supporters of sending additional troops to Iraq advocate a 'surge' rather than an 'increase' ... [because] surge says it goes up and goes down--and not only that, it goes up and goes down quickly" (Stripling). From a larger linguistics perspective, "political and economic ideologies are framed in metaphorical terms. Like all other metaphors, political and economic metaphors can hide aspects of reality. But in the area of politics and economics, metaphors matter more because they constrain our lives" (Lakoff and Johnson 236). When "surge" constrains Americans' lives its analysis is predicated upon a directive drawn from studying organizational communication: identify and explain what is "exceptional--whether qualitatively or quantitatively--in producing or failing to produce, the desired effects" (Tompkins 432). A 2004 National Communication Association Golden Anniversary Monograph Prize went to an "exemplar of engaged, contemporaneous rhetorical criticism" in Rhetoric & Public Affairs (Spectra 17). Therein, John Murphy found President Bush's discourse after 11 September 2001 to be epideictic; for unlike "deliberative discourse" justifying "expediency or practicality" of future action (such as warfare), "epideictic rhetoric" uses "appeals that unify the community and amplify its virtues" in the present because audiences are "observers" of how communicators echo "the voice of the people" (609). …

Developmental Nonsense in the Alice Tales

Abstract: Evolutionary accounts of nonsense usually try to recuperate it for biological "sense," and the Alice stories, in particular, have provided a convenient metaphor for the adaptive way in which the human mind works. Alice's tumble into a world of illogic and gibberish along with her repeated efforts to find coherent meaning in it is a framing figure for Steven Pinker's discovery of an evolved, innate "inventory of basic human thoughts" in The Stuff of Thought (27). His second chapter, "Down the Rabbit Hole," describes his discovery of a hard-wired scaffolding of core concepts in the brain that structures our sense of the social and physical worlds we navigate and, therefore, our very grasp of reality. By implication, these core concepts rescue us from the watery ground of nonsense. With a different emphasis, Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea introduces a chapter on the evolution of meaning with the often-quoted exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass: "When I use a word," Humpty-Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty-Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's all." (Carroll 269; qtd in Dennett 401) For Dennett, Humpty-Dumpty's cantankerous insistence on the authority that arbitrarily assigns meaning to words paradoxically points to the indeterminate and evolved nature of that meaning. There is no intrinsic or natural reason why a particular word should stand for a particular thing. Instead, Alice's absurd adventures suggest the blind work of cultural selection in helping produce the most sophisticated form of sense-making in the animal world. In the context of other parts of Dennett's book, Humpty Dumpty's remarks also suggest his perverse and wrong-headed resistance to the role of language in cultural evolution. Describing how linguistic communication functions as an evolutionary "crane," Dennett stresses its function as a device that, like a simple machine enabling complex functions, accelerates the ordinarily slow pace of evolution by natural selection. Indeed, language might even be described as a "crane-making crane" (338), since it facilitates our development of other cultural tools. Language is the instrument by means of which humans are able to "compare notes" (380) about the phenomena they encounter and make relevant behavioral decisions that have enormous reach and efficiency. In this respect, and whatever Humpty-Dumpty may think, humans hold a significant advantage over all other species, even those with brains that enable them, like us, to recognize other beings as thinking agents. The everyday thought-reading processes that most human beings exercise ,which we call "theory of mind," already enormously enhances sociality, thereby conferring on us all kinds of evolutionary advantages. But by, in Dennett's words, "sharing ... design wealth through cultural transmission" (370), we vastly increase our range of behavioral options as well as the speed at which we can process them. In what follows, I want to think about Dennett's cranes in reference to the Alice stories, where the very possibility of shared cultural knowledge is dubious and, as a result, developmental learning goes askew. Alice's dream worlds continually undermine categorizations that organize raw experience into meaning and that themselves assume a world of stable objects: logical categories dissolve into contradiction; language thickens into puns and literalizations or slides into mere sound so that it neither illuminates the world with categorizing order nor transmits meaningful information from one mind to another; relationships among objects in space continually change so that reality cannot be anchored in a fixed scale; distinctions between things animate and non-animate become confusingly unstable. …

Towards a Sentimental Rhetoric: A Rhetorical Reading of Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills"

Abstract: Since the 1970s and 80s, cultural studies have provided the dominant paradigm for the interpretation of sentimental fiction? In recent years, however, critics such as Joanna Dobson and Elizabeth Dillon have argued for the importance of considering the aesthetic dimensions of sentimental literature. (2) But for the most part, this new emphasis has created a gap between cultural and aesthetic studies, as the critics in each camp foreground different aspects of sentimental fiction. In this article, I propose to bridge that gap by turning to the rhetorical theory of narrative, an approach that leads us to a clearer perception of both the aesthetic complexity and cultural significance of sentimental fiction. At the same time, I will argue that sentimental fiction, and more specifically, Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills," prompts further refinements of the rhetorical model, especially its theorization of the relationship between the author and reader. Although Robyn Warhol rightly calls her study of the links between authorial gender and the uses of engaging and distancing addresses to narratees in nineteenth-century British fiction an example of feminist narratology, her focus on the relationship between an author's choice of technique and its effect on audiences makes it compatible with rhetorical theory (for a fuller description of Warhol's model see the next section). Furthermore, since Davis's addresses to her narratees are such a central part of her rhetorical strategy, I will begin by suggesting how Davis's practice is only partially captured in Warhol's model. I will then turn to Peter J. Rabinowitz's rhetorical model of audiences and demonstrate how Davis's practice necessitates some additional discriminations among audience positions. I shall then build the bridge between this rhetorical analysis and the case for both the aesthetic and cultural value of sentimental fiction. More specifically, I shall argue that these rhetorical strategies arise in response to historical-cultural circumstances even as they lead to an aesthetically accomplished novella whose purposes include moving its audience to change those circumstances. Clearing the Ground: Toward a More Nuanced Model of Rhetorical Audiences Davis's narrator has always posed a problem for critics because of the contradictory appearances she gives. On the one hand, she speaks in a severe and accusatory tone towards a partially characterized addressee, and on the other, she betrays an apparent eagerness to engage the sympathy of the person she reproaches. The narrator repeatedly confronts her addressee with moral questions: "What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist?" (12), and, "You laugh at the shallow temptation?" (46). Yet, she also strongly urges him to go down with her "into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia" and see with his own eyes the life of the mill workers before shrugging it off as a dull and tiresome story (13). Given this problem, the critics Andrew Scheiber and Kirk Curnutt have come to directly opposite conclusions about the narrator, both using Warhol's theory of gendered intervention. Scheiber believes that the narrator's chiding addresses are engaging strategies meant to make the actual reader sympathize with the sufferers, but Curnutt insists that they are distancing strategies, creating "space between the fictional and the real world" (149). This important disagreement does not mean that either critic has significantly misunderstood Warhol, or that Warhol's model contains any internal contradictions. It shows instead that there are certain complexities about the use of direct addresses to the narratee in "Life in the Iron Mills" that Warhol's otherwise powerful model cannot fully explain. Warhol regards a narrator as distancing when her direct addresses to the narratee characterize him as someone that the actual reader wants to move away from, and Warhol calls a narrator engaging when she uses earnest direct address to invoke identification between the actual reader and the narratee (29). …

