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Cognitive Literary Science PDF
Cognitive Literary Science PDF
Series Editors:
Alexander Bergs, University of Osnabrück
Margaret H. Freeman, Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts
Peter Schneck, University of Osnabrück
Achim Stephan, University of Osnabrück
Advisory Board:
Mark Bruhn, Regis University Denver, CO, USA
Peer Bundgard, Aarhus University, Denmark
Michael Burke, University College Roosevelt Middelburg, The Netherlands
Wallace Chafe, University of California Santa Barbara, USA
Barbara Dancygier, University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada
Frank Jäkel, Universität Osnabrück, Germany
Winfried Menninghaus, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Keith Oatley, University of Toronto, Canada
Jan Slaby, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Reuven Tsur, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Mark Turner, Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH, USA
Simone Winko, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany
Dahlia Zaidel, University of California Los Angles, USA
Edited by Michael Burke
and
Emily T. Troscianko
1
1
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Contributors xi
Introduction: A Window on to the Landscape of Cognitive Literary
Science 1
Emily T. Troscianko and Michael Burke
Index 327
[ viii ] Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book appears in the Oxford University Press series Cognition and
Poetics. We are especially grateful to the series editors, Alexander Bergs,
Margaret H. Freeman, Peter Schneck, and Achim Stephan for seeing poten-
tial in our project and for commissioning it. We are also indebted to the
anonymous reviewers of our book proposal, who helped focus our ideas
in the planning stages. This volume is the third artefact, as it were, of our
ongoing interest in cognitive literary science (CLSci), which also gives the
book its title. The first of the three was a symposium entitled Science and
Literary Criticism, held in April 2012 at St John’s College, Oxford; we are
extremely grateful to the St John’s College Research Centre and to Terence
Cave (via the Balzan Interdisciplinary Seminar ‘Literature as an Object of
Knowledge’) for financial, organizational, and moral support in making
that event happen. The second of our joint ventures was a special issue on
‘Explorations in Cognitive Literary Science’ published in September 2013
in the Journal of Literary Semantics. Several of the authors whose work fea-
tures in this book were involved in those earlier projects.
Editing a volume of scholarly contributions is a task that requires more
than just the editors. We are grateful to a number of anonymous review-
ers who offered insightful and constructive feedback to the authors. We
also appreciate the help of all those at Oxford University Press working
in copyediting, production, and sales to publish and promote this book.
Any errors that may remain are our responsibility. Finally, we are especially
indebted to Hallie Stebbins at Oxford University Press for all her guidance,
expertise, and kindness during the writing and editing process.
While every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, we would
be pleased to hear of any that have inadvertently been omitted.
M.B. and E.T.
Oxford, UK, and Middelburg, NL
February 2016
CONTRIBUTORS
Alexander Bergs joined the Institute for English and American Studies at
Osnabrück University in 2006, when he became Full Professor and Chair of
English Language and Linguistics. His research interests include language
variation and change, constructional approaches to language, the role
of context in language, and cognitive poetics. His works include several
authored and edited books (Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics
[2005], Modern Scots [2005], Constructions and Language Change [2008],
Contexts and Constructions [2009]), one textbook on Synchronic English
Linguistics (2012) and one on Historical Linguistics (co-authored with Kate
Burridge, 2016), as well as the two-volume Handbook of English Historical
Linguistics (edited with Laurel Brinton, 2012). He has taught at the uni-
versities of Düsseldorf, Bonn, Santiago de Compostela, Catania, and
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and has organized several international workshops
and conferences. Apart from several terms as Director of the Institute of
English and American Studies, as Dean of the Faculty of Linguistics and
Literatures, and as member of the University Senate, he is one of the
founding directors of the Research Cluster for Cognition and Poetics at
Osnabrück University.
