Showing papers in "Style in 2014"

Introduction: What Is the "Second Generation?"

Abstract: 1. Preliminary MovesWhat does it mean to take a "second-generation" approach to the cognitive study of literature? Since this label can easily lend itself to misunderstandings, we want to make clear that "second-generation" refers to a specific strand in contemporary cognitive science, one foregrounding the embodiment of mental processes and their extension into the world through material artifacts and socio-cultural practices."First-generation" theories in the cognitive sciences conceive of the mind as based on abstract, propositional representations. Like a computer, the first-generation mind would process information as largely independent from specific brains, bodies, and sensory modalities. By contrast, "second-generation" approaches-a term coined by Lakoff and Johnson (Philosophy 77-78)-reject previous models of the mind as unduly limited to information processing, placing mental processes instead on a continuum with bioevolutionary phenomena and cultural practices. We treat "second-generation cognitive science" as interchangeable with another, more technical-sounding label used by cognitive scientists-that of "e-approaches" to cognition (Menary; Hutto). Here the e's stand for theories bringing to the fore the enactive, embedded, embodied, and extended qualities of the mind. To this list we may add "experiential" and "emotional," since this new paradigm gives experience and emotional responses a much more important role in cognition than first-wave, computational cognitivism. Bringing these e-approaches together under a common tag is at some level problematic, as Menary points out (459-461 ), because the theories and methodologies that it encompasses often prove distinct on closer examination. We will have to keep in mind this caveat as we explore the potential of these cognitive models for literary interpretation and theorization. The diversity of the secondgeneration framework is, in itself, a reminder that-again in Menary's words-"our cognitive lives are rich and varied and that simple homogenous explanations do not do justice to the complexity of cognitive phenomena" (461). At the same time, second-generation approaches also show some remarkable continuities: they converge on a view of the human mind as shaped by our evolutionary history, bodily make-up, and sensorimotor possibilities, and as arising out of close dialogue with other minds, in intersubjective interactions and cultural practices.These are the shared tenets of a second-generation account of cognition, and the complexity of the resulting framework is, as we will show, perfectly suited to match the complexity of literary (and, more generally, artistic) practices. Hence, this special issue attempts to map out the continuities among e-approaches and bring them to bear on longstanding narrative, literary, and aesthetic questions. In this process of interdisciplinary bridge-building, the essays touch on all the e's of e-approaches, exploring how perception and mental imagery are enacted through sensorimotor patterns (Kuzmicova; Muller), how creativity is extended through material artifacts (Bernini), how the reading process is shaped by embodied schemata and lived experiences (Caracciolo; Kukkonen; Troscianko), and how characters' fictional minds are in themselves embodied and embedded in socio-cultural contexts (Bernaerts). Though our main focus will be on literature, by including Muller's essay on the embodiment of film viewing we would like to underscore the connections between literary scholarship and the neighboring field of film studies, where cognitive approaches have gained explicit recognition, often by drawing on what we are calling "second-generation" cognitivism here.Contrasting first-generation and second-generation cognitive science does, of course, raise the question of whether a similar split exists, or can be identified, within cognitive approaches to literary narrative. Lakoff and Johnson themselves point out that their distinction "has nothing to do with the age of any individual or when one happened to enter the field The distinction is one of philosophical and methodological assumptions" (Philosophy 78). …

Literary Narrative and Mental Imagery: A View from Embodied Cognition

Abstract: IntroductionMental imagery is reportedly one of the commonest things people remember about their narrative reading in the long term (Sadoski et al.), and it correlates with various other dimensions of reader response, most notably with emotion (Krasny and Sadoski).The objective of this article is twofold. In the first part, I will discuss two issues central to any theoretical inquiry into mental imagery: embodiment and consciousness. I will do so against the backdrop of second-generation cognitive science-more specifically, the increasingly popular research framework of embodied cognition-and I will consider two caveats attached to its current exploitation in narrative theory. In the second part, I will attempt to cast new light on readerly mental imagery by offering a typology of what I propose to be its four basic varieties. The typology is grounded in the framework of embodied cognition, and it is largely compatible with key neuroscientific and other experimental evidence produced within the framework. It is, however, primarily based on introspection, the one tool available to me for accessing conscious experience. Even though individual predispositions towards imagery (e.g. the tendency to image more or less often, more or less vividly, in greater or lesser detail, or within specific sensory modalities) are known to differ significantly, the proposed varieties are meant to capture imagery structures operating, in full or in part, across these differences.The notion of mental imagery is used in its narrow sense here so as to capture those instances in which modern silent readers of literary narrative, while reading an expression "X," experience some form of sensory representation of what they (more or less literally) understand to be X.1 Despite individual variations in susceptibility to mental imagery, all readers experience mental images some of the time, and some readers experience them all the time (see also Sadoski and Paivio 74). Such experiences can be grounded in any sensory modality, deploying the external senses-i.e., the visual (sight), the auditory (hearing), the olfactory (smell), the gustatory (taste), and the tactile (touch)-as well as the internal senses-i.e., the interoceptive (pain, hunger, etc.), the proprioceptive (balance, limb and organ position, etc.), or the motor/kinesthetic (movement-related proprioception: effort, acceleration, etc.). They can, and very often do, combine several of these modalities.Extant theoretical literature on mental imagery thus defined is small but thematically and methodologically diverse. Authors tend to focus on highly specific questions such as those concerning the art of composing imageable face or flower descriptions, respectively (Jajdelska et al.; Scarry), or the links between spatial imagery and readers' childhood memories (Burke). As a consequence, this article is probably the first attempt to categorize readerly mental imagery in the most general of terms, as a set of distinct embodied experiences, each with a unique combination of essential properties. However, as literary scholarship is more and more accepting of crossovers into cognitive science, the theoretical literature accounting for mental imagery keeps growing steadily. The contemporary second generation of cognitive science, and especially the framework of embodied cognition, can indeed be very helpful to advancing our understanding of mental imagery and other lower-order (e.g. affective) aspects of reader response. Perhaps most notably, narrative scholars have begun to explore what goes under the name of embodied simulation (for a review, see Caracciolo, "Embodiment at the Crossroads").Embodied simulation stands for several interrelated cognitive phenomena that are currently being unraveled with the help of fMRI and other experimental methodologies and that are perhaps most notoriously represented by (but not restricted to) mirror neurons. Briefly put, it has been suggested that in the processing of language referring to sensorimotor contents, whether it is an isolated phrase such as "grab the cake" (Raposo et al. …

Presence and Prediction: The Embodied Reader's Cascades of Cognition

Abstract: Even if a literary theory is not expressly geared to reader response or the empirical investigation of what real readers do, every attempt to theorise interpretation models its ideal readers as it describes how meaning emerges from texts. Does the reader master a secondary system of literary expression on top of language, as the structuralists propose (see Culler)? Is the reader 'greedy,' her mindreading capacities gobbling up whatever mental states the narrative text offers, as proponents of theory of mind might suggest (see Zunshine)? Does he go along for a ride in the emotional rollercoaster of the narrative that speaks to his sentiments (see Warhol)? As second-generation approaches to narrative develop new models for the process of interpretation, partly on the back of empirical research into embodied responses to reading, the question of what a model for the 'embodied reader' might look like arises. At this point, no fully-fledged conceptualization of the embodied, enactive, embedded, and emotional reader has been attempted, but accounts of interpretation in a second-generation vein give us a glimpse: In Guillemette Bolens The Style of Gestures, readers responds to the gestures, movements and other kinesthetic features of the literary text. According to Marco Caracciolo, he lives vicariously through the embodied experiences evoked by the literary text. In this special issue, we have also seen this reader take different stances towards the embodied features of the text (Kuzmicova) and caught her adventuring on the traces which authors lay down for readers to follow (Bernini). In this article, I develop a model for the embodied reader, which draws on the insights of second-generation cognitive sciences into the embodied, extended, and embodied features of cognition. The model makes no empirical claims; rather, it combines empirical research and philosophical accounts of the experiential dynamics of presence with a consideration of the temporal and conceptual dynamics of literary text. (2) Whenever I speak of the embodied reader, this is shorthand for a model of the act of reading which takes into account readers' embodied responses. Earlier critical reader models, such as Wolfgang Iser's "implied reader, have foregrounded the temporal and conceptual dynamics of anticipation and propositional meaning-making, but were not specifically interested in the embodied engagements of reading. Whenever I speak of the implied reader, this is shorthand for a model of the act of reading that sidelines the embodied aspects of reading and focuses on abstract, propositional meaning making. In what follows, I aim to devise a critical model of the embodied reader in dialogue with earlier reader constructs, in particular, Iser's "implied reader." Let us start by tracing what the second-generation cognitive sciences allow us to conclude about the reading process of the embodied reader in the following passage from the 1753 novel The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett. What are the textual features that might give the embodied reader a sense of being there in the fictional world? The protagonist Ferdinand has just had a brush with death and escapes with a potentially treacherous landlady as his guide to the next town and safety: Common fear was a comfortable sensation to what he felt in this excursion. The first steps he had taken for his preservation, were the effects of meer instinct, while his faculties were extinguished or suppressed by despair: but, now as his reflection began to recur, he was haunted by the most intolerable apprehensions. Every whisper of the wind through the thickets, was swelled into the hoarse menaces of murder, the shaking of the boughs was construed into the brandishing of poignards, and every shadow of a tree, became the apparition of a ruffian eager for blood. In short, at each of these occurences, he felt what was infinitely more tormenting than the stab of a real dagger; and at every fresh filip of his fear, he acted as remembrancer to his conductress, in a new volley of imprecations importing that her fife was absolutely connected with his opinion of his own safety. …

Euclid at the Core: Recentering Literary Education

Abstract: "Maybe it's not really New Criticism; maybe it's just called that because it's not anything else" --Emily Rohrbach Introduction: The Aims of Education We have written this essay with some trepidation The project began when John V Knapp invited Peter to revisit some of the arguments he had made about the role of literary theory in secondary education in Authorizing Readers, which he had co-authored with Michael W Smith back in 1998 Peter was wary: did he have anything new to add, especially after the introduction of the Common Core and its bright vision of a revamped educational system? But he was also intrigued: he'd been working, at a distance, with Corinne, a former student, as she tried to adapt her theoretical knowledge to the day-to-day activities in her middle- school classroom We wondered: working together, might we in fact be able to think in new ways about how students, both secondary and early college levels, learn--or should be taught--to read literature? Perhaps: but Peter is a college teacher, with a few months of high-school teaching during Freedom Summer, and Corinne has taught for three years in an independent school What could we really contribute to a national debate dominated by people with far more knowledge and experience than both of us together? Still, neither of us is exactly diffident, and we figured we'd barge ahead Offering what? Let us begin with a few caveats We're not going to be proposing a model curriculum, nor a pedagogical guide Nor will we be intervening in the debates about literary reading lists--for instance about the role of young adult literature in classrooms What we're hoping to do, rather, is offer a few general ideas about how literary education might be more profitably grounded (as you'll see when we get to the issue of abstraction, there's something paradoxical in that generality); and our arguments will be utopian in the specific sense that we'll skip over such questions as how someone might go about putting some of our ideas into practice in a particular classroom While we'll be offering some specific interpretations, too, our goal is not to convince you of our readings and evaluations (say, of Hunger Games), but to convince you that we're offering fertile grounds on which to discuss them Simply put, we argue that if education doesn't give students the tools to discuss important literary questions (including questions about literature's relationship to the larger world) intelligently, then their education is flawed Our basic aim is hardly controversial: to develop students who can be flexible, self-conscious readers (1) We also want them to be theoretically informed This might seem a bit more treacherous, since teaching theory to high school students may, at first, raise the specter of replacing Hawthorne with Derrida in our schools Nothing could be further from our minds Over the past thirty or forty years (can it really have been that long?), the word "theory" has been hijacked--at least at the college and university level--by post-structuralists and post-modernists (loosely considered) so that it has come more and more to mean a particular kind (or at least a cluster of particular kinds) of theory (2) We are not interested in giving our students High Theory, either directly or indirectly (for an interesting discussion, see Mohanty "Radical") Our notion of theory is less grand, and certainly less overtly ideological We're not proposing something rigorously systematic; what we're looking for is a set of comprehensible, pragmatic, and coherent principles about literature, readers, and the act of reading, principles on which readers can rely as they build literary interpretations Theory in this sense need not be threatening, even in a middle-school classroom In fact, theory in our sense is, to a large extent, working with what our students already know--providing a framework and a vocabulary that allow them to express and build on that knowledge …