Framing the Reader in Early Science Fiction

Abstract: John Jacob Astor introduces his account of interplanetary travel, A Journey in Other Worlds (1894), as helping to usher in a new age where science has superseded the classics: "There can be no question that there are many forces and influences in Nature whose existence we as yet little more than suspect. How much more interesting it would be if, instead of reiterating our past achievements, the magazines and literature of the period should devote their consideration to what we do not know!" (Astor i). More dramatically, in 1894 Gustavus W. Pope noted the accelerated tempo of cultural change in his age, "pre-eminently distinguished for the rapid progress of science, mechanical arts and inventions, evolution of ideas and interchange of thought." He continued: "In the domain of current literature this progressive change is displayed" (Pope v). As different fields of knowledge were explored in the late nineteenth century, the speculative range of fiction opened up correspondingly. The narratives which resulted in the period from around 1880 up to the First World War were characterized by their extraordinary nature, which authors offset by different framing devices, sometimes of startling complexity. The term "frame" has been applied in three overlapping senses relevant to this discussion. In his classic 1974 study Frame Analysis, Erving Goffman explained the frame as a schema or conceptual framework embedded in and shaping discourse. In 1985 Mary Ann Caws' Reading Frames in Modern Fiction pursued the picture frame analogy through a series of writers from Poe to James and Virginia Woolf to explain how these writers described the directed gaze. Both these applications are limited, narratologically speaking, by extending frames throughout utterances and narratives, whereas Gerard Genette's Paratexts (translation 1997) is uniquely helpful in drawing the reader's attention to the "pre-matter" preceding the main body of texts. His original title, Seuils, describes title-pages, prefaces, and similar matter as thresholds, which helpfully broadens the metaphor of the frame by stressing means of access, and I shall take bearings from his work throughout this discussion. The most complex paratext which he examines is the preface, whose function, he declares, is "to ensure that the text is read properly" (Genette 197; his italics). Genette identifies a series of functions for the preface: to indicate genesis; to comment on the title; to profess fictiveness; and to place the narrative in a genre. It will be argued here that all these functions become complicated by the extraordinary or fabulous nature of the narratives to which these preambles are attached. As such, they do indeed function as thresholds by mediating between the reader's familiar world and attendant assumptions about reality, and the events narrated which will challenge those assumptions. Frames in early science fiction are everywhere noted, but almost never lingered over, with rare exceptions (e.g., Milner). In the examples discussed below, framing functions as a convenience of reading, a means of gradually introducing the reader to the extraordinary. In Frankenstein, for Brian Aldiss the prototypical science-fictional work, Mary Shelley is offsetting Frankenstein's narrative through the mediation of Walton, a traveller in Russia. However, the paratexts of the novel suggest a far more complex process of transmission, where origination is constantly problematized. According to Gregory O'Dea, Frankenstein assembles a concentric sequence of narratives, at the core of which lies Milton's Paradise Lost, where textual production and the creation of life become indistinguishable. Frankenstein is a complex case, but an even earlier example suggests how frames can destabilize the relation of the reader to the text. In the second preamble to Gulliver's Travels, "The Publisher to the Reader," Richard Sympson explains how he has stricken out from the text details on minds, tides, nautical bearings and sailing in order to address the "general capacity of readers" (Swift 7). …