Brian Boyd is University Distinguished Professor in English, Drama, and
Writing Studies at the University of Auckland. He is best known for his
work on Vladimir Nabokov—a biography, critical books, and editions, most
recently of Letters to Véra (Penguin, 2014, and Knopf, 2015) and hundreds of
articles—and on literature, evolution, and cognition, including On the Origin
of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction and Why Lyrics Last: Evolution,
Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Harvard, 2009 and 2012) and the co-
edited Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (Columbia, 2010). He has
written on literature from Homer to the present, on comics and film, on lit-
erary theory and translation, and on art, philosophy, and science. His work
has won awards on four continents and has been published in 19 languages.
He is currently writing a biography of philosopher Karl Popper.
Michael Burke is Professor of Rhetoric at University College Roosevelt
(Utrecht University). He is the author of Literary Reading Cognition and
Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (2011). He has published numer-
ous chapters and articles on the topic of cognitive literary science. His areas
of interest also include classical rhetoric, stylistics, and pragmatics.
James Carney is Senior Research Associate in Psychology at Lancaster
University. He previously held a Marie Curie Fellowship and a Junior
Research Fellowship (with Linacre College) at the Department of
Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. Other appointments have
included working as a lecturer in English literature at University College
Cork and the University of Limerick. His research interests centre on the
application of insights from the cognitive and experimental sciences to cul-
ture, broadly conceived. To date, this has resulted in studies of literature,
religion, mythology, popular culture, poetics, and narrative in a wide vari-
ety of scholarly journals.
Richard J. Gerrig is a professor of psychology at Stony Brook University.
Gerrig’s research focuses on cognitive psychological aspects of language
use. One line of work examines the mental processes that underlie effi-
cient communication. A second research programme considers the cogni-
tive and emotional changes readers experience when they are transported
to narrative worlds. His book Experiencing Narrative Worlds was published
by Yale University Press in 1993. Gerrig is a Fellow of the Society for Text &
Discourse, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for
Psychological Science. He is the editor of the Journal of Memory and Language.
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Poetics of Mind:
Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding (1994), Intentions in the
Experience of Meaning (1999), Embodiment and Cognitive Science (2006),
and, with Herb Colston, Interpreting Figurative Meaning (2012). His newest
book is Metaphor Wars: Conceptual Metaphor in Human Life (2015). He is
also editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (2008) and
the journal Metaphor and Symbol.
Marcus Hartner is lecturer in English Literature at Bielefeld University
in Germany, where he is also part of a research project on Contemporary
Fictions of Migration. His main research interests include literary theory,
cognitive approaches to narrative, and the study of both contemporary
and early modern literature and culture. In the field of cognitive narra-
tology his work has focused primarily on blending theory, the sociopsy-
chological underpinnings of character construction, and the dynamics of
[ xii ] Contributors
character interaction. Among his publications are Perspektivische Interaktion
im Roman: Kognition, Rezeption, Interpretation [The Interaction of
Perspectives in the Novel: Cognition, Reception, Interpretation] (de
Gruyter, 2012) and a co-edited volume on Blending and the Study of
Narrative: Approaches and Applications (de Gruyter, 2012).
David Herman, who has taught at institutions that include North Carolina
State University, Ohio State University, and, most recently, Durham
University in the UK, is working to bring ideas from narrative stud-
ies into dialogue with scholarship on animals and human‒animal rela-
tionships. His current projects include an edited collection titled Animal
Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives (forthcoming from
Bloomsbury in 2017) and a monograph on Narratology Beyond the Human
(in progress).
Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor in the English Department at the
University of Connecticut, where he is also on the faculty of the Program
in Cognitive Science. He is the author of nineteen books, including How
Authors’ Minds Make Stories (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Beauty
and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts (Cambridge
University Press, 2016).
Arthur M. Jacobs is Professor of Experimental and Neurocognitive
Psychology and founding director of the Dahlem Institute for Neuroimaging
of Emotion (D.I.N.E.) at the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB). As part of
the highly interdisciplinary Languages of Emotions project at the FUB,
Professor Jacobs led a team investigating the Affective and Aesthetic
Processes of Reading. He is (co-)author of more than 250 scientific publica-
tions in the fields of reading research, psycholinguistics, affective neurosci-
ence, and neurocognitive poetics, including the book Gehirn und Gedicht
[Brain and Poetry] (2011).