Interpretation for the bodies : bridging the gap

Abstract: Introduction Narratologists and literary scholars have often drawn attention to the problematic role of interpretation within cognitive approaches to narrative and literature (see Jackson; Easterlin 20-27; Ryan). How is it possible to reconcile literary interpretation as a specifically cultural form of meaning-making with the generalizing aims and reductionist methods of the cognitive sciences? This discussion on the scientific status of interpretation goes back at least to Wilhelm Dilthey's distinction between "Erklarung" (causal explanation, the goal of scientific investigation) and "Verstehen" (interpretive understanding as practiced in the human sciences; see Gallagher). "Erklarung" attempts to explain phenomena through scientific methods, in terms of their underlying causes, while "Verstehen" makes sense of human agency and cultural practices by referring to their subjective significance. Focusing on the integration of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, today's theories of "consilience" (Wilson) and "vertical" or "conceptual integration" (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby; Slingerland 9-11) have put the relationship between scientific knowledge and interpretation--"Erklarung" and "Verstehen"--back on the agenda of interdisciplinary research. As Wilson himself suggests, "[!Interpretation is the logical channel of consilient explanation between science and the arts" (230). Interpretation is where the divergences between scientific and humanistic methods are at their most evident, thus representing a crucial test bed for any cognitive approach to cultural artifacts. Evolutionary critics such as Joseph Carroll, Brian Boyd, and Jonathan Gottschall have made a step towards a fully consilient literary criticism,2 but as Nancy Easterlin notes their (and especially Carroll's) "strong appeal for scientific study ultimately [points] in the direction of a very different kind of discipline, one that perhaps locates human nature rather than literature as it primary object of study" (18). As Easterlin puts it, restating Dilthey's opposition, there is no obvious way in which the "unimaginable complexity of interpretation" (20; see also Nordlund) can be subjected to scientific procedures of hypothesis testing and validation. My article takes on board the difficulty of closing the gap between literary interpretation and scientific knowledge and responds to this difficulty by sidestepping it: if the gap cannot be closed, it can at least be bridged--or so I will suggest. Rather than attempting to reduce interpretation to scientific methods or even theories, I would like to explore how these two domains of inquiry are or could be related across the gap: literary interpretation may not sit comfortably with the goals or methods of scientific inquiry, but it still addresses, and can interact with, processes that fall under the purview of the hard sciences. Perhaps zooming in on these processes will reveal something about the structures that underlie the sheer diversity and complexity of interpretation. This article proposes that the notion of embodiment--which lies at the core of the second-generation cognitive sciences (Lakoff and Johnson)--can provide a link between hermeneutics and bio-evolutionary and cognitive levels of analysis. Embodiment is an existential condition, our being tied to biologically finite and phenomenologically conscious bodies. As such, embodiment is an object of constant cultural reinterpretation. But human embodiment is also the result of an evolutionary history and fundamentally shapes any psychological process, from emotional responses to higher-order meaning constructions (Anderson; Gibbs). All in all, embodiment provides an integrative framework in which different levels of analysis can coexist and constrain one another while remaining distinct in their respective aims and methodological tools. I call this framework "embodiment spectrum," and I stress that this spectrum is respectful of epistemological divides as well as of what we may regard as the autonomy of interpretation--its value for its own sake, regardless of its compatibility or commensurability with scientific knowledge. …

The Implied Author as an Ethical Buffer: An Argument from Translated and Censored Fiction

Abstract: If the Implied Author (IA) is the Object of a Belief,1 then let me start by confessing that I am a believer-though an unorthodox one as will become apparent. On the one hand, I will welcome the IA as a tool to analyze a particular comic narrative and its censored translation. On the other hand, and perhaps because I do not belong to any narratological church that takes Wayne C. Booth's notion of the IA as a dogma, I will dare to propose an IA concept that only roughly connects with Booth's and the orthodox believers' many descriptions of the IA. That rough connection is our shared concern for the ethics of fiction, for the role of the IA in this ethics, and for positing an author who is not the flesh-and-bones author (FABA). Yet my proposal should not take its strength as much from continuing a tradition-since my IAguided ethics of reading will also be opposed to Booth's-as from throwing fresh light on the interpretation, translation, and censorship of a comic narrative. To that effect, I will first briefly turn to the concept of the author who seems in need of a conceptual defense too. For both arguments-pro-author and pro-IA-I will mainly refer to the Spanish author Elvira Lindo and her comic narrative Manolito Gafotas (1994), and its American translation Manolito Four-Eyes (2008).It may be true that the IA debate has turned somewhat sterile over time (on which see Lanser, "Manifesto" 2011 ), but in my view this is mainly so because it has become primarily conceptual. The IA comes to life in specific ethical readings and specific translations of specific literary texts. Indeed, though my argument includes general discussions of genre (viz., fiction and comedy), it is entirely inspired and motivated by a specific censoring translation of a particular work of fiction.The Author Exists-Who Else Does the Comedy?Lindo's Manolito series, of which Manolito Gafotas was the first book to be published, is a comic narrative series immensely popular among Spanish children and adults. Manolito, the protagonist and first-person narrator, is a charming little boy who uses his particular sense of humor as he tells us about life in a workingclass suburb of Madrid. He admits his real name is Manolito Garcia Moreno but also insists that in the suburb "everyone knows me as Manolito Four-Eyes." He then sets out to explain this apparently pleasing fact:I was named Manolito after my dad's truck, and the truck was named after my dad, whose name is Manolo. . . .I like that they call me Four-Eyes. At my school-which is called Diego Velazquezanyone who's a little important has a nickname. Before I had a nickname, I used to cry plenty. When a bully started in on me at recess, he always ended up calling me Four-Eyes or Fat Glasses. Since I've officially become Manolito Four-Eyes, insulting me is a waste of time. (Manolito Four-Eyes 3-5)2The narrator's idiosyncratic explanations and evaluations are not the only source of comedy, as the characters are also responsible for some pretty incongruous behavior-and incongruity is a well-known mechanism of humor.3 We learn for instance that one day Manolito got caught up in a street protest in Madrid. His grandfather, who accompanied him, asked a man to put Manolito up on his shoulders so that he could see what was happening. Manolito then realized that the man had dandruff:I noticed that the guy had dandruff so I decided to brush it off a little. I asked him why he didn't buy one of those shampoos they advertise on TV that gets rid of dandruff (and if you don't watch out, gets you a girlfriend, too). The guy put me down on the ground, all in a huff.... (my translation)4All of this is quite funny, yet so far we have no trouble explaining the comedy without recurring to the concept of the author. The protagonist's actions are incongruous, the dandruff guy feels ridiculed, and Manolito the narrator has his tongue-in-cheek way of telling things.However, as I have argued before ("Narrative Humor I," "Narrative Humor II"), humor in narrative does not spring from the narrator or character only. …

Supersizing narrative theory: on intention, material agency, and extended mind-workers.

Abstract: In recent years, cognitive science has progressively entered the epoch of “4E” cognition,” in which the mind is considered as embedded, enacted, embodied and extended. However, among these second-generation perspectives, the extended mind theory (Clark and Chalmers) seems to have lagged behind in the narratological discourse. According to this view, the human mind extends into the world when coupled with external cognitive tools like computers or material symbols such as language. This article seeks to apply the extended mind theory to the problem of literary intentions by putting the key principles of the theory in relation to the act of narrative worldmaking. In so doing, I suggest that EMT entails a reconsideration of the concept of authorial intentions in that it provides a distributed account of agency during the writing activity. In the last part of the essay I elaborate on the further implications of this reappraisal for literary interpretation.

Literary Competence and the Experience of Literature

Abstract: In responding to the pedagogically important and informative effort by Peter Rabinowitz and Corrine Bancroft to re-center literary education, I will not focus as much on their admirable accomplishments as I will on problem spaces that they have chosen not to occupy or fully develop, and probably could not have had the room to develop within the scope of a single journal article. My response, then, will try to extend the reach of their essay more than it will suggest any argument with them. And I will begin by elaborating on the importance of their brief but salutary observation that what literature offers to readers initially and primarily is not a meaning but an experience and that "the experience of reading a text, the total effect, is what's central to interpretation." I take this to mean that insofar as meaning is derived from a literary text, it is derived by a reader either viscerally and intuitively or more discursively through reflection on his or her experience of the text, much as most people find meaning in other experiences in their lives, in their daily experiences, and particularly in the memorable or traumatic or transformative experiences that constitute the vicissitudes of every human life. Literature and Experiential Learning Let me now add to their observation some related postulates about literature as experience that may hardly require elaboration, yet seem to be widely ignored or forgotten in many literature classrooms. I begin with the fact that it is the distinctive capacity of literature, among the varieties of discourse, to enable us imaginatively to have lively, emotionally moving, and intellectually transformative experiences. And it is this particular capacity that accounts for the value attributed to literature by literary critics and theorists across the ages and representing a wide range of philosophical orientations. Furthermore, this is the same power of literature that explains the teaching in the classic formulations that literature teaches and delights and teaches through delight, and, accounts for why, as Phillip Sidney asserts, "the speaking picture of poesy"(977) is a better teacher than either history or philosophy and has the power to "hold children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner." (982). And, again, it is this same power of literature that explains, as Cristina Bruns has recently shown us, how literature can serve much like a "transitional object" in the development of young persons and in the continuing psychological and characterological development of adults, giving readers a safe opportunity to test for themselves values, ways of being, and desires that through such trials assist in the development of one's aspirations, personality, and identity (26-36). One would think, therefore, that this distinctive capacity of literature to serve as an instrument of experiential learning would both justify the place of literature in education and shape instruction in literature in classrooms at every level of schooling. Yet historical evidence and modern observational research in classrooms suggest, on the contrary, that literary pedagogy in secondary schools and colleges, while generally paying lip service to literature's capacity to teach experientially, has, under the conditions of formal schooling, tended to employ instructional methods, assessment practices, and a range of assignments that discourage or prevent rather than enable students to experience directly and for themselves the literary texts that are the focus and ostensible objects of literary instruction (Graff; Scholes; Marshall; Zancanella). The reasons for this failure and its intellectual costs I have analyzed elsewhere (2003, 2010); so here I will merely note that in colleges and universities, it can probably be attributed at least in part to the conviction articulated most influentially in 1957 by Northrop Frye that "the difficulty often felt in teaching literature arises from the fact that it cannot be done. …