Grimm and Grimmer: "Hansel and Gretel" and Fairy-Tale Nationalism

Abstract: Every year during the holiday season in theaters around the world, an old woman is pushed into a roaring oven. As she screams in agony, children on stage and in the audience shriek with delight. Not confined to grand opera, this scenario has been played out in countless tellings of "Hansel and Gretel," voted Germany's favorite fairy tale in 1997 (Zipes Happily 38). That most in the audience are not too troubled by the old woman's fate has much to do with the circumstances of her demise, in particular the fact she had been holding the children captive for weeks with the clear aim of killing and eating them. By way of explanation the Grimm Brothers provide an even more damning reason why we should not feel sorry for the woman in the oven: she was, they write, "a wicked witch" (81). While many readers have found much to admire in "Hansel and Gretel," others have found it to be disturbing in the extreme. (1) The tale has recently made its way into the judicial reasoning of the highest court in the land: writing the majority opinion that overturned California's ban on the sale of violent videogames to minors, Antonin Scalia noted that "Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven," (Brown 8). Whereas recent cognitive literary theorists have tended to stress the beneficial aspects of fiction, (2) this essay will investigate the possible dark side of "narrative transport," a term coined by Richard Gerrig to describe what happens in the mind when we are swept away by a story. As such highly influential narratives as "Hansel and Gretel" demonstrate, the engendering of prosocial behavior is often conditioned by the narrative construction of radical evil, a process by which the simplifying tendencies inherent in story-telling play a key role in demonizing putatively disruptive groups or types. Techniques typical of narrative transport--stereotypical characters and situations, vivid imagery, suspenseful problem solving--immerse readers of the fairy tale in a world in which prospects of abandonment, treachery, and death are overcome through cooperation, ingenuity, and justified violence to create a parable ripe for nationalist appropriation. The historical relationship between the classic fairy tale and nationalist ideology provides an instructive example of how evolutionary predilections and cultural practices could interact to set the stage for cruelties and horrors unimaginable even by the Brothers Grimm. As Jack Zipes has pointed out, debates over the value and influence of fairy tales have been ongoing since the eighteenth century (Art 138). Since the 1970s, much of this scrutiny has focused on the potentially pernicious influence of degrading gender stereotypes on young minds. Marcia Liebermann writes, If we are concerned about what our children are being taught, we must pay particular attention to those stories that are so beguiling that children think more as they read them "of the diversion than of the lesson"; perhaps literature is suggestive in direct proportion to its ability to divert. (184) (3) Lieberman's linking of the influence of fairy tales to their power to divert is supported by recent theories and findings that argue that the persuasive power of fictional narratives lay precisely in their success in circumventing the critical faculties. "Narrative transport" seems particularly suited to describe the fictional worlds to which many a fairy tale character--and reader--have been regularly conveyed. Gerrig writes, Someone ("the traveler") is transported, by some means of transportation, as a result of performing certain actions. The traveler goes some distance from his or her world of origin, which makes some aspects of the world of origin inaccessible. The traveler returns to the world of origin, somewhat changed by the journey (10-11) Prior to Gerrig, Victor Nell analyzed at length the phenomenon of being "lost in a book," comparing the extreme of this experience to trance; "Attention holds me, but trance fills me, to varying degrees, with the wonder and flavor of alternative worlds" (Lost 77). …

Naomi Rokotnitz. Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

Abstract: Naomi Rokotnitz. Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ix + 188 pp. $80.00 Hardback.The still nascent application of cognitive science to literature and performance studies has necessarily demanded that scholars attempting this application carefully attend to and tenaciously critique their own methodology in blending these two diverse fields of inquiry. Naomi Rokotnitz' s recent addition to the Palgrave Macmillan series on Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance not only displays this careful attention to methodology, it thoughtfully tests this methodology against an excellently structured and diverse pallet of dramatic genres, historical contexts, and philosophical ideas. The dexterity with which Rokotnitz structures her work, each chapter tightly interlocking with its companions to produce a fertile ground for crosscomparison and later developments of earlier ideas, evinces a sincere commitment to rigorously test the hypothesis that originally drove her inquiry. Despite the fact that our extensions of friendship, trust, and love to others are repeatedly met with betrayal and manipulation, Rokotnitz begins the book pondering why we nonetheless consistently trust and cooperate with people we hardly know and frequently will never meet again. She sees it as an essentially epistemological question since, "Logical analysis convinces us, more often than not, that the best defense against error and disappointment is the cultivation of both skepticism regarding knowledge and vigilant suspicion of others" ( 1 ). However, to fight this skepticism regarding our reasons for trusting others, Rokotnitz proposes that embodied forms of knowledge acquisition such as sense-perception, emotional responsiveness, memory, intuition, and imagination bypass the need for verification via logical analysis.In discussing "embodied knowledge," Rokotnitz appeals to what are becoming the pillars of a cognitive analysis of literature and performance studies: primary emotions and affective states; mirror neurons and the interpretation of actions via mirrored motor processes; the generation and manipulation of concepts through a reciprocal relation between sensorimotor information and abstract, conceptual processes; the empathetic simulation of other's emotions. While these often preconscious, embodied sources of knowledge form the primary substance of the book's theoretical argument, Rokotnitz acknowledges that they are merely part of the complex process by which interpersonal trust is generated. For example, empathy is frequently augmented by a conscious, rational sympathetic identification with the object of one's empathetic response. Yet, for Rokotnitz, embodied knowledge serves as the primary epistemic ground for developing trusting relationships, and she sees it as one of the primary strengths of live performance. "Drama presents the tangible actions of living bodies on stage to living bodies in the audience. In addition to - and by no means instead of - the intellectual stimulations of the narrative argument and its linguistic dimensions, dramatic performance arouses and co-opts both performers' and audiences' embodied receptiveness... often opening new avenues for communication and encouraging trust" (3). As this statement indicates, the book presents an analysis of drama in its literary form, production, and reception.The first chapter follows Stanley Cavell and Ellen Spolsky's analysis of The Winter's Tale as an indictment of radical skepticism in the character of Leontes. However, Rokotnitz expands this analysis of the play by correlating our evolutionarily developed, multi-modal, sensory access to knowledge about our physical environment with Camillo and Paulina's faith in Hermione, Perdita' s "natural-knowing" and Hermione's loving forgiveness. All of these characters display an intuitive, multi-modal approach to knowledge, which stands in stark contrast to Leontes' logic and dogmatism. …

Where Do Conventions Come from? Constraints or Plasticity of the Human Brain Follow-Up Note