Karin Kukkonen is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at
the University of Oslo and Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Research
Fellow. She has published on cognitive approaches to comics and graphic
novels (Contemporary Comics Storytelling, 2013) and embodied and prob-
abilistic cognitive approaches to literary narrative, as well as on the 18th-
century novel. Her forthcoming monograph A Prehistory of Cognitive
Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel brings the neoclassical criticism of the
17th and 18th centuries (which was informed by the ‘new science’ of the
time) into conversation with today’s cognitive approaches to literature. In
a project funded by the Academy of Finland, Kukkonen is currently pursu-
ing research on how the rise of embodied strategies of style and narration
Contributors [ xiii ]
in the 18th-century novel contributed to the immersive, gripping nature
of the genre.
David S. Miall received his doctoral degree from the University of Wales
at Cardiff, after which he taught for 10 years at the College of St Paul &
St Mary in Cheltenham. He moved to Canada in 1989 and took up a posi-
tion in the Department of English in 1990, specializing in literature of the
British Romantic period. His research interests include empirical study of
literary reading—a field in which he has collaborated with Don Kuiken in
Psychology since 1990. The first of several federal grants for this research
was awarded in 1992, the latest in April 2008. In addition to his book
Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies (2006), he is the author
of over 140 chapters and scholarly articles. He became Emeritus Professor
on his retirement in 2012. He now resides in France.
Micah L. Mumper is a doctoral candidate in the Cognitive Science program
at Stony Brook University. He is advised by Dr. Richard Gerrig. Using a
combination of behavioural and self-report methodologies, he studies how
readers’ global and moment-by-moment experiences of fictional worlds
influence narrative impact. In particular, his research considers how basic
cognitive processes support comprehension, how reading may benefit
social-cognitive abilities, how narratives affect readers’ moral judgements,
as well as how fiction influences real-world attitudes and behaviours.
Keith Oatley read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and did a PhD at University
College London. With Maja Djikic and Raymond Mar, he has been involved
in developing the psychology of fiction, a movement in which literary anal-
yses are combined with empirical and theoretical research in psychology.
His work has included the relation of reading to writing fiction, exploration
of how literary works enable people to transform themselves, and research
on how reading fiction encourages empathy with others. Among his books
on fiction is Such Stuff as Dreams (2011). He has also published three nov-
els, the first of which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First
Book. His most recent book is a novella combined with psychological analy-
ses, The Passionate Muse (2012).
Caroline Pirlet is now working as a management consultant in Frankfurt/
Main. During her time as a PhD candidate at the International Graduate
Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Giessen, Germany, she was a
visiting scholar with Project Narrative at Ohio State University (Columbus,
OH). Her research has focused on the affective dimension of understanding
narratives, and reception-orientated cognitive-narratological approaches in
particular. She co-authored the entry Narratology in English and American
[ xiv ] Contributors
Studies (with Monika Fludernik, ed. Martin Middeke et al., 2012), contrib-
uted to Unnatural Narratives—Unnatural Narratology (ed. Jan Alber and
Rüdiger Heinze, 2011), and reviewed Patrick Hogan’s Affective Narratology
(Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 2013). She is currently gaining fur-
ther qualifications as a business coach and doing independent research on
emotions and narrative coaching.
Merja Polvinen is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced
Studies. Her work focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to literature, lit-
erature and the natural sciences (Reading the Texture of Reality: Chaos Theory,
Literature and the Humanist Perspective, 2008), and cognitive approaches
to literary representation. She is co-editor of Rethinking Mimesis (2012)
and has recently published articles in the Journal of Literary Semantics and
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. Polvinen is also a member of the network
Narrative and Complex Systems (University of York), board member of the
Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, and co-organizer
with Karin Kukkonen of the Cognitive Futures in the Humanities confer-
ence in Helsinki in June 2016.