Schema theory, hypertext fiction and links

Abstract: Introduction The academic study of digital fiction has recently undergone a significant paradigm shift. Research has moved from a "first wave" of pure theoretical debate to a "second wave" of narratological, stylistic, and semiotic analysis. While the theoretical intricacies of second-wave digital fiction theory have been well debated (see Ciccoricco; Ensslin; Ensslin and Bell; Bell, Possible Worlds), the discipline and practice of analyzing digital fiction require a more systematic engagement and understanding than offered by much previous scholarship. With this critical need in mind, the scholars have has been exploring new avenues of defining and implementing approaches to analyzing digital fiction in order to develop a range of tools and associated terminology for digital fiction analysis and, in a related step, provide a body of analyses based on the systematic analyses of texts, which are substantiated by robust theoretical and terminological conclusions (e.g. Page and Thomas; Bell, Ensslin and Rustad). In line with that commitment this article provides a means of analyzing hyperlinks in web-based hypertext fiction. It begins by showing that hyperlinks in hypertext work associatively. It then argues that schema theory can be used to analyze the ways in which readers approach hypertext reading as well as how links function in hypertext fiction. The approach is demonstrated via an analysis of external links in a web-based fiction, 10:01 by Lance Olsen and Tim Guthrie. It shows that links are used to provide an ideological context to the narrative as well as forging a relationship between the fictional and actual world. Hypertext, Association and Cognition Hypertext is a form of electronic text in which documents are linked together using an associative system. The World Wide Web is the most extensive and renowned example of a hypertext in which individual electronic files are linked to form a vast network of textual documents, visual media, executable programs and software applications. Hypertext can also be used for a range of different purposes ranging from informational web pages and wikis to literary forms of writing such as hypertext fiction and hypertext poetry. Since the emergence of hypertext in the 1980s, theorists have stressed the significance of the hyperlink in both informational and literary hypertext. Landow claims that it is "the element that hypertext adds to writing" (13); Ryan suggests it functions as the "primary mode of moving though hypertext" ("Cyberspace"); and Ensslin views it as "the crucial structural and aesthetic component of hypertext" (31) (cf. Harpold). While some hypertext theory stresses the hyperlink's structural function, others as will be discussed below, return to the associative properties of which its founders conceived. The origins of hypertext can be traced to Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think" in which he outlined a plan for the "memex" machine, an information storage system, built using microform technology, in which items would be catalogued according to "associative indexing" (45). The user of the memex would instruct the machine to create links between documents so as to "build a trail" (45). At a later juncture while one item was being consulted, the user could quickly recall the associated items by simply clicking a button. The aim of the memex was therefore to allow users to retrieve information quickly and easily via a system that relied on associative linking rather than a more arbitrary alphabetical or numerical system. As the title of Bush's article suggests, the rationale behind the memex was ultimately cognitive. Bush argued that while most information storage systems, including libraries, employ numerical or alphabetic indexing systems, "the human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain" (44). …

Comparative Study of Verse: Language Probability Models

Abstract: Introduction The formal-statistical method in verse studies was developed in the Russian school of metrics and prosody. The establishment of this method has led to the formation of a particular field within cognitive poetics based on exact methods for studying how texts are generated. In Russia, the formal analysis of verse structure was initiated by Andrey Bely. Subsequently, this tradition was developed throughout all the 20th century in works by scholars representing different generations and countries: Boris Tomashevsky, Roman Jakobson, Victor Zhirmunsky, Andrey Kolmogorov, Mikhail Gasparov, James Bailey, Barry Scherr, Marina Tarlinskaja, el al. At the end of the past century, it served as the basis for a new direction, which can be said to fall within cognitive verse theory. (2) This direction arose thanks to the theory of reconstructive simulation of versification (RS) developed by Marina Krasnoperova. (3) The apparatus of the RS theory represents a unique system of cognitive and probability models of text rhythm, allowing for the study and reconstruction of the processes for generating and perceiving rhythmical texts. The probability models comprise background models for verse study. They represent a link between the text and deeper cognitive models. The latter form the nucleus of the RS theory and among them the central model is that for the perception and generation of the rhythmic structure of poetic texts. Through it, a given set of conditions of versification are placed into correspondence with probability models. Cognitive models are than used to interpret the agreement or disagreement of the data with the structural characteristics of text provided by probability models. The main group of probability models consists of so-called language models of meter. The first such model was constructed by the world-famous Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov who had devoted many years to the study of verse. The language models are constructed using the basis of a rhythmic dictionary of prose, which is perceived as arhythmically neutral language background. The rhythmical dictionaries of prose give an idea of the frequencies of rhythmic (phonetic) words in texts. The phonetic word is a group of syllables united by one principle word stress (the table, she said, my name). Since the frequency of a rhythmic word, in a sufficiently large sampling, approaches its probability, the particular probability of the use of this word in speech (the language probability) is assigned to it in accordance with its frequency in prose. Probability models have provided an essentially new perspective on the analysis of verse rhythm, making it possible to study the mechanism of versification. After Kolmogorov's model, others have been proposed. Of particular importance is the so-called language model of dependence (LMD) developed by Krasnoperova. This model is based on the principle of dependent combinations of rhythmic words in verse formation. The choice of a word depends on certain conditions such as meter, metric position, and the preceding context. The preceding rhythmical context is formed as a result of the action of certain syntactic conditions and can be also called the syntactic context. In this regard the model differs from the usual Kolmogorov language model (LM), which is constructed on the principle of the independent selection of rhythmic words. (4) In the apparatus of the RS theory, different variants of LMD are developed: for example, symmetric and asymmetric models. These differ in the sequence by which the rhythmic line is formed. Moreover, an important role is played by the choice of words in the initial and final strong positions (SP or S-positions) of a line. The symmetric model is highly rigid. In it, the outer S-positions of a line are filled no later than the internal: if the line beginning is formed first (the word/words in the first SP are chosen), then the line end is formed next, and vice versa. …

Bundles, Trunks, Magazines: Storage, a Perspectival Description, and the Generation of Narrative

Abstract: Via a common slippage, we assume that interior spaces are domestic spaces. Thus, Gaston Bachelard opens The Poetics of Space with a series of images that equate "inside space, in its unity and complexity" with "the house," which provides "shelter," "protected intimacy," and a sense of "inhabiting" to the people who occupy it (3-4). This complex of figures-interior, interiority, inhabitation-assigns interior spaces the primary function of harboring human beings and figuring their personalities via metaphors of interiority as enclosed space. When it is a home, interior space provides refuge and comfort, originating the self. However, need interior space always be domestic space, as suggested by Bachelard and much of nineteenthcentury prose fiction? As we will see, in the pre-realist and picaresque novels of the eighteenth century, interior spaces are primarily spaces of storage rather than of habitation, and this difference has implications for character subjectivity as for the form of the novel.The idea of home as the primary interior space is given a history by Walter Benjamin and Leo Spitzer. Separated by only a few years, their accounts specify that inside space only becomes an "interior" as a result of social and economic forces of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. In "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Benjamin writes that under Louis Philippe, "for the private individual, places of dwelling are for the first time opposed to places of work. The former come to constitute the interior" (19). Human beings are transformed into "private individuals]" when "places of dwelling" come to be seen as "interiors," spaces defined in opposition to other, public spaces, such as places of work and of economic exchange. According to Benjamin, the interior enables a retreat from the social world, sustaining its inhabitants' fantasy of a space free from the demands of a social reality: "the private individual, who in the office has to deal with realities, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions" (19). As wage-labor comes to take place primarily outside the home, the domestic interior provides an "asylum" ( 19) from commodification. The bourgeois man does not feel at home in the broader world but can create a sheltering universe in the domestic home, which protects and sustains the fiction of a private, self-determining identity.Leo Spitzer, writing in 1942, further specifies that the nineteenth century sees the development of the domestic interior as a compensatory formation for the loss of a sense of being at home in the broader world: "the world-embracing, metaphysical cupola that once enfolded mankind has disappeared, and man is left to rattle around in an infinite universe" (195). In Spitzer's account, the domestic space of an individual becomes a milieu, or personality-sustaining environment, after the loss of a sense that the universe provides an enveloping environment for individuals. Home is the "interior" once the world becomes "exterior." Furthermore, Spitzer specifies that these interiors must be furnished with objects in order to successfully shelter the individual. The cozy home is not an empty space but rather, according to Spitzer, "the milieu of an individual is 'full of a number of things' ... [and] the individual thinks of himself ... as surrounded by things, familiar things-each of which goes to make up the final quality of his particular milieu, and on each of which he leaves some imprint of himself' (195). The domestic interior comprises a set of objects that coalesce into an ensemble in which the human individual is ensconced and by which he is mirrored. The inhabitant of such a milieu is Benjamin's "etui mensch," the man defined, as instruments are, by being cushioned in a velvet-lined case, or etui, that allows no excess space, no rattling around.1 The interior functions as a case when it stills the motion of its contents, both human and nonhuman.Aesthetic depictions of this kind of interior space appear with increasing frequency in the nineteenth century. …

First-Person and Second-Generation Perspectives on Starvation in Kafka's "Ein Hungerkünstler"

Abstract: Hunger and Anorexia Funnily enough, Kafka's story "Ein Hungerkunstler" has no hunger in it Once I noticed it, I found this really quite weird, although it's very easy to read the whole text multiple times and not notice it at all As far as I'm aware, no one else who's written about this text has noticed this absence (or considered it noteworthy), and maybe I noticed it only because I suffered from anorexia for ten years, and for ten years was hungry, so that it feels deeply strange to me to read a story about a man starving himself to death and apparently never feeling hungry at all The kind of sensitivity created by my personal history might sometimes be a biasing liability when analyzing literary texts, but I think it may also sometimes be an asset, and more generally may point towards a new way of doing cognitive criticism Specifically in this case, the observation about there being a gap where one might reasonably expect hunger can unlock a new understanding of the story Most interpretations of "Ein Hungerkunstler" see the act of not eating as standing in for something else: an artistic attitude, for example, or a moral stance In what follows, I'll draw on Peter Lamarque's tripartite distinction between explication (clarifying localized textual meaning), elucidation (exploring the narrative world of the text), and interpretation (appraising the thematic meaning of the work) to argue that ethically and textually sensitive critical practice should do justice to the first two of these three stages before proceeding to the third In this respect, second-generation cognitive criticism conforms to the more general principles set out by Lamarque; what he--and I--see as the tenets of any responsible critical engagement with a text also happen to be furthered by this particular cognitive approach Specifically, I hope to show that the act of "Hungern" (fasting) which is this text's primary subject matter contains abundant meanings and effects within it, on the level of elucidation, and that these can be illuminated by a cognitive understanding of the central paradox of the text: the ongoing act of "Hungern" without, apparently, any feeling of "Hunger" Although the current discussion will primarily be arguing for and against ways of reading texts like Kafka's rather than offering a detailed close reading, the notion of cognitive realism could certainly also dovetail with and enrich the analysis of textual features like narrative perspective and reader-response features like mental imagery The framework for this argument will consist of a second-generation strand--a critical perspective informed by a basic understanding of how the cognitive realities of fasting are shaped by the physiology of fasting--and a first-person strand, drawing on my experience of anorexia nervosa The connective point between the two will be the concept of "cognitive realism," the correspondence between textual evocations of a specific aspect of cognition and how this aspect of cognition is understood in current cognitive science (Troscianko, "Cognitive Realism and Memory") I'll show how cognitive realism and its relation to folk-psychological intuitions, which latter are often if not usually at odds with the cognitive realities, can be a source of hypotheses about how readers (including professional readers) may respond to a given text A scientifically grounded understanding of cognition allows us to make informed claims not just about how cognitive realities connect with textual features, but also about how folk psychology (people's intuitive understanding of how their minds work) diverges systematically from those realities, and may yield its own set of readerly expectations and hence responses This approach differs from the field known as "reader-response studies" in that readers are conceived of as flesh-and-blood beings with actual minds susceptible to scientific exploration, rather than primarily as textual incarnations (Troscianko, Kafka's Cognitive Realism 10-11) …