Abstract: (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)This is a follow-up note to an old article of mine, published in Style (Tsur "Poetic Conventions"). That article asks the question where do poetic conventions come from, arguing against a "migration" or "influence-hunting" approach. My answer is based on a conception of cognitive constraints; ultimately, on the natural constraints of the human brain. I had the good luck that the article was sent to a referee who objected to such a conception, and preferred an answer based on the plasticity of the human brain. Consequently, he asked a host of cogent questions and made a host of cogent comments. In the final version I answered those questions and comments one by one; but on one of the crucial issues I had only evidence that is a good approximation, not a straightforward hit. Recently I found in a article on brain science the ultimate good example for my argument (from which I am going to quote extensively). What is more, it provides evidence that illuminates the referee's position too.My "constraints-seeking" or "cognitive-fossils" approach is associated with cognitive and evolutionary criticism, and assumes that cultural programs originate in cognitive solutions to adaptation problems that have acquired the status of established practice. Poetic conventions are verbal constructs that reflect once-active cognitive (sometimes depth-psychological) processes and constraints that became fossilized in time. From Roy D'Andrade I have adopted the following account of the process:An important assumption of cognitive anthropology is that in the process of repeated social transmission, cultural programs come to take forms which have a good fit to the natural capacities of the human brain. Thus, when similar cultural programs are found in most societies around the world, there is reason to search for psychological factors which could account for these similarities.In that article I explore such questions as "What are the relevant natural capacities (and constraints) of the human brain?" "What is a 'good fit' to those capacities and constraints?" "What are the principles of 'the process of repeated social transmission' that brings about this result?." As to the last question, I quote at considerable length Sir Frederick Bartlett (1920; 1932), who devised a controlled experiment, using the Eskimo story 'The War of the Ghosts" to explore how schemata affect our memory and the reproduction of folk-stories. He assumed that our memories, as well as our perception, are essentially reconstructive rather than reproductive, that is, we recreate the meaning of a memory or a percept by merging elements of what actually occurred with knowledge from our existing schemata. We fit information into our already existing schema. Bartlett tried to find out how a story for which we have no mental schemata assumes, through repeated transmission, a good fit to the mental schemata we do entertain. He staged a game of "Chinese Whispers" or "Broken Telephone"; he had experimental subjects read the story, and then, after some time (ranging from several hours to several weeks), write it down from memory. These texts were then read by other subjects, who wrote it down after some time, and so forth. The story changed from one transmission to another, until it achieved a good fit to a mental schema prevalent in Western culture; then it stopped changing in subsequent transmissions.At this point I remarked that though "a good fit to schemata" is not quite the same as "a good fit to the natural capacities of the human brain," Bartlett's experiment did reproduce the mental dynamics involved. I felt somewhat uneasy about the fact that this experiment was concerned with "a good fit to schemata" rather than "a good fit to the natural capacities and constraints of the human brain." Bartlett himself remarks, however, that "the reproductions themselves illustrate the operation of principles which undoubtedly help to determine the direction and character of conventionalisation as it occurs in everyday experience" ("Some experiments" 31). …

Matthew Hart. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing

Abstract: Matthew Hart. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing. Oxford UP, 2010.Matthew Hart's Nations of Nothing but Poetry contributes to the growing field of transnational criticism, joining such studies as Anita Patterson's Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge UP, 2008) and Jahan Ramazani's Transnational Poetics (U of Chicago P, 2009). Although Hart derives his main concept of the synthetic vernacular from the poetics of Hugh MacDiarmid, he persuasively explains why the concept also applies to Basil Bunting, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Melvin Toison.Drawing on Edward Sapir's belief that "'provincial' language is a fundamental element of literary art," Hart zeroes in on the contradiction between the materiality of language, particularly in the form of dialects, and the universal appeal of successful literature (8). To explain what he means by "synthetic vernacular," he draws on Adorno's claim that "the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived." Hart equates Adorno's concept with "the idea of a language that articulates some collective sense of nationality," while he correlates the thing conceived with the "actual" poetic discourse of nationhood (8). From this perspective, the vernacular can only be synthetic because the sign is never wholly adequate to the concept. Focusing on this divide, Hart explores how different poets from both sides of the Atlantic forge distinctive idioms in relation to their specific dreams of nationhood. He relates his study to modernism's preoccupation with mimesis by examining the way his poets "strain the representational norms of vernacular language to the breaking point, thereby registering the contradictoriness - and uncanny durability - of the politics of locality in a transnational age" (16).Hart views MacDiarmid's "Synthetic Scots poetry as a creative solution to the problem of reconciling Scottish nationalism and socialist internationalism" (52). He argues that this solution is only partially effective because of Scotland's contradictory status as a partner in promoting the British Empire and as a victim of English linguistic domination. The characteristic gesture of a MacDiarmid poem is always double, as in the following example: "Noisy, inorganic, and dredged up from textbooks and dictionaries, the language of 'On a Raised Beach' . . . binds language to a place . . . and yet reveals it to be always out of place, forever rejoining and remaking the world" (67). To explain this dynamic, Hart contrasts MacDiarmid's method with Pound' s in Cathay: "Rather than comprising a systematic reflection on the contemporarneity of an ethnohistorical type, the 'nexus of personae' at work in MacDiarmid's Scots poems are part of a catch-as-catch-can program to 'represent an alternative Scot' in the present moment" (65). Hart sees this as laudable but also notices that it undercuts the political efficacy of MacDiarmid's thought. In the long run, for MacDiarmid, "poetry ... is the true test of politics, its forms and languages allowing for imaginative complexities far greater than those encompassed by mere theory." Unfortunately, however, "this aesthetic victory has little parallel at the level of activism or political theory" (77).In his chapter on Bunting, Hart tries to account for the paradox of what the poet "called 'a dialect written in the spelling of the capital' - a Northumbrian vernacular verse, that is, which looks like Standard English" (79). As with MacDiarmid, Hart detects a regional cosmopolitanism at workin Bunting's writing, a quality he connects to synthetic vernacularism. For Hart, the chief tension driving Bunting's poetry is the tension between the dialect of the spoken word and the potential durability of the written word. His poem Briggflatts "never engages with graphic forms of writing without also troubling their suitability for recording a life and defining a Northumbrian poetics" (88). …