Emily T. Troscianko (http://www.troscianko.com) is a Research Associate
in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of
Oxford, and in 2014‒2015 was a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Oxford
Research Centre in the Humanities, collaborating with Beat, the leading
UK eating disorders charity. The book from her doctoral thesis, Kafka’s
Cognitive Realism, came out with Routledge in 2014, and she is now work-
ing at the intersection of the cognitive and medical humanities, while
co-authoring, with Susan Blackmore, the third edition of the psychology
textbook Consciousness: An Introduction (forthcoming 2018).
Andreas Wirag is a PhD student at the Teaching & Learning Processes
(UpGrade) Graduate School at Koblenz-Landau University. As a secondary
schoolteacher of foreign languages and a university lecturer, he empirically
investigates the interface of cognitive approaches, literature, and language
education. He is currently working towards his PhD thesis on the employ-
ment of prototype theory in second language vocabulary acquisition.
Contributors [ xv ]
Cognitive Literary Science
Introduction
A Window on to the Landscape of Cognitive
Literary Science
EMILY T. TROSCIANKO AND MICHAEL BURKE
I n 2013, we asked what the prospects were for the field of cognitive liter-
ary studies not only offering tangible benefits for our understanding of
literature (which it has and continues to do) but also starting to think of
itself, and be thought of by others, as able to offer benefits back to the cog-
nitive sciences that inform it. In our special issue of the Journal of Literary
Semantics (Burke and Troscianko, 2013), we included four examples of
work that made this recursive move back to the scientific side: papers on
parallel processing and consciousness, affect and artifice, the imagination
across the disciplinary divide, and the neuroscience of rhetorical style were
followed by a coda from a neuroscientist asking ‘Can literary studies con-
tribute to cognitive neuroscience?’ (and concluding yes).
Over the past few years, it has been gratifying to see a subtle but distinct
shift in the tone of many contributions to the cognitive-literary field: not
across the board, but more conspicuously now than before, researchers
working with cognitive concepts, findings, and debates seem to be engag-
ing with them more in the spirit of confident give and take. Not that there is
anything wrong with applying a relevant idea from another field judiciously
to a question in another: this kind of work can be exciting and illuminat-
ing. It is probably also the most sensible first step in an encounter between
disciplines: find something (probably something quite solidly documented)
from ‘the other side’ that speaks to a question you already had, or some-
thing that opens your eyes to a question you had never quite thought of,
and see where it takes you. This ‘simple’ strategy of cross-disciplinary
application is in practice often not very simple at all, and if it takes you as
far as a new insight into an issue of text or response that had previously
been opaque, this in itself is already a real achievement. That should not
be forgotten when we tell ourselves that one-directional ‘borrowing’ isn’t
enough; it is already a lot.
Quite often, though, it happens that along the way, the act of applying
one thing to another actually makes you rethink the thing (the theory or
method) being applied. In the most basic sense, new evidence for something
(like, say, the characteristics of autobiographical memory as evidenced in
a fictional evocation of memory or a reader’s response to it) always tells us
more about that thing—and when the evidence comes from something as
unlike the standard experimental psychology or neuroscience protocols as
a work of literary fiction, it would be surprising if something qualitatively
new were not learnt about memory or whatever it might be.
In more emergent areas of scientific inquiry, the likelihood of reciprocal
benefit is greater still: if a subfield explicitly acknowledges its own works in
progress, it automatically opens up space for input from other areas. This is
one of the things that makes the cognitive-literary dialogue so promising
in the first place: there is so patently so much still to be learned in so many
and varied corners of the cognitive-scientific field, as well as the literary
one, that nearly everything is still up for grabs.