Description and Perspective: The Representation of Interiors 1

Abstract: The narratological analysis of description and even its definition and distinction from surrounding narrative report of action has given rise to a host of problems and questions (Genette, Bal, Klaus, Ronen), as indeed the introduction to this special issue has already briefly acknowledged. Narratological study of description has invariably focused on the nineteenth-century novel and its Modernist heirs, and to a lesser extent on the prevalence of description in the nouveau roman (though Genette argues that even there description does not replace narrative but becomes narrativized- "Frontieres" 59-60). Extensive work has been done on the enumeration of items in descriptive passages (Hamon, "What is"; Bal 122; Haupt) and on the articulation of themes and subthemes (see Bal and the studies she summarizes; Mosher and Zoran) as well as the elaboration of contiguous features and qualities that serve to expand lists into descriptions in Balzac or Zola (Hamon, Introduction, "What is").2 David Lodge, in a brief subsection of The Modes of Modern Writing (93-103), has additionally noted the inherently metonymic character of descriptions (see also Bal 122); not only does the narrative move from one contiguous item to the other but the qualities ascribed to the listed objects tend to become representative of the place or person(s) described. Characters' habits and clothing inevitably signal their morals or beliefs, thus operating on the lines of synecdoche. However, as Lodge notes, these metonymies often congeal into metaphors and symbols (he defines a symbol as a "metaphorical metonymy"-100) since the rhetorical elaboration of the noted objects or features consistently resorts to metaphoric implication. At the same time, Lodge points out that description may sometimes forego the use of tropes but then tends to achieve a generally 'metonymic' effect through the extensive use of "repetition, balance, and antithesis," a strategy-illustrated on the example of E. M. Forster's opening paragraph to A Passage to India-that Lodge regards as "perhaps the nearest thing in prose to 'the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination'" (98).Other narratological studies of description have focused on description's non-storylike (event-less) quality. Description occurs in the pauses of narrative progression (events and dialogue) just like narratorial commentary. As Seymour Chatman's model illustrates to perfection, existents and setting provide the static background on which the dynamically conceived events are configured (66-81). In accordance with Chatman, both Hamon (Introduction, "What is,") and Margolin ("Character") emphasize the strong correlation between description and constitution of character. The tendency to partition description off from the surrounding report of events is carried to an extreme in Helmut Bonheim's The Narrative Modes, in which he sees texts as splitting up into four kinds of chunks: narrative report, commentary, dialogue, and description. There is, as I have argued, a tendency in the development of written narrative from an oral model of storytelling to the rise of the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to increasingly proportion the narrative discourse into alternate segments of report, commentary, description, and dialogue scenes (later also representations of characters' thoughts), which eventually expand into discrete textual units in the discourse (see Fludernik, Towards, Chapters 2 - 4). In the nineteenth-century novel, this practice of juxtaposing these four types of textual elements rose to a high point. The pattern appears in many nineteenth-century novels like Le Pere Goriot, which opens with a several pages' long description of the setting (zooming in on the characters from a survey of the region to the town and down to the house in which the protagonists live); the novel thus anticipates sociological analysis in a synecdochic manner.Description moreover has been noted to be a crucial functional element in the configuration of narrative dynamics. …

Minds at Play: Narrative Games and Fictional Minds in B.S. Johnson's House Mother Normal

Abstract: What does it mean to read minds in fiction? Are fictional minds merely artificial figments, or are they shaped and understood in much the same ways as real minds? How can new hypotheses about real minds (e.g., with regard to embodiment, enactivism, extended cognition, Theory of Mind) provide new answers to these questions? These are some of the most heavily debated questions in cognitive literary studies since the late 1990s (see, for example, Palmer 2004, Zunshine 2006, Herman 2011, McHale 2012, Caracciolo 2012, Makela 2013). Against the backdrop of those questions and debates, this essay explores how second-generation cognitive approaches to narrative might be able to bridge the divide. It argues for a synthesis in which the hypotheses of the extended, embedded, and embodied mind can be reconciled with a narrative analysis that recognizes the artificial nature of fictional minds. As the guest editors of this issue explain in the introduction, this strand builds on a "second generation" of cognitive science, which acknowledges that minds function in constant interaction with the body and the environment. Minds can and should not be seen as separate from that interaction. Introduction When it comes to the thematic and stylistic aspects of fictional minds, each literary narrative raises specific questions, which can shed light on more general issues of consciousness evocation. In this essay, I wish to focus on House Mother Normal (1971), a novel that enriches our understanding of the ways in which both the literary conventions underlying fictional minds and their cognitive facets contribute to the process of literary meaning-making. Also, my reading of the novel highlights the added value of second-generation cognitive approaches to fictional minds. At issue in House Mother Normal, written by the experimental British writer B.S. Johnson, is how dementia can be convincingly depicted in interior monologue and how metafiction affects the illusion of authenticity associated with the mimetic evocation of minds. The novel evokes fictional minds with familiar as well as with less traditional means, which fits in with Johnson's project of novelistic experimentation. In his seven novels (1963-1975), he uses inventive narrative strategies for consciousness evocation. In House Mother Normal as well as in other novels, visual and material features of the book are granted a narrative function. These features can also expose the illusion of the fictional world. In view of its particular narrative structure, the novel is thus suited to test an approach that does justice to the cognitive and the aesthetic aspects of fictional minds. The first section of this essay will introduce the novel and describe the ways in which it experiments with the evocation of minds. In the second section, these procedures will form the basis of my discussion of some tendencies in cognitive-narratological accounts of fictional minds. Whereas critics have emphasized that the minds depicted in House Mother Normal turn inward and back to the past, a cognitive approach instead reveals that there are also extended, embodied, and embedded dimensions to the characters' minds. Not only does a traditional narratological approach ignore these aspects of the formal composition, it would also miss an important thematic strand in the novel, I will argue. In fact, the ethical crux (1) of the novel becomes more sharply visible when one notices how these minds are coupled with the environment, the body, and with other minds. Also, the cognitive-cum-narratological approach itself will be put to the test: can it illuminate the evocation of minds if these minds are situated in a metafictional context? In other words, can a cognitive approach do justice to the aesthetic nature of (meta)fictional mentation? The answers to these questions will also lead to a heuristic model for the analysis of fictional minds, which combines narrative modes with what I call "cognitive modes," and makes room for "scales" (e. …

What Reading Fiction Has to Do with Doing Well Academically

Abstract: In their target essay for this volume, Peter Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft observe that the Common Core Standards "have no significant theoretical grounding at all, and thus provide no purchase for real conversation and debate." To remedy this problem they propose a theoretical base emerging from "a loose amalgam of rhetorical narrative theory, Speech Act Theory, and cognitive narrative theory (as distinct from actual cognitive science)." I find their proposal compelling, and am particularly gratified by their parenthetical insistence that cognitive narrative theory is distinct from actual cognitive science. Over the last decade. I've been working toward establishing cognitive narratology not as an adjunct of cognitive science but as a specifically literary theory. Yet I should point out that, in this case, another look at cognitive science proper can add important nuance to our understanding of the Common Core project. Specifically, we have research at the intersection of cognitive science and literary theory that is directly relevant to the Common Core Standards' goal of fostering complex thinking in K-12 students. Ignoring this research will have a short-term negative impact on elementary-, middle- and high-school students (particularly those from low-income backgrounds) and a long-term negative impact on every discipline in higher education. The Common Core initiative recommends focusing on the acquisition of "the academic vocabulary that pervades complex texts of all types" (Coleman, 11). That means including more informational texts (like literary nonfiction) and less fiction in the curriculum. (2) Cognitive scientists and literary theorists have plenty to say on this subject. Cognitive science connects the acquisition of vocabulary to social cognition, or the development of theory of mind--a capacity to attribute mental states, including thoughts, beliefs, and desires, to oneself and others. According to the developmental psychologists Joan Peskin and Janet Wilde Astington, it's been shown that children attending schools in low-income neighborhoods "demonstrate substantial lags in their theory-of-mind understanding" and that at 6 years old, they know only half the number of words as do children from higher socioeconomic groups. "Children whose parents do not provide a rich lexicon for distinguishing language about perceiving, thinking, and evaluating might make important gains from hearing and talking such talk in their everyday story reading," write Peskin and Astington. "A rich vocabulary, more than any other measure, is related to school performance" (256). Cognitive science thus gives a concrete definition to what proponents of the Common Core initiative are seeking for elementary and secondary students: what David Coleman, president of the College Board, calls "an underlying language of complexity" (11). It's metacognition--thinking about thinking. As Peskin and Astington explain, "In the intermediate and later school years, there is the developing understanding of high-level metalinguistic and metacognitive terms such as infer, imply, predict, doubt, estimate, concede, assume, and confirm--terms used in scientific and historical thinking" (254). It's not incidental that the words chosen by Coleman to exemplify complex vocabulary--appearance, consequential, and deliberate"--denote various aspects of metacognitive reasoning. Armed with this language of complexity, students indeed do better in school, and now we understand why. Here's where it gets interesting--and brings us closer to the subject at hand: fiction. Peskin and Astington wanted to test "whether exposure to an explicit metalanguage [results] in a greater conceptual understanding of one's own and other people's beliefs or whether this understanding develops more implicitly" (254). For their study, they rewrote kindergartners' picture books "so that the texts were rich in explicit metacognitive vocabulary, such as think, know, remember, wonder, figure out, and guess" (255). …

Describing the Unseen: The Visceral and Virtual Construction of Spaces in Bleak House