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2nd Ed

Abstract: The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 2nd ed. Edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 871 pp.Chagrined to see the same few titles "recycled continuously" (2) in anthologies on American literature, Joyce Carol Oates sets out to provide fresh and unknown works by well-known authors, as well as novel stories by up-and-coming writers. She seeks to paint a fuller picture of the American experience by unearthing the hidden places and soliciting voices from under-represented groups. Confident, direct, and articulate, Oates' introduction and editorials are densely constructed with a plethora of information on various authors and motifs.It is interesting to note, though, that the phrase "unmappable diversity" (xviii) is used in conjunction with current American readership-and arguably authorship, as well-for Oates herself as the editor of this anthology seems to implicitly map out various themes through her choice of stories and the introductory material on authors that she provides. One finds various patterns that emerge throughout the anthology-a "map" of sorts-including such themes as the intertwining of music with prose, the proliferation (and irony) of reversals and inversions, and the breaking with tradition and convention. It is significant that the last story of this 871 page anthology, titled "Edison, New Jersey" by Junot Diaz, has the narrator holding a map and predicting exactly where he will go. He says nonchalantly, "[y] ou can't imagine how many times I've been right" in his game of guessing where his final destination will be (868). Far from being vague, ambiguous, or unmappable, "Edison, New Jersey" is punchy, confident, and almost predictable. Similarly, Oates implicitly seems to know where she is going, highlighting the crevices important to her, and arguing her points with lucidity and assertiveness.Oates seems particularly interested in the intertwining of music and prose. Of William Carlos Williams, she argues that his writing is "composed, like music, for the ear" (283), and she is significantly intrigued by Paul Bowles' two careers-"as a composer, and as a writer and translator" (402). She often points to the musical quality of a chosen short story, describing Ray Bradbury's work-where "quiet music rose to back the voice"-as "elegiac" (475), and Eudora Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" as a "masterpiece of voice, rhythm, music" (395). Many of the short stories-including "A White Heron," "A Death in the Desert," "Sonny's Blues," and "Today Will Be a Quiet Day"-have themes revolving around musical elements. The song of a bird, a radio, a piano, a guitar, a musical score-these things are ubiquitously, and sometimes subtly, found almost as living characters in a number of the short stories that Oates has chosen to include.It is significant, though, that the music heard throughout the anthology is predominantly melancholy. Oates states in the introduction that "discord, then, and not harmony is the subject our writers share in common" (6), and this bears out in a number of telling ways. Chronicling the number of changes that America has faced throughout the years, there is much about loss, striving, infidelity, violence, confusion, and strife in the anthology. Authors describe these things in almost poetic, and at times, romantic terms, with a definite cadence to their words; however, the content is sobering, pensive, and heavy.This somber tone connects with the number of reversals and inversions found pervasively throughout the anthology. From "Rip Van Winkle" and "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," to "The Wives of the Dead," "Cannibalism in the Cars," and "The Lottery," there are a plethora of surprises, and things are rarely as they seem. For Rip Van Winkle, for instance, "the ruby face of King George, under which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe" was so changed that he did not recognize it. Now, the words "General Washington" took its place (25) and Van Winkle does not know how to make sense of this; everything seems upside down. …

Dan Shen. Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots

Abstract: Dan Shen. Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots. (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics). London: Routledge, 2014. The craft of interpretation has been and will continue to be a craft of unveiling practiced by specialists in meanings otherwise missed. These would include those 20 -century theorists of the craft who often specialize in meanings missed not only by the intended audience but by the author as well. And they would include those 20,t,-century theorists who specialize in what critics themselves miss because they tail to attend to what happens as these texts are processed by consumers (approaches gaining heft from cognitivist cultural and literary studies now on the march). And then there are the approaches that focus on what we miss when we forget that literary texts are themselves the product of specialists of a craft and take as much training to read as they did to write them. Among these are the oft-opposed formalist and neo-Aristotelian rhetorical approaches that Dan Shen has brought together in her remarkable new study of the art of narrative, Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions behind Overt Plots. This book is a shining example for 21 '-century narrative theory in the forceful and comprehensive way it insists on binding the craft of interpretation to the craft of fiction. Dan Shen's is no less an art of unveiling, but it unveils meaning that readers miss not because it's hidden but largely because their interpretive equipment won't allow them to see what is right there in plain sight. In this regard, however, she also departs from the formalist and rhetorical roots of her approach. By my count, her departure lies in four principal arguments. The first of these is that, when they interpret, readers (and critics and theorists) of narrative fiction are tethered too closely to the order in which a story's events are distributed by the narration and the range of ways (amplification, repetition, etc.) in which these events are made to signify--that is, by their emplotment. The plot is narrative's strong force, a dominating progression that is the primary source of its narrativity--or, in other words, what we register when we feel we are reading "a good story." As Dan Shen notes, the emphasis on plot and the corollary focus on plot by interpreters goes back to Aristotle, yet by locking on to "the overt plot progression we miss things, including in a number of notable cases what she terms the narrative's "covert progression." The existence of covert progressions is the second principal argument of this book, made through readings of six short stories, three by Americans (Poe, Crane, and Chopin) and three by Katherine Mansfield. As a generator of meaning, a narrative's covert progression can run in a different direction from the plot, in some cases even subverting what would otherwise appear to be the text's obvious meaning. Thus, while the plot progression of Kate Chopin's widely praised and widely taught "Desiree's Baby" delivers an indictment of racist hypocrisy, a covert progression running through the tale supports a racist distinction between the inherent virtue of white people and the proclivity for evil that can be transmitted even by a tincture of the blood of black people. But covert progressions do not necessarily subvert the ethical thrust of plot progressions. As Dan Shen brings out in her carefully selected demonstration texts, there is range and variety in the ways in which a covert progression, or in some cases multiple covert progressions, can inflect our understanding of what you might call a story's meaning world. In Stephen Crane's "An Episode of War," for example, readers can gain a much fuller and more nuanced understanding of "the meaninglessness of war and the illusory nature of romanticized heroism" (69) by tracking a covert thread revealing the way the soldiers are infantilized and another bringing out how petty personal conflicts dominate the lives they lead under the shadow of a much greater conflict. …