And up for grabs does not mean the literary people are coming in and
grabbing stuff the scientists would rather keep for themselves. It’s easy,
working in an area where the most obvious method has seemed to be the
application/borrowing one, to come unthinkingly to the conclusion that
no one on ‘the other side’ cares what you do. This impression is bolstered
by the practical facts that departments and journals and funding bodies
tend to adhere to the disciplinary boundaries, so the opportunities for
researchers in different fields simply to come across your work can be lim-
ited. Nevertheless, researchers tend to become researchers because they
are generally curious, open-minded people, and our experience is that this
applies unequivocally to those trained in the empirical method: for people
who run experiments as an everyday part of life, the point is to have ques-
tions and enjoy figuring out how to pose them in answerable ways and
then trying to answer them, all the while knowing that your knowledge
will never be absolute.
A few weeks ago, one of us (Troscianko) spoke to someone at a cognitive
classics conference in Oxford who had been involved in an event bringing
[2] Introduction
together psychologists with humanities scholars, and who reported that
one of the scientists had said to her at some point during the event, ‘It’s
obvious what we get out of it, but why would literary people want to col-
laborate with us?’ Ironically enough, this is what humanities researchers
seem to think most of the time too. It seems that for whatever combina-
tion of perfectly explicable reasons—institutional habit, intellectual inse-
curity, the allure of the greener grass everywhere else—both ‘sides’ have
concluded that, well, they would quite like to collaborate with the other,
but the other would never be interested in reciprocating.
It’s very easy (for us) to enumerate all the reasons why the humanities
end up thinking this: the apparent status imbalance, the consequent feeling
of being under-appreciated, the consequent feelings of defensiveness …
But it’s a shame, because all this conspires against giving it a go, whatever
‘it’ may mean in any given context: emailing that person whose paper you
liked but didn’t quite understand, setting up lunch to talk about your very
hazy ideas for an experiment, inviting someone from slightly academically
further afield to speak at your seminar series. This is especially sad if the
scientists do in fact really value the qualitative depth or conceptual sub-
tlety apparent in our work—but we never get to find out.
However, if you’re reading this book, you are probably one of the people
who does do these things and continues to do them because you see that
they are worthwhile—if only in making your working day more stimulat-
ing. We know there are a lot of you out there, and we are not going to pre-
tend that this volume is in any sense representative of cognitive literary
research as a whole, except insofar as it showcases the sheer variety and
creativity of our field.
Most of our contributions are single-authored chapters, and the two
exceptions are co-authored by researchers from the same field, but we
imagine (and in many cases know) that they are all based on energetic and
careful conversation with people from that ‘other side’: at conferences and
seminars, in common rooms and over lunches, by email, and even through
periods working closely with people trained very differently, in open-
minded lab groups or interdisciplinary institutes. In the rest of this intro-
duction, we try to draw out some of the commonalities and differences
between the topics tackled and the angles adopted by our contributors;
there are thematic threads to be traced and recurrent patterns of perspec-
tive and method. But our guide in conceiving this volume was not thematic
or method-specific; it was structural in a broad disciplinary sense.
Many of our contributors took part in a symposium on Science and
Literary Criticism (Burke and Troscianko, 2012) which we held at St John’s
College, Oxford, in the spring of 2012. The talks given there were as diverse
INTRODUCTION [3]
as the title suggests, and the small size of the event combined with the vari-
ety of topics and backgrounds meant we were able to have intimate conver-
sations about the promise and problems of the field. We talked about the
‘laboratory liability’ and what experiments can really be expected to teach
us; about how systems of theoretical knowledge interact; about all the tim-
escales from the evolutionary to the neural; about how much interpersonal
variability there really is; about expertise and the blank-slate reader, nor-
mality and averaging, introspection and the unconscious, rigour and fidel-
ity. Questions about disciplinary balance and reciprocity have been with us
since, and the idea for this book was to try to instantiate both.