Abstract: Space and place have up to now been conceived by narrative theorists in terms of vision and movement. The term "focalization" and its ancestor, "point of view," are dead metaphors likening the construction of narrative perspective (another visual metaphor) to the act of standing in a particular spot and seeing the diegetic world from there. Marie-Laure Ryan's entry on "space" in the online Living Handbook of Na r rato logy explains that descriptions are "the major discourse strategy for disclosure of spatial information," which she conceives in visual terms as "a more or less detailed glimpse at the current spatial frame" (par. 19). Ryan observes that space can also be rendered more dynamically through references to movement of characters or objects, reports of characters' perceptions, narrativized renditions of how particular places came into being within the storyworld, and implications arising from reported events. The visual and the kinesthetic are not, however, the only dimensions of spatial construction available to the English novel, as a close look at Charles Dickens's Bleak House will show.1 Extending the corpus of narratology's examples back into earlier periods of literary history-as all the essays in this collection demonstrate-can expand and complicate narrative-theoretical concepts of how storyworld spaces take shape.My close analysis of Bleak House suggests that Dickens's text challenges current theories of spatial construction in two ways, both of them departures from the assumption that narrative spaces are conceived as virtually "seen." Indeed, I will argue that Dickens creates spaces through invocation of the unseen. First, there is the visceral: although the novel is full of countless examples of spaces taking shape through vision and motion, many of those places are characterized by smell, touch, sound, and even taste. By adding the olfactory, the auditory, the gustatory, and the tactile to techniques for constructing narrative space,2 Dickens's practice invokes sensations registered not just by the eyes but by multiple parts of the body, from the nose to the skin to the mouth.3 Dickens's mode of creating space moves beyond visual perception to what I will call "visceral apperception."4 Not so much visceral as virtual, the second way in which Dickens relies upon the unseen to create fictional spaces is a technique I will call "reverse ekphrasis." If ekphrasis is the description of art works within a verbal text, reverse ekphrasis is a device for bringing to mind extra-textual works of art with which audiences would have been familiar. Like all nineteenth-century realist novelists, Dickens constructs spaces visually through reference to the boundaries of a particular setting and to selected objects within those boundaries. In Dickens's novels, these special objects have at least two functions. They often serve as mnemonic devices to aid the serial reader with remembering the characteristics of important spaces during the breaks between parts, similar to Dickens's famous trick of assigning a definitive action or phrase to a character who repeats it upon every appearance.'1 Those individual objects also serve as cues around which a reader can build up a more fully realized imaginary space that goes beyond what is "seen" in the text.In Bleak House those details operate in concert with reverse ekphrasis, drawing on an audience's familiarity with engravings and sketches of popular artworks to help construct a virtual image of the fictional space. The illustrations by Phiz (aka Hablot Browne) that appeared in the monthly serial parts as well as in the bound first edition of Bleak House reinforce the verbally invoked visual details but oddly do not augment them very much. These drawings, like the written descriptions, clue readers in to what they can't "see" in the descriptions or illustrations in Bleak House but might be able to reconstruct from other pictures they remember having seen. Both visceral apperception and reverse ekphrasis, then, refer in different ways to the unseen in passages of description: not just to what a fictional space looks like but to what it smells, feels, and tastes like as well as to remembered visual images the reader might bring to bear upon picturing the storyworld. …

Illustrations and Text: Storyworld Space and the Multimodality of Serialized Narrative

Abstract: Illustrations permeated and arguably defined Victorian print for much of the nineteenth century. Just as technological advances facilitated the proliferation of printed materials due to the reductions in costs produced by high-speed steam presses, Patricia Anderson demonstrates how similar improvements made "high-quality mass reproduction of diverse imagery" both possible and profitable (2). Consequently, the Victorian reading public expected illustrations as a central print component in everything from advertisements and news reports, to poetry, printed books, and serialized stories. Perhaps no form of publishing was affected more by the use of images in the nineteenth century than that of serialized narratives. Beginning with Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), the inclusion of illustrations played a significant role in the serial's distribution and reception. Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge have argued that "appeals relevant to all illustrated Victorian fiction apply with particular force to serial novels, in which the placement and prominence of illustrations made images an essential part the Victorian reading experience" as they became "key aspects of every installment" (66). Similarly, while J. R. Harvey acknowledges that Victorian book illustrations were "often accessories after the fact" that "do not belong to the novel in the sense that without them the novel would not be complete," he singles out serialized novels as an important exception (2). For Harvey, "it is precisely in this respect that the serial novels are so unusual: they do show text and picture making a single art" (2). Thus, rather than acting independently, the visual illustrations included in Victorian serialized narratives work in tandem with the verbal words on the page as one narrative text in its evocation of the storyworld. Previous scholarship concerning illustrations in this context focuses on how the dual perspectives provided in each mode subvert plot and character construction in the storyworld and speak to issues of reliability. For example, Robert Patton suggests illustrations in Dickens's works often offer alternative perspectives and contradictory voices to those described in the narrative discourse, creating a "polyvocality" that is "everywhere present in illustrated narratives" (92). However, scholars of this period often neglect how the multimodal aspect of serial narratives also affects the construction the space of the narrative, typically relegating the spatial component to background or scenery in favor of interpreting the focal characters and their actions. This essay, therefore, examines the role illustrations play in the construction of the storyworld space in two widely popular early Victorian serials: William Harrison Ainsworth's Tack Sheppard (1839-1840),1 originally published as monthly installments in Bentley's Miscellany, and George W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London (1844-1845), originally published in weekly eight-page penny-parts. Specifically, I examine the importance of opening illustrations in establishing a reader's spatial entrance to the storyworld and how each individual installment establishes a unique re-entry for the reader into the storyworld due to the serial's enforced interruptions. Secondly, I also consider how the material placement of the visual image on the printed page relative to the corresponding verbal discourse potentially affects the reader's construction of particular interior spaces within the storyworld. This relationship is important to understand for two reasons. First, while the enforced interruptions present in the original illustrations are erased when compiled into bound forms, the narrative patterns dictated by the conventions of serialization remain present in the structure of the storyworld and its spatial components. Secondly, my focus on the structure and interaction of illustrations and printed text in the original installments as opposed to later compiled editions acknowledges arguments previously made by Leighton and Surridge concerning how changes in the physical arrangement of the text from installment to bound novel changes the configuratory process of the reader. …

Approaching the Interior of the Eighteenth-Century English Country House

Abstract: In the late eighteenth century in England, the term "approach" became a noun, with a very specific architectural meaning. As a verb, of course, it primarily meant "the act of drawing near" (Johnson's Dictionary, 1755). (1) Humphry Repton (1752-1818), inventor of the term "landscape gardening," conceptualized the idea of the approach as a carefully designed experience in perspective, a drive from the lodges at the entrance of an estate "through the most interesting part of the grounds, and ... displaying] the scenery of the place to the greatest advantage" (Observations 34). John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843), Scottish botanist and Reptonian landscape planner, defined "approach" in his Treatise on Forming, Improving, and Managing Country Residences (1806) as "a variety of road peculiar to a house in the country. In direction it should, on the one hand, neither be affectedly graceful or waving ...; nor, on the other, vulgarly rectilineal, direct, or abrupt" (2:590; original emphasis). The approach should "form new combinations on every movement of the spectator" (2:591). This idea of approach as a constructed experience, predicated on movement, is part of the picturesque aesthetic, of course, but it more largely might be characterized as part of a shifting cultural interest in angles of perception in a variety of modes. "In the ancient style, the grand object is, to obtain a straight line," Loudon explains, while "in the modern style, a winding line is preferred, as being more easy and natural, and ... displaying a greater variety of scenery" (Encyclopedia 769). Not just architecture but a whole host of cultural enterprises were becoming interested in something other than a straight line as a way of approaching something else. In this essay I will use the historically specific concept of the architectural approach to enter the interiors of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels from a different perspective. I make three intertwined claims. First, architectural treatises and novels self-consciously invoked each other. Any Austen reader knows how often her characters call on Repton to improve their estates. And as Peter Collins argues, "[i]t was the desire to live the experiences of a novel which constituted the original essence of architectural romanticism" (39). In synchronized step with the novel, the narratives of the architectural manuals and the guides to the country estates became increasingly interested in describing domestic interiors. Second, these descriptions adopt patterns that take "a winding line" and "form new combinations" for the reader, both visually and narratively, on approaching and entering the house. The approach is perspectival, reflecting what Collins sees as the eighteenth-century architectural interest in parallax, or "the apparent displacement of objects caused by an actual change in the point of observation" (27). That is, in architecture, things (objects, buildings, views) are designed to produce the perception of movement in the observer. I argue that the narrative strategies of architectural manuals, country house guides, and novels attempt the same effect. Narrative parallax, we might say, is achieved when one sentence winds into the next for a different perspective, as in the new approach of free indirect discourse to psychological interiors. And third, the perceptual experiences of changing perspectives--these designed "approaches" in architecture, country house tours, and novels--find a common linguistic denominator in a changing grammatical and typographical landscape, away from objects and things (and capitalized common nouns) to the spaces in between (verbs and participles, prepositions and adjectives). (2) A preposition, as defined by one nineteenth-century grammarian, is a word that "enter[s] into a complex proposition, in combination with a Noun or Pronoun, to express some relation" (Fowler 319). In a period where the dominant aesthetic was the picturesque, the architecture was parallaxed, the approach was winding, and narrative explored the indirect, we could say that the cultural perspective was tending towards the prepositional. …

Concealment and Revelation: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Reader Suspense

Abstract: IntroductionChristie has been praised as an ingenious puzzle-plotter.1 In her detective narratives, she distracts her readers from the facts, which are in full view on the page. By presenting facts as what is not as what might be, in these false trails the reader is faced with duplicity and performance of the character. The reader, as an active participant in the narration, tries to work through the plethora of clues and red-herrings presented in the narration. Through the plot twists, the reader, like the detective, attempts to discover who could be the murderer among the closed community of suspects in the narrative.In this article I look at this duplicity of the character or character/narrator in presenting what is not, or what might be, in the DF of linguistic elements like participant role in transitivity function and in circumstantial elements. This is to find out how an elusive metalanguage is created in the grammar of "deliberate act of omission" in detective discourse.2 The study of discourse grammar is argued in Barthes as:Discourse as a set of sentence is organized ... through this organization it can be seen as a message of another language, one operational at a higher level than the language of the linguistics. Discourse has its units, its rules, and its "grammar": beyond the sentence . . . Discourse must be studied from the basis of linguistics. (83)For the purpose of framework, I first identify the DF in standard analysis (7 [subject] broke [goal-oriented process] the vase [object]) and in ergative3 analysis (7 [actor] broke [process] the vase [medium]) of transitivity functions (the variable is not one of extension but of causation4) in detective discourse to follow an intentional action from unintentional. This followed by the DF in definite and indefiniteness of circumstantial elements (participant typically indirectly linked to process) for truth value of an event.Using clause complexes from Ackroyd (Appendix 1), I then analyse the contextual gaps created in linguistic rectification like DF. The contextual gaps can be paralepsis (information in excess of what is called for by the logic of the type selected), analepses (to provide necessary information about a character or event, characteristically to fill in gaps5) or paralipsis6 (the holding back of information that would be logically produced under the type of focalization selected). The clause complexes adapted from the story are specific contexts, which as cardinal functions (nuclei)7 constitute real hinge-points in the detective narrative. In contextual monitoring8 of "readers" awareness of the grouping of particular characters in a particular place at a particular time in specific context analysed, I show the suspense, which is a form of distortion9, and is linguistically created in the way of logical disturbance in a narrative sequence.Frame workTransitivity systemThis is an ideational function10 (systematic relationship between the Active form and its Passive counterpart) of language, where action and the type of participant involved in that action/process are identified, e.g. in the way of intentional vs. unintentional, who is agentive and who is acted upon; doers or thinkers, instrument or force. As seen in Table (1), this relates to participant's dispositions, i.e. their ability to control things, or to infer causal connections, or powerlessness.Participant disposition is different in each example. The disposition in 1 is different from that in 2-4. In 6 and 7 there is one participant in the relational11 (processes realised by verb be) and behavioural process12 (of physiological and psychological behaviour). Material13 process (involves "doing words") and behavioural processes freely progressivize, as in 8 where processes, and, therefore, participant disposition are more developmental. This makes the narrative event in complex 8 dynamic than events in 1-4. The disposition thus in 8 is more dynamic than 1-4. …