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. …

Stretching the Boundaries of Narrativity on Stage: A Narratological Analysis of Paula Vogel's the Baltimore Waltz and Hot 'N' Throbbing

Abstract: While the novel still remains the most thoroughly investigated field of narratological study, recent research has indicated that the longstanding dichotomy between narrative and drama is an artificial one. Arguments to discard this dichotomy are not exactly new: in 1988 Brian Richardson--one of the major advocates for the recognition of drama as a narrative genre--refuted the notion that "drama is exclusively a mimetic genre, while fiction combines mimesis and diegesis" and concluded his article by claiming that "drama, like the novel, is and always has been a mixture of mimetic and diegetic representation, and that any theory of narration that ignores stage narration may be considered needlessly limited, if not seriously impoverished" (193, 212; Richardson's italics). And indeed, even though it has long been neglected by narratologists, theories about the relation between narrativity and drama extend back to Antiquity. Since Richardson's article we have witnessed a slow but steady rise in the inclusion of drama in narratological research, as narratologists such as Richardson, Monika Fludernik, Manfred Jahn, Ansgar Nunning, and Roy Sommer (see also Nunning and Sommer; Huhn and Sommer) have provided a theoretical framework to support this thesis. By revisiting structuralist concepts such as "agency," "focalization," "narrative voice," and different types of narrators, and by applying these concepts to drama, they have paved the way to more practical research that analyzes narrative experiments set up by contemporary dramatists. In a forthcoming article on Samuel Beckett's radio play Cascando, Tom Vandevelde rightly reminds us that--now that a theoretical framework has been established--there is still a great need for narratological research based on a thorough textual analysis of drama texts. In most cases, the aforementioned critics have employed the reversed strategy. They have outlined theoretical concepts (e.g. Richardson's "generative narrator" which will be elaborated on below) that can be used to investigate narrativity in drama, and provided many examples in order to validate them. While this approach suited these critics' needs perfectly at the time, the field now requires a more exhaustive methodology focussing on thorough narratological analysis rather than on listing titles of important diegetic plays. If we wish to keep the narratological study of drama relevant we must not only identify those plays which make use of narrativity, we must also--and more importantly--investigate the ways in which dramatists explore and eventually transgress the "conventional" limits of narrativity in their plays. For while the theory enveloping diegetic possibilities and experiments in drama might still be fairly recent, their practice is not. Many postmodern playwrights have kept their repertoire interesting by experimenting with mediation, narrative voice, narrative time, etc. in their plays, which often leads to the creation of what Jan Alber terms "impossible storyworlds": "stories [which] transgress real-world frames and urge us to stretch our sense-making strategies to the limit" (80). Paula Vogel is one of those playwrights. As a lesbian feminist playwright who often uses feminism and sexuality in her plays, most articles on and interviews with Vogel have focussed on gender-related issues. While this is undoubtedly an important aspect of her work (see Mansbridge; Savran), the significance of experiments with narrativity in her plays has often been overlooked. Two exceptions I have found are Graley Herren's "Narrating, Witnessing, and Healing Trauma in Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive" and Brian Richardson's "Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama." Herren's article is a case study which discusses how the protagonist in How I Learned to Drive employs narration as a coping mechanism to help her confront a traumatic event in the past. Richardson's article on the other hand is a more general treatment of the use of narratological concepts in Postmodern drama. …

Esthetic Qualities, Conventions, and Aspect‑Switching: Medieval Hebrew Poetry in the Perspective of Modern Theories of Reading 1