In this spirit, the three parts of the book present the three main itera-
tions on ways of working in the cognitive-literary field. In the first part,
which would often be thought of as cognitive literary studies proper, lit-
erary scholars draw on some aspect of cognitive science to offer a new
viewpoint on literature or literary reading. In the second, literary scholars
use literary materials or conceptual frameworks to contribute to cognitive-
scientific debates. In the third, cognitive scientists engage with literature
and literary-critical methods to shed light on questions in their home dis-
ciplines and/or those in literary studies. Arguably for total symmetry there
should have been four parts, but in practice we found that the contribu-
tions from cognitive scientists tended in any case to have a dual focus: cast-
ing light on the literary phenomena and on the cognitive. So separating
them out would have felt a little artificial.
In 2013, we suggested the term ‘cognitive literary science’ for a form of
cognitive literary studies that takes its place assertively beneath the capa-
cious cognitive-science umbrella, giving and receiving in equal measure—
maybe so it stops even feeling like exchange, and starts feeling simply like
what we do. Originally our thought was that Part I here might not quite
count as part of cognitive literary science thus defined, but as should
become clear in the following survey, it now seems right and important to
see all three variations on cognitive literary research as integral to what a
grown-up ‘CLSci’ will look like.
Of course, the argument could be made that this model makes the inher-
ently limiting assumption that everyone will be working on their own and
that every individual researcher has only one ‘home’ discipline. Clearly
neither of these things need or should be true. Collaborative work that
in its everyday practices crosses the divide or even forgets that the divide
exists is one of the best ways of making interdisciplinarity meaningful. And
many people have eclectic and active enough academic backgrounds that
pigeonholing them by department makes little sense. But even where these
things are the case, perhaps there is still something to be said for the rough
[4] Introduction
outlines of our structures; perhaps, especially while the field is still rela-
tively young, the directional currents can still on the whole be discerned,
and can tell us interesting things when we stop to look at them.
In the spirit of learning through careful observation, the remain-
der of this introduction will be devoted to an overview of the follow-
ing chapters that asks broad questions about some of the similarities
and differences between our contributions. We will not give a blow-by-
blow summary of what each chapter. Instead, it has been interesting
to reflect, at the end of a long editorial process, on the composition
of the book and what it might tell us about the present and future of
the field. Again, we make no claims to representativeness, but 15 chap-
ters in 3 parts offer a decent- sized window on to the state of CLSci in
2016: where, right now, are our colleagues applying cognitive-literary
approaches, to what purpose, with what methods and assumptions? Is
it even possible to generalize at all?
We will start with a few simple questions.
— Who? Our contributors range from established to mid- and early-
career scholars, working in the United Kingdom, the United States,
Canada, New Zealand, Germany, Finland, and Norway, originally trained
in literary studies, linguistics, and experimental and neurocognitive psy-
chology, and now practising at the interesting intersections of those fields
and others.
— What? Broadly speaking, the topics being addressed in our chapters
are the ones we would expect to see. The current Big Six cognitive-literary
topics—embodiment, emotion, immersion, mental imagery, simulation,
and social cognition—are salient in the majority of the chapters. Even
when the focus of inquiry is something less ubiquitous and more specific,
like the sublime in David Miall’s chapter or the fantastic in Karin
Kukkonen’s, the conceptual underlay is still shaped by those major themes.
The three exceptions are perhaps the two chapters on different aspects of
readerly pattern extraction (by Alexander Bergs and Brian Boyd), and James
Carney’s chapter on construal level theory and science fiction. The latter
proposes hypotheses about psychological distance and abstraction that
certainly touch on empathy and emotion more broadly, but subordinates
them to questions about the foregrounding of human agency through spe-
cific stylistic means. The role of feedback and predictive processing, which
Kukkonen describes as ‘still vastly under-represented in cognitive literary
studies’, makes an appearance in two other chapters—briefly in Caroline
Pirlet and Andreas Wirag’s, and centrally in Emily Troscianko’s—and feels
like one that could play an important connective role in the future of the
field, with clear relevance to topics like the interplay between memory and
INTRODUCTION [5]
emotion discussed by Patrick Hogan or between immersion and reflection
as explored by Merja Polvinen. If, as Andy Clark predicts, predictive cod-
ing turns out to kick off one of ‘the major intellectual events of the early
twenty-first century’ (2013, p. 21), then it seems likely that CLSci will get in
on the act. But then, we are currently keen on this, so our predictions may
be revealing primarily of our ‘priors’.