Introduction: Narrative Perspectives and Interior Spaces in Literature Before 1850

Abstract: This special issue of Style investigates how writers present interior spaces (houses, drawing rooms, halls, offices, closets, etc.) in narrative literature. (1) A much greater variety of interiors could be focused on, for instance, prisons, covered markets, yacht cabins, or train compartments. The question of visual representation in narrative has been revived by recent research into readers' cognitive mapping activities and their participation in the co-creation of storyworlds. Marie-Laure Ryan commented in 2003 that "while it seems evident that narrative comprehension requires some kind of mental model of space--how else could readers imagine character movements?--the issue of the form and content of this model remains to be explored" (Ryan 216; original emphasis). According to Ryan, drawing on Linde and Labov as well as Tversky, spatial description can convey objects' intrinsic orientations relative to one another from a stable viewpoint (gaze perspective), or it can suggest a bird's-eye view that presents a totalized mental image of a specific setting in the shape of a map (216). A third possibility, one that bridges the temporal demands of narrative form and the spatial logic of a map, is the tour, which "represents space dynamically from a perspective internal to the territory to be surveyed, namely the perspective of a moving object. The tour thus simulates the embodied experience of a traveler" (Ryan 218). Though this strategy seems especially appropriate to the chronotopes associated with the novel, the demands of description antedate the novel as a genre. The rhetoric of the catalog, the discourse of the tour-guide or guidebook, the conventions of ekphrasis, and other strategies may be deployed in interior descriptions with or without a situated focalizer, the most common technique in modernist narrative. Perspectival rendering of space makes it possible for the reader to visualize objects in relation to one another, even to map the room and its contents. In response to figural narrative situations rigorously employing a focalizer whose perspective provides a consistent center of consciousness, a tacit rule holds that "the description has to be felt by the reader to depend on the vision of the character who is responsible for it, on his ability to see, and not on the knowledge of the novelist, on the contents of his files" (Hamon 149). If a character's perceptions do not govern representation of the space he or she enters or moves in, what does? In addition to enriching the evidence for a developmental account of perspectivism, arising out of earlier aperspectival techniques, this special issue contributes to the understanding of description as a component of narrative fiction. Description has been a neglected stepchild in the very large family of narratological concepts. Traditional narrative theory of the mid-twentieth century often employed description as the other against which narrative proper was defined by juxtaposition. For example, Felix Martmez-Bonati--in the opening gambit of his Fictive Discourse, dedicated to describing the stylistic features of literary language--writes: "Narration is the purely linguistic representation of change in particular persons, states of affairs, and circumstances. Description, on the other hand, is the representation of permanent, momentary, or recurring things, or events of short duration, in their unchanging aspects" (Martinez-Bonati 22). Description thus comes to occupy the space between the events that constitute story, and as an element of discourse it is perceived to delay or even halt the action: a retardatory structure (Sternberg 161) or a "relatively autonomous expansion, characteristically referential" (Hamon 148). In her 1985 original Narratology Mieke Bal charily defined description as "a textual fragment in which features are attributed to objects" (Bal 130), acknowledging that these marginally important passages are "practically and logically necessary" (129) and linking them to motivation (130-34). …

Building Paper Houses

Abstract: In "Euclid at the Core: Recentering Literary Education" Rabinowitz and Bancroft set out to develop "a set of comprehensible, pragmatic, and coherent principles about literature, readers, and the act of reading" A timely project indeed given the curricular and instructional reforms likely to be engendered by the Common Core State Standards I very much admire both the thinking that Rabinowitz and Bancroft did in articulating those principles and the way that Bancroft enacted them in her teaching Helping students work to "articulate an overarching experience" by showing multiple versions of the same scene in Macbeth, giving them conscious control of rules of notice and rules of signification by helping them apply those rules in a wide variety of texts, and holding a Cinderella conference all suggest a classroom environment full of wonderfully rich intellectual exchanges, exchanges that will surely help students develop the "interpretive flexibility" that Rabinowitz and Bancroft champion Indeed Jeff Wilhelm and I (2010) have advocated similar instructional ideas But our most recent project (2014), in which we try to explain the nature and variety of pleasure young people take in their out of school reading, reminds us that that reading literature is not just an intellectual experience I worry that the essay, in Peter's terms, privileges the authorial audience at the expense of the narrative audience and in so doing runs the risk of minimizing the power of the experience that students can take from reading literature Rabinowitz and Bancroft offer this definition of literature: "As a speech act, literature is fundamentally an invitation, specifically an invitation, designed for us, to read the mind of the author (15)" Here's note 15: "In most cases, of course, this involves a reading the minds of the characters as well" Why does the author get the mention in the text while characters are relegated to a footnote? I think it's because literary theory, including the theory developed here, privileges the semiotic over the mimetic This emphasis a makes some sense After all, as Rabinowitz and Bancroft explain, the CCSS place primary emphasis on the explicit meaning of a text and the logical inferences readers can derive from it The readers we studied were very mindful of this schoolish emphasis As one of them explained, "When you pick up a book in school, you know that there's supposed to be something you're getting out of this, and that's all you really think about, what does the teacher want me to understand from reading this" But there's more to reading than getting what even the best of teachers wants a student to understand In his study of what he calls ludic readers, Nell (1988) talks about the pleasure of entering a story world: These are the paired wonders of reading: the world creating power of books, and the reader's effortless absorption that allows the book's fragile world, all air and thought, to maintain itself for a while, a bamboo and paper house among earthquakes; within it readers acquire peace, become more powerful, feel braver and wiser in ways of the world (1) Drawing on Dewey (1913), we label this kind of pleasure the pleasure of play This is how Dewey describes it: There are cases where action is direct and immediate It puts itself forth with no thought of anything beyond It satisfies in and of itself The end is the present activity, and so there is no gap in the mind between means and end All play is of this immediate character (21) The readers in our study talked about how their reading had this playful emphasis on the immediate experience One said that she reads "to dissipate the real world Go somewhere new Get rid of me and become someone else" Another made a similar remark: I feel like I just read to get the story out of the book and stuff, and it's good to be alone with whatever they're saying in the book, in your own head just thinking about what's happening, and it's like getting away from your own world into somebody else's that could be way cooler, or not so cool …

Supernatural Intuitions and Classic Detective Fiction: A Cognitivist Appraisal

Abstract: Can detective fiction be illuminated by the psychology of religion? In this article I show (1) that classic detective fiction rhetorically accords the “privileged epistemic access” to mental states that we intuitively assign to punitive supernatural agents to the literary detective; and (2) that viewing the genre through this lens addresses several inconsistencies that have thus far resisted easy solution in the critical literature. I then make the argument (3) that this generic blurring results from competing historical pressures that simultaneously engendered greater levels of secularism and an increased propensity to believe in supernatural punishers in nineteenth century urban populations.

Interior Space and Description in Keats's Narrative Poetry

Abstract: IntroductionIn Keats's narrative poetry, an acute awareness of the spaces that characters occupy and in which the action unfolds gives particular symbolic significance to various interior spaces (such as castles and houses, living rooms, ballrooms, bedrooms, tombs, etc.) with windows and doors or no openings. In this article, I account for Keats's employment of the descriptive method with a specific focus on his creation of interior space. How does he craft these interior spaces? Which means are used to achieve which ends? How do they function within the narratives? And are they mainly performed by narrators or focalized through characters?To address these issues, I turn to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's book Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, published in 1766. Lessing theorizes what he deems the proper subjects for painting and poetry, respectively. Although he concludes that depicting objects in space belongs to painting whereas depicting a sequence of events falls under the domain of poetry, he investigates how poetry and painting can use each other's resources. In a similar vein, Georg Lukacs has theorized about literature's means of evoking space in his 1936 essay "Narrate or Describe?" Skeptical towards extensive descriptions as mere fillers, Lukacs instead advocates that description should be thematically integrated in a central action.In dialogue with Lessing's and Lukacs's theories, I analyze Keats's use of description and interior space in his narrative poetry. I apply three ideas from Lessing to Keats: first of all, his notion of an economy of descriptive adjectives (functioning as epithets); secondly, his notion of narrativized description; and finally, the notion that poetry literally organizes language spatially. In relation to the latter, I supplement Lessing with Brian McHale's notion that poetry spaces language, proposed in "The Unnaturalness of Poetry" (2013). Though I argue that Keats's rendition of space is mainly aperspectival, I employ Lessing's three ideas to probe the way his description of interior space can have multiple functions: serving as deliberate interruptions; being thematized, semanticized and narrativized; offering a poetic vision; and occasionally reflecting character psychology.The interpretation of Keats focuses on "Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil" (1818) and "The Eve of St. Agnes" ( 1820). In "Isabella," I explore the image of the tomb and the spatial entities of the pot and the forest, which according to Keats's extended understanding of space function as interior spaces (with the ability to contain living or dead people within them). In "St. Agnes," I focus on the symbolic significance of Madeline's chamber as space for the scene of seduction, the climax of the story.Descriptive Stasis versus Plot ProgressionIn "Sleep and Poetry" (1817) Keats bids farewell to delightful poetry in order to write in an epic and more narrative mode, with these often-quoted lines: "And can I ever bid these joys farewell? / Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life, / Where I may find the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts" ( 122-125). Yet if we assess what Keats went on to write, the narrative poetry of his last volume of poetry Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems ( 1820) does not really conform to these epic aspirations. For one thing, he continues to write lyric poetry (not least, the critically-acclaimed great odes) and, for another, he composes his narrative poems, which are lyric-narrative hybrids.Keats indulges in elaborate descriptions of various items in both his lyric and in his lyric-narrative poetry. Scholars have stressed how "Keatsian narrators" often present various figures "as though they were art objects" (Kelley 170). Keats's "Fragment of Castle-Builder" typifies his interest in description. The speaker in the poem indulges in imagining-or performatively inventing-a specific room in a castle. Theresa Kelley writes about how the "title and the repeated use of the modal 'should' (26, 28, 59, 63, 65) recognize this room as a rich poetic 'phantasy' (47), created out of thin air" and that "[tjhe features and appointments seem both substantial and yet patently invented" (Kelley 175). …