Abstract: The Hebrew secular poetry written in medieval Spain adheres quite strictly to predetermined conventions of genre. One prominent genre of this poetry is contemplative poems. Dan Pagis made a distinction within this genre between two contrasting conceptual positions that give rise to two groups of poems, "dark poems of fate" that speak about man's futile existence and make no mention of consoling ideas such as an afterlife and the soul's immortality, and "poems of admonishment and faith," that also proclaim the vanity of human existence but also raise the possibility of escape, by adhering to the path of morality and faith, that holds out the promise of everlasting life for the soul (233). The poems of admonishment and faith, unlike the dark poems of fate, are thus similar in spirit to sacred poetry. Pagis's distinction is revolutionary; so revolutionary, in fact, that it was not rejected out of hand only because it was proposed by such a prominent scholar in the field. Because the poems are read in the knowledge that their composers were religious men, there is a tendency to interpret even the darkest motifs as possessing a positive religious aim. Pagis himself was apparently aware of the difficulty which his proposal created, since he makes the following comment there: "When we examine each poem separately we must therefore distinguish between a general conceptual criterion associated with cultural history--the beliefs and opinions of the period in question and of the poet as a believer--and a literary conceptual criterion that applies to each poem individually" (236). If we read these poems against the background of the period and of the poet as a man of faith we could provide the dark poems of faith with a religious conclusion as well, and interpret them in the spirit of the poems of admonishment and faith. However, if we examine them using a literary criterion that is applicable to each poem as an individual unit we will not be able to obliterate the difference between the pessimistic spirit of the dark poems of fate and the optimistic spirit of the poems of admonishment and faith (236). Furthermore, as will be pointed out at the end of the article, even the matter of "cultural history" or "the spirit of the times" is not unambiguous. One of the motifs that recur in Hebrew poetry from Spain, in particular in contemplative poetry, is youth and old age. This motif has different meanings in different intertextual contexts. As we shall see below, in the context of personal sacred poems and secular poems of admonishment and faith youth is condemned; it is perceived as a time of silliness, as a metonymy for a superficial existence and a pursuit of vain things. Old age, on the other hand, is praised in these poems, as a rewarding time of clarity that represents a rational (not instinctive), ethical, and, religious existence. In the dark poems of fate youth and old age have the reverse meaning; here youth is praised as representing the best time in a man's life, a time whose all too quick passing is the cause of Man's tragic fate, and whose loss is bitterly mourned. Accordingly, old age in these poems is perceived, explicitly or by implication, as a man's end, as death, so its meaning is purely negative. These contradictory views of youth and old age are usually expressed in distinct genres or sub-genres, as noted above. In light of this, Hanagid's contemplative poem "God Blesses Old Age" is a complex poem that transmits an ambivalent attitude towards youth and old age which the text itself does not disambiguate; it is only in association with changing intertextual connections that an unambiguous view can arise, to one side or the other. In order to be able to foreground the complexity of "God Blesses Old Age" we shall first discuss another contemplative poem by Shmuel Hanagid, "When You Recall the Days of Youth": 1. When you recall the days of youth, towards them / your heart roars and shouts like a lion Asking that all your days be like them / but you will not find like them afterwards. …

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

Abstract: 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. …

Social Neuroscience, the Imitative Animal, and Aronofsky's Black Swan

Abstract: 1. Early in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010) we are shown the protagonist, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) and her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey) as Nina prepares to leave for her day as a working ballerina. The mother is preparing breakfast for Nina as if she were a little girl heading off to school. At one point they face each other on opposite sides of a narrow breakfast counter, and as the mother hands Nina her plate, they repeat in perfect unison Nina's child-like description of the breakfast: "so pretty they say, giggling together. A distinct visual mirroring accompanies the verbal synchrony of mother and daughter. The mother takes a quick step to her right in order to be exactly across the breakfast counter from Nina at the instant of their speaking together. To add to the mirroring effect, both women have their hair tied back in identical buns. Though each clearly mirrors the other, Nina's mother is dressed ominously in black, while Nina wears the girlish pale pink and grey outfit that becomes a metaphor for her situation at the beginning. This minor interaction initiates a major concern of the film: the relationships between mirroring, imitation, and identity. (1) Now, most film and literature scholars will likely think of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as a foundation upon which to investigate any text that deals with mirroring and identity. I, however, will replace that foundation with a newer, and significantly different one: social neuroscience. Since social neuroscience may not be familiar to many of my readers, we will first take a detour through the theory before returning to this scene from Black Swan. Broadly defined, social neuroscience studies the linkages between certain biological mechanisms--"neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic"--and various forms of social behavior (Decety and Cacioppo 3). In the present case we will concentrate on what social neuroscience has to tell us about imitation. It hardly needs saying that imitation is important in human life. But social neuroscience (and cognitive psychology) has shown just how imitative we humans are. As imitators, humans have no equal. In one influential study, psychologists Andrew Meltzoff and Wolfgang Prinz studied fourty infants with an average age of just thirty-two hours and documented the fact that even neonates imitate facial acts of adults (Meltzoff and Prinz 23). Adult imitativeness has been studied as well. Social neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have investigated the embodied bases of a phenomenon remarked upon for centuries: emotional contagion, our predisposition to automatically imitate the faces, voices, and movements of others, and so to take on their emotional state. Empathy, often related to emotional contagion, has also received much attention. (2) One conclusion from this research is that imitation is a constitutive element of human social-psychology. Marcel Kinsbourne argues that imitation in newborns "becomes the source of most of one's social knowledge base." And such imitation begins far too early in development to have originated as a deliberate and reasoned choice. Also it is far-reaching, beyond adaptation to the social norm. It is a prime mover in mental development, and ... underlies affiliation both to individuals and to the group ... affiliation has a neurobiological rudiment, mediated by imitation. (Kinsbourne 326) Imitation can readily be seen as "a default social behavior. Imitation is not something we only occasionally engage in. Instead, we usually imitate--automatically--and not doing it is the exception" (italics in original) (Dijksterhuis 208). Imitation is useful. It gives humans a unique ability to learn from others by imitating their actions. From this fact V. S. Ramchandran argues that imitative learning "may have been the key step in hominin evolution, resulting in our ability to transmit knowledge by example" (Ramachadran 132). In a similar vein, Merlin Donald--one of our foremost thinkers about imitation, cognition, and evolution--has argued that in our evol utionary past as well as in the present, mimesis "is the elemental expressive force that binds us together into closely knit tribal groups. …