Historiographic Metafiction, French Style

Abstract: One of the main trends in the French novel since the 1980s has been what the title of an anthology edited by Wolfgang Asholt and Marc Dambre calls Un Retour des formes romanesques dans la litterature francaise contemporaine. Moving away from the formalist experimentations of the 1950s-1960s, several French novelists have now "returned" to narratives that include such components as characters and plots--components that hard-core representatives of the Nouveau Roman like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Ricardou had stigmatized in their theoretical writings and--for some time at least--excluded from their fictional works. One of the chief aspects of that "return" is an engagement with history. Chapters are devoted to that trend in several recent surveys of the French novel, notably in Dominique Viart's Le Roman francais au XXe siecle (2011), Yves Tadie and Blanche Cerquiligni's Le Roman d'hier a demain (2012), Yves Clavaron's Poetique du roman postcolonial (2011), and editors' Bruno Blanckenman, Alice Murat-Brunel, and Marc Dambre Le Romanfrancais au toumant du XXIe siecle (2004). Obviously, the French novels that those studies earmark as "historical" do not all fall under the same mold. Some are straight, traditional narratives, which often belong thematically to the popular genre of the costume story; they tend to be situated in exotic areas, like Ancient Egypt (Christian Jacq's Ramses, Le Mystere d'Osiris), Renaissance Italy (Juliette Benzoni's La Florentine, La Chimere d'or des Borgia), and the French-speaking world in the nineteenth century (Maurice Denuziere's Helvetie, Louisiane). Other works fall under the subgenre that theorists have called "biographical fiction" (Viard), or more simply "biofiction" (Gefen); like Jean Echenoz's Ravel, Pierre Michon's Rimbaud le fils, and Alain Gerber's Charlie (about jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker), they treat actual figures without abiding by the constraints of scholarly biographies. A third group of texts, finally, combine their account of a specific moment in the past with a play on the conventions of the historical novel; more ambitious than the costume stories and even the biofictions, they question in diverse ways the rules, codes, and procedures of the genre of which they are a part. The three texts I want to consider fall under this latter category. More specifically, they belong to the subgenre that Linda Hutcheon has labeled "historiographic metafiction": "intensely self-reflexive," they also "paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages" (Poetics 5). Hutcheon, to be sure, did not have French literature in mind when she coined the term "historiographic metafiction" in the late 1980s. Her sample included mainly texts from the English-speaking world, such as The French Lieutenant's Woman, Midnight's Children, Ragtime and Famous Last Words. The same restrictions are found in most of the studies that followed in Hutcheon's footsteps, such as editors' Bemd Engler and Kurt Muller Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature (1994), Ansgar NUnning's Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion (1995), and Christina Kotte's Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction (2001). Conversely, the surveys of the French novel I have just listed do not use the concept of "historiographic metafiction" (or a French equivalent of it) when they describe the "turn to history" that French literature has supposedly taken since the 1980s. (1) It would be unfair to charge them with anglo-or americanocentrism because Hutcheon and the scholars in her legacy are explicit about their choices. The selectivity of their corpus, as well as the lack of the category "historiographic metafiction" in French literary history and theory, raises the question of knowing whether or not the subgenre has developed elsewhere, in this instance in French-speaking countries. The three novels I have selected certainly show that it has as they mobilize several of the strategies that have been identified in works written in English. …

James J. Murphy, Richard A. Katula, and Michael Hoppmann. A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric

Abstract: James J. Murphy, Richard A. Katula, and Michael Hoppmann. A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric. 4th ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. xii + 287 pp.Routledge's popular A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric has been thoroughly revised for its fourth edition. Two authors of the previous editions have died in the interim between the third and fourth editions: professor Forbes I. Hill and professor Donovan J. Ochs. The two remaining authors, professors James J. Murphy and Richard A Katula, have been joined by professor Michael Hoppmann in producing this new edition. While retaining the general framework of previous editions, the fourth revises every chapter as well as the classical texts appended for study.While previous editions identified the author(s) of each chapter, this new edition does not do so. Additionally, unlike the previous editions, this one adds a helpful synopsis at the end of each chapter. Chapter one, "The Origins of Rhetoric in the Democracy of Ancient Athens" expands significantly the first chapter of the third edition. It adds more historical background about the rise of Athenian democracy and the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. Most importantly, this edition includes several paragraphs on the role of women in Athenian society. Chapter two, "Rhetorical Consciousness and the Rise of the Sophists," reproduces the second chapter of the third edition, but with the addition of a section on Demosthenes not included in the previous editions. This chapter is especially important for its discussion of the various kinds of sophistry and the narrow focus of Plato's attack on it.Chapter three discusses Aristotle's Rhetoric, and this chapter is substantially revised from the previous edition. The authors have revised their very helpful outline of the Rhetoric which is then followed by a detailed synopsis of the work that is carried over from the previous edition. The distinguishing feature of the revision, however, is an expanded and clearer presentation of Aristotle's treatment of the enthymeme and the topoi. One of the advantages of this chapter, retained from the previous edition, is a useful discussion of the ambiguity of the term "probability" in Aristotle's treatise. Finally, the chapter includes an excellent exposition of Aristotle's anatomy of emotions, justifying his reputation as the first psychologist. The entire chapter is one of the most readable presentations of Aristotle's subtle (and sometimes confusing) work.Chapter four departs from the previous edition. Entitled "From Greek to 'Roman' Rhetoric with Synopses of Thee Pragmatic Handbooks," the chapter reorganizes and expands on the third edition's chapter on the codification of Roman rhetoric. The three "pragmatic handbooks" are the Rhetorica ad Alexandrian, the rhetoric of Hermagoras of Temnos, and the Rhetorica ad Herrenium. While the third edition treated each of these also, this edition greatly expands that treatment to include recent research. Along the way, the authors briefly summarize and analyze some works of lesser importance. First, the authors present a detailed outline and explication of the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, giving it a much more thorough treatment than that in the previous edition of their work. Second, their analysis of Hermagoras includes a very detailed study of Hermagoras's writings on stasis theory, illustrated with a very useful diagram. This section is one of the highlights of the new edition. It incorporates the latest research on stasis theory and makes it accessible to a less than expert reader.After discussing Hermagoras, the authors introduce some material on early Roman rhetoric. They provide useful historical background on the careers of Cato the Elder, Marcus Antonius, and Fucius Ficinius Crassus, indicating their contributions to early oratorical practice. Then they turn to Cicero's youthful De inventione. They provide a selection of passages only slightly altered from the previous edition, and they point out the significance (and shortcomings) of the work. …

"Il Est De Certaines Choses Qui Demandent Absolument Des Voiles": The Space of the Boudoir in the Marquis De Sade

Abstract: The Marquis de Sade made a career out of titillating his readers with lavish descriptions of what could and should, in his opinion, take place in a libertine boudoir. In several instances, however, he strategically chooses to hide the specifics of what happens in these eroticized sites, preferring to allow readers to draw their own conclusions as to what might be taking place inside. While sexual exploits are not, of course, limited to the boudoir in Sade, this room does serve as the ultimate site of hidden seduction, a location where everything can be experienced but is not always revealed. Close reading of Sade's most famous works demonstrates how he simultaneously reveals and conceals the boudoir as a privileged site for punishment, pleasure, and education and, ultimately, as a site of seduction for and of the reader. The boudoir may seem like an obvious setting for tales of sexual exploits, but its centrality in Sade's writings in fact opposes traditional concepts of the chamber as a feminine space. Despite modern notions of the boudoir as a site of female power and seduction, the word itself does not appear in the mid-eighteenth-century Encyclopedic produced by France's top intellectuals; rather, cabinet or chambre are the preferred terms for a space in which solitary activities are conducted, although these words differ significantly in that they refer to private rooms in which one conducts business or sleeps. (1) The closest English equivalents for this term would be a cabinet, using the Johnson's Dictionary definition of "a private room in which consultations are held" (s.v. cabinet), or a withdrawing room, a site for private audiences. (2) By the eighteenth century, according to Ed Lilley, rooms within French homes had become "increasingly function-specific" (193). Principal among these specialized rooms was the boudoir, a space dedicated to, and primarily dominated by, women. The chamber was as much a place for discussion as it was a place for relaxation. Indeed, even today, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term boudoir as "a small elegantly-furnished room, where a lady may retire to be alone, or to receive her intimate friends" (s.v. boudoir) and cites its appearance into French in the mid-eighteenth century as the mistress's exclusive realm. The word itself is derived from the verb bonder, meaning "to sulk" or "to pout" and Le Grand Robert sees this as an apt denomination, "parce que les dames se retirent dans leur boudoir quand elles veulent etre seules" ("because women retire to their boudoirs when they want to be alone" (3)) (s.v. boudoir). Hence, the room is clearly defined as a female space, with its associated characteristics of delicacy and privacy. Although the boudoir is unquestionably considered to be a female-controlled space, it is frequently appropriated by male authors who seek either to penetrate the female domain or to use its air of mystery and seduction as setting for their stories. Libertine authors often privilege the room in their writings, prizing the combination of the secluded space and its inherent discretion. Among the better-known French stories of the eighteenth century that feature boudoirs as sites of feminine guile and desire are Crebillon's Le Sopha (1742) and Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782). Unsurprisingly, the Marquis de Sade uses this room repeatedly in his works, going so far as to make it the centerpiece of one of his most popular stories, La Philosophic dans le boudoir [Philosophy in the Bedroom] (1795). The naming of this room in the title suggests its centrality to the entire work and easily captures the reader's attention as it references a familiar yet mysterious space. The article at hand focuses on the Sadean use of the boudoir, but it is important to acknowledge that Sade himself does not always remain faithful to this particular location as a site of hidden pleasure. Even within his works, the room's purpose could vary from one setting to the next. …

A Lumber-Room of Her Own: Attics in Pamela and Jane Eyre

Abstract: Before Jane Eyre's madwoman roamed the attic and before the subsequent connection between that space and female agency in Victorian fiction became established, Pamela can be argued to have performed in that site an antecedent moment of female agency--and did so before the novel was understood to be staked on the marriage plot and domestic interiority. The attic--or the lumber-room, (1) as it was called in the early eighteenth century--made its first novelistic appearance as an architectural space in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). But rather than debuting as a narrative space that reveals Pamela's inner thoughts, the lumber-room resists internal focalization and instead takes the reader outside the narrative itself. Richardson's use of the lumber-room, I argue, reveals the author's figurative and spatial awareness that the attic stands for something more than merely a descriptive place: it uncovers Richardson's prescient blueprint for building the first marriage plot into the genre that would later become the domestic novel popularized by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847). Pamela's lumber-room creates a historical perspective that allows Richardson tacitly to acknowledge all the unused but nonetheless stored literary lumber that went into his novel: the amatory, the seduction, and the roman a clef narratives. The lumber-room itself eluded architectural description and definition in the eighteenth-century, but largely represented a storehouse. This curious architectural site--a space that stores, changes, and records those very changes--allegorizes the way Richardson tucks away the leftover and latent legacies of the earlier novelistic narratives into the interiority of his domestic novel. Richardson's use of the lumber-room in Pamela as a generic node anticipates Bronte's re-purposing of the attic in Jane Eyre. I argue that Richardson and Bronte drew from the same eighteenth-century pool of symbolic associations and deployed the lumber-room as a symbolic space of storage, liminality, and transformation. For Richardson the lumber-room marks the moment before the domestic novel was fully formed, and he uses it to establish his own vision of the novel, which both acknowledges and dismisses earlier seduction narratives. But Bronte uses the attic to disrupt Richardson's view and instead shows that the novel is a dynamic and unstable genre. Several literary scholars have noted the abundance of spatial descriptions in eighteenth-century novels, and in Pamela in particular. However, these scholars usually overlook the significance of the lumber-room and focus instead on the closet. Robert Folkenflik in "A Room of Pamela's, Own" (1972) observes that Pamela includes an "extraordinary number of spatial locutions, one after the other" (586-7). But out of these many spaces, Folkenflik focuses on the closet as the one that signifies Pamela's textual agency. He argues, "Mr. B's conversion is marked by the shift in function of Pamela's closet. This room becomes the scene and touchstone of their formally changing relationship" (591). He notes that by the eighteenth century, the closet was known to be a "room off a bedroom or another one," which was characteristically "used as [a] room[] for reading and writing" (590-1). The fact that Pamela secures her epistolary agency at Lincolnshire--she reads and writer's her letters there--recommends the closet as a defining site that authorizes her subjectivity. Michael McKeon in The Secret History of Domesticity (2006) refracts that argument through a reading of Pamela as a secret history and states that Richardson's novel discloses "traditional or elite secrets" and creates "an internalization of public concerns" (470). Thus, he discusses Pamela's closets in terms of secrets and subjectivity: When Mrs. Jewkes spies her parcel of writing through the "Closet" "Keyhole," Pamela fears that her "private Thoughts" and "Secrets" will become known. The key to actual names has modulated to the keyhole that opens into the concrete inner recesses of the mind" (657) Folkenflik and McKeon both read the abundance of closet passages and their attendant details (the "keyhole" and "the room off a bedroom") as indications of the internal recesses of Pamela's thoughts. …

A Response to Euclid at the Core: Recentering Literary Education Close Reading: Classroom Notes on Teaching the Odyssey

Abstract: I remember the topic my eleventh grade teacher assigned for The Odyssey: "What makes The Odyssey a classic?" I didn't know what made anything a classic, let alone The Odyssey. Doc Campbell set demanding questions that required close study of Macbeth and Huckleberry Finn but his broad question about The Odyssey stumped me. So, as a teacher I break things down for my students, which is basically what close reading does. The three passages from The Odyssey that follow show how one might lead students through a series of questions to an understanding of the text and the artistry behind it. For teachers, the key to close reading is simply to assume deliberate authorial intent, to ask oneself and one's students, again and again, is "Why is this or that detail in the passage?"Close Reading: Book 11: Anticleia and Odysseus in the UnderworldIn Book 11 Odysseus descends to the Underworld where he encounters his mother, Anticleia. Fie has been absent from Ithaca for 13 years and so he asks her for news of home. His questions fall into five general categories, which we try to identify. Grouping things into categories is hard for many students. It requires both insight and confidence. The more students worry about omitting something, the more categories they are likely to come up with. My question is purposeful in this regard because the ability to subsume ideas under broad headings is a skill necessary for writing well-organized essays. When we finally settle on (1) how did you die? (2) how is my father? (3) how is my son? (4) how is my kingdom? and (5) how is my wife? we number those items lightly in our texts and turn to Anticleia's reply and discover that Odysseus' questions are being answered in reverse order. I write hysteron proteron on the board, explain it means "last, first" in Greek, and we practice using hysteron proteron for a few minutes in everyday conversation. Someone makes up three or four questions: "What time did you get up this morning? Were you late getting to school? Did you get your math homework done?" Someone else answers in reverse order. "Yes, I got my math homework done. I arrived on time. I woke up at 6:30." Students like mastering so fancy a literary term, but this is just the beginning: we are laying the groundwork for the close reading to come.Upon which of the five topics does Anticleia linger? Easy-"on Laertes, her husband, Odysseus' father." And what sorts of things preoccupy her?-"domestic things, household things," "that he's not sleeping on clean sheets," "that his clothes aren't mended," "that sometimes he sleeps in the dirt." So, what kind of wife does she seem to have been? It's a large question, but easy now. They answer and we drop down a few lines to find corroborating evidence in Anticleia's farewell to her son: " But now quickly make for the light! And bear in mind all you have learnt here, so that one day you can tell your wife." How does this last exhortation, to report to Penelope, reinforce what we've just seen? What does Anticleia assume about husbands and wives? What do her words tell us about her own marriage?-"that she and Laertes probably talked about lots of things together," "that he probably confided everything in her," "that she thinks of marriage as a relationship of great closeness between husband and wife."Reminding ourselves of the hysteron proteron pattern, we complicate Homer's design. Why, beyond the formula of hysteron proteron, might Anticleia speak of her own death last? Students propose:-"perhaps because she hesitates to make her son feel guilty and she thinks hearing that she died of a broken heart will do so," "perhaps she's modest and considers other news more important than news about herself," "perhaps what she most wants to stay in his mind is how urgent his homecoming is," and so on. Without my talking formally about the difference between ascertainable fact and inference, they've made the distinction with "perhaps." I don't know whether Homer, in his genius, used such rhetorical patterns for the beauty and orderliness he found in them, or for characterization as well. …

Real mysteries : narrative and the unknowable

Abstract: H. Porter Abbott. Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. 178 pp. ISBN 978-0-8142-1232-5. The word "narrative," it has often been observed, is related to the Sanskrit root for "knowledge." In his latest book, narrative theorist Porter Abbott explores the less charted side of narrative's connection with knowledge: namely, how storytelling, and particularly storytelling of the literary variety, can deal with states of unknowing. Abbott does not limit himself to asking how narrative can represent the unknowable, ineffable, or incomprehensible--arguably, a familiar question in literary studies. Rather, Abbott contends that literary fiction can convey to willing readers states of unknowing which are not a matter of narrative representation, or even interpretive negotiation, but of immediate experience: readers sensitive to certain kinds of textual prompts may become immersed in a "palpable experience of what is unknown" (17). The premises of Abbott's book are intriguing, and the execution is admirably poised between affability of tone and uncompromising scholarly engagement with texts by Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tim O'Brien, and others. Here the close readings are integral part of the argument, and Abbott's well-paced textual analyses pull off the feat of conveying the "palpable experience" he is theorizing. Anchoring his contribution in recent debates on theory of mind and empathy within cognitive narrative theory, Abbott draws on a wide array of scientific sources, from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to evolutionary theories. Chapters 1 and 2 tackle questions of selfhood and artistic creativity, showing how literary narrative may confront the reader with the mystery of self-consciousness and the inexpressible wonders of literary inventiveness. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to what Abbott calls the "syntax" of literary language and narrative, exploring the momentary hesitation of parsing a garden-path sentence, or of engaging with texts that invite us to entertain two narrative scenarios at the same time. Abbott looks at the epistemic dizziness that these narrative strategies may engender: it is almost--Abbott suggests--as if such texts worked against the grain of evolved cognitive functions, complicating and problematizing mental operations that have long been streamlined by evolution. Finally, in chapters 5 and 6 Abbott considers permanent ("egregious") gaps in a fictional world, or in the mind of an "unreadable" character, and how such gaps may force readers to acknowledge the intrinsic limitations of their cognitive apparatus. The concluding chapter teases out the ethical implications of literary encounters with the unknown, arguing that literature can function as a "machine to think with" (in I. A. Richards's phrase) and, perhaps, counter absolutisms of all kinds through the epistemological questions it raises. One of the unique strengths of Abbott's book is how, without fanfare, it succeeds in integrating narrative theory, cognitive approaches to literature, and literary interpretation--a feat considered impossible by some of the critics of literary cognitivism (see Jackson). The path Abbott carves through these approaches is elegant and original, and his book is likely to appeal to literary scholars well beyond his "home fields" of narrative theory and cognitive literary studies. In this respect, Real Mysteries has something in common with Rita Felski's Uses of Literature or Joshua Landy's How to Do Things with Fiction--two recent monographs theorizing, from different perspectives, how literary fiction can be employed as a tool for self-exploration and interrogation. Like Landy, Abbott zooms in on a particular set of "formative fictions" (Landy's coinage), demonstrating how these texts may impact readers willing to face the unknown. Both Landy and Abbott emphasize that readers must be predisposed to this experience, for the effects of literature are never inescapable: they are always a matter of hermeneutic circularity, with readers finding in fiction what they expect to find on the basis of their individual interests and sensibilities (in this case, a fascination for the unsolvable mysteries of human existence and selfhood). …

Learning to Read

Abstract: Bancroft and Rabinowitz offer a sound critique of the Common Core model and other comparable approaches to the teaching of reading. They also propose a number of specific suggestions and identify the larger principles that guide their practice. Many of these are extremely useful; others somewhat more debatable. While affirming my agreement with their general sense of nature and pedagogy of reading, I will offer a few observations concerning some of the specifics offered. While I cannot speak to teaching in a high school, either public or private, I can see the results of such teaching in the freshmen and sophomores I encounter in some of my classes. I sympathize entirely with the authors' attempts to avoid reductionism, especially to reduce a complex work to a bald statement of a theme. I too denounce the heresy of paraphrase, and yet I find discussion of themes to be a very useful path to understanding a work's complexity. First, I differentiate between thesis, theme, and motif. I ask whether or not a given work has a distinct thesis, say, "To justify the ways of God to man"; if it has a thesis, I ask whether it is consistently presented, ironically treated, or inadvertently undermined. Themes I treat as significant ideas running through a text that need not produce any significant thesis; this may well be the case of the all-pervasive but thesis-resistant theme of time in Macbeth. I ask how these ideas are presented, developed, modified, or transformed during the course of the work. Many students are amazed that such thematic patterns exist, and are curious to follow them out. As to motifs, or other repeated figures in a text with minimal connection to ideas per se, such as clothing in Macbeth, I have the students identify the recurrences they are able to note and then speculate on their possible significance. This general pedagogical practice has worked well for me in enriching the reading experience of the students. While I resist the opposition of Bancroft and Rabinowitz to the use of themes and even meaning to the teaching of critical reading, I am very suspicious about the claims of ethics. In practice, it is difficult to direct; invariably, the worst kind of conventional moralizing creeps into the discussion--sometimes, it produces a moralizing that exemplifies the very sensibility being castigated by the text. More problematically, it typically presupposes that characters are to be judged as humans should be in the same situation. But humans are never in the same situation as fictional characters because fictional characters are fictional and are part of a different teleology than are living humans. Poetic justice is not the same thing as legal justice. I don't mind when children cheer that the wicked witch is burned alive at the end of "Hansel and Gretel," even though I don't believe in capital punishment (or witches, for that matter) in real life. Aesthetically, I am glad that Cordelia dies every time King Lear is performed, since that death makes the tragedy a more powerful one, though I do not approve of the wanton murder of innocent young women in real life. I don't worry ethically about all those deaths in a revenge play like Hamlet and I am less interested in establishing that Macbeth is evil than with exploring how Shakespeare can get his audience to empathize with a mass murderer for most of the play. …