Negotiating Money in The Wanderer: Lessons from Behavioral Economics

Abstract: Frances Burney's The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties (1814) begins with a negotiation. "In the dead of night" a female emigre of mysterious racial origin begs for a place aboard "a small vessel ... preparing to glide silently [to England] from the coast of France" (11). Ultimately identified as Lady Juliet Granville, she spends three-quarters of this very long novel (1) trying to become financially self-sufficient: hence Burney's subtitle for the work, "Female Difficulties" is a direct reference to the troubles Juliet has along the way. Dispossessed both geographically and financially, she resorts to various schemes for making money. Each scheme is temporary and takes her lower down the ladder of gentility: music-teacher, milliner, seamstress, and an old lady's companion. She endures verbal abuse from three women in particular--Mrs. Howel, Ireton, and Maple; faces sexual advances from men like Sir Lyell Sycamore and Mr. Ireton; and creates a generalized sense of anxiety in this neatly ordered, if parochial, microcosm of English society. Through it all, Juliet remains determinedly nameless--she is called, first "L.S." and then "Ellis" by the novel's other characters--while discouraging the romantic attentions of the socially established Albert Harleigh. Ultimately, she is revealed to have been married under duress during the Reign of Terror to an avaricious French commissary who is later conveniently killed off. Juliet finds social and financial restitution when it is eventually discovered that she is English, not French, and that her deceased aristocratic father left her a huge family fortune. Although published in 1814 at the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars, The Wanderer's preoccupation with events during and after Robespierre's Reign of Terror makes it very much a work of the 1790s, and throughout this essay, I am going to refer to it as such. Burney alludes to as much in her dedication to the novel, saying, "I had planned and begun it before the end of the last century" (4). For most of the nineteenth century, due mostly to the opprobrium of its initial reception, the novel remained largely ignored. William Hazlitt, one of Burney's gentler critics, acknowledges he is "sorry to be compelled to speak so disadvantageously of the work of an excellent and favorite writer: and the more so, as we perceive no decay of talent, but a perversion of it" (338). John Croker, writing in the Quarterly Review, notes caustically that The Wanderer, "which might be expected to finish and crown [Burney's] literary labors, is not only inferior to its sister-works, but cannot, in our judgment, claim any very decided superiority over the thousand-and-one volumes with which the Minerva Press inundates the shelves of circulating libraries" (124). However, in the late twentieth century, literary scholars have returned their attention to the novel, analyzing it as a feminist text in which Burney "poses fundamental questions about a woman's place in society" (Johnson 167). Barbara Zonitch argues that "by attempting to climb the social ladder by her own talents, and thus achieve a respected and perhaps protective identity, Juliet challenges the notion of elevated birth as the only conduit of honor and integrity" (115). Claire Harman suggests, "Burney's real subject (and audience) was that section of English society, which Ellis passes through as 'wanderer,' the new and vulnerable bourgeoisie, particularly its female members, caught between the old regime of dependence and idleness and the increasing necessity to be self-dependent" (311). While each reading mines a rich vein of interpretive possibilities, they collectively bypass what I consider the real issue at stake: how people negotiate. Existing literary criticism on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economic life typically posits that money and fiction are comparable and interchangeable systems of representation, both deriving ultimately from social relationships with credit. …

Henry James in Mid‑Career: "Georgina's Reasons" and the Possibilities of Style

Abstract: In the early 1960s, Oscar Cargill and Leon Edel criticized James's 1884 short story "Georgina's Reasons" for posing a problem of character-motivation that it fails to resolve. What are the "reasons" of the story's title? What are Georgina's reasons for marrying, secretly and against her parents' wishes; for keeping the marriage a secret and making her husband promise to do the same; when she becomes pregnant for hiding the pregnancy, even from her husband; for abandoning her child after he is born; for bigamously remarrying; and, finally, for refusing to grant her first husband a divorce so that he can legally marry again? Identifying Georgina, who upon her second marriage becomes "Georgina Roy," as a precursor to Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, Cargill compared the story unfavorably with the novel, arguing that, because of her poverty, Kate Croy is "far more plausibly motivated" than Georgina, for whom James provides no such clearcut motivation (348). Two years after Cargill published this judgment, Edel called "Georgina's Reasons" "a strange unmotivated sensational little story" (56), his disparagement effectively sealing its fate as one of James's least read short fictions. According to Edel's verdict, the inadequacy of James's psychological conception of his heroine results in formal narrative failure: Georgina is "unmotivated," therefore the story is too. On the basis of this formal failure, Edel assigns the tale to one of the lowest in the hierarchy of fictional genres, the sensational, a categorization that in turn supports his measure of the work as "little." "Georgina's Reasons" is one of James's longer tales, (1) so the smallness ascribed to it by Edel must reflect, not its page extent, nor indeed the geographical reach of its action (which, as I will discuss later, is broad), but a sense of what the work achieves--little. Yet surely James was too canny a writer to choose a title for his story that would draw attention to what is, according to Cargill and Edel, its greatest flaw. Rather, I believe that he used the title "Georgina's Reasons" to create an expectation on the reader's part, which the story deliberately frustrates, thereby opening what Frank Kermode calls, with reference to later James works such as What Maisie Knew and The Sacred Fount, a "hermeneutic gap," which the reader must explore but cannot close. (2) The title focuses the reader's attention on the question, why? It also seems to invite a rational, ethical mode of answering that question, which its subject matter resists. This resistance forces readers to consider carefully not only what they know about Georgina, but also how they know it. Specifically, James's refusal to provide a secure interpretative ground for Georgina's actions challenges the reader to compare possible theoretical and literary models for understanding her character and behavior. I will consider four frames of reference within which the reader may "read" Georgina and her reasons: theological, political, scientific and geographical. Each of these conceptual frameworks corresponds to a fictional genre that James could use to tell her story: sensation fiction, New Woman fiction, naturalism, and the international tale. The problem of the heroine's motivation thus provides the occasion for a consideration of the kinds of fiction that were available for James to write in the mid-1880s, and of the capacities and limitations of each kind for developing his chosen subject--a woman whose unconventional and destructive behavior defies rational understanding. James adumbrated this subject in The Portrait of a Lady with the character of Mrs Touchett, whose strange and hurtful behavior towards her husband and son rests upon "reasons which she deemed excellent" (Novels 211) but which remain opaque to others. She had "an extreme respect for her own motives" and "was usually prepared to explain these--when the explanation was asked as a favour; and in such a case they proved totally different from those that had been attributed to her" (211). …