— Where? If we look at the cognitive-scientific disciplines on which our
contributors are drawing, we again find the usual suspects of experimental
psychology and neuroscience, with a little bit of evolutionary psychology
and some philosophy of mind, notably an adapted form of ‘heterophe-
nomenology’ (David Herman). Herman also brings in ethology and some
anthropology, which seems like an obvious area for expansion in CLSci,
as do developmental psychology and questions about life-course changes
(broached by Richard Gerrig and Micah Mumper, and by Keith Oatley) and
the medical/psychiatric realm dealt with by Troscianko. Alexander Bergs
and Arthur Jacobs make cognitive (neuro)linguistics central to their chap-
ters, though it does not feature much in the contributions of those outside
that field, with the exception of Miall, who explains how EEG findings on
functional shift speak to the style of the sublime. There is, though, a dis-
connect across the field between researchers who adopt a linguistics model
and those who do not which continues to feel surprising—it would be nice
to see more integration on this front in future. A possible facilitator here
could be the field of cognitive stylistics: the linguistic analysis of literary
texts conducted through the lens of either cognitive psychology or cogni-
tive linguistics. Another common absence also found here is that of social
psychology: like anthropological methods, it tends to be under-represented
in CLSci, as it is here (though there is a little discursive psychology in Pirlet
and Wirag’s chapter).
Is this because when turning to ‘science’, the inclination is to turn to
the ‘harder’ rather than the ‘softer’ versions first, because they promise
the most solid foundation of empirical validation? Marcus Hartner would
warn us that the principle of autonomy should make us hesitate before leap-
ing over too many explanatory levels on the path between our home dis-
ciplines and those we make connections with. We would also add that a
cogent link from the humanities to social psychology can be found in the
precepts and principles of classical rhetoric and its modern guises of persua-
sion and communication studies. Meanwhile, it’s clear that for the majority
of our contributors, the behavioural and self-report methods of experimen-
tal psychology are the natural stepping stone: not too near and not too far.
Generally speaking, though, there seems quite a contrast between those
contributors who (to oversimplify somewhat) jump straight to the science
[6] Introduction
and those who ground their arguments in theoretical or empirical work that
has already taken place within the cognitive-literary field. That preference
will depend on all kinds of factors including subject matter and probably
personality, but tracking whether the relative proportions change over time
may tell us something about the likely future size, shape, and constitution
of CLSci.
Another ‘where?’ question we might ask, of course, is a cultural-
geographic one: where do our contributors’ primary texts come from? In
this we are, for the obvious pragmatic reasons, fairly Anglocentric, but
Kukkonen introduces us to an 18th-century French novella and Jacobs
guides us through the word valleys, sentence slopes, verse lifts, and stanza
rises of German linguistic beauty, idiom, and poetry. Where time and
expertise permit, it would be great to see more cultural-linguistic diver-
sity in future CLSci studies out beyond the main Germanic and Romance
languages.
— When? The primary texts our contributors discuss range from
Longinus, reproducing in the 1st century c.e. a poem by Sappho from
6 centuries earlier (Miall), to three North American novels from 2013
(Gerrig and Mumper). Shakespeare’s sonnets win the prize for the most
attention, with three contributors considering them. Otherwise, the 20th
century is the best represented, as might be expected—but with much less
of a focus on high Modernism than has often been the case.
— Why and how? These two questions meld somewhat into one, since
it’s hard to neatly separate out the question being asked from the method
used to answering it. The methods adopted by our contributors take in
the full range from meta-theoretical overview (Hartner) to theories that
encompass facets of the overarching distinction between lyric and narra-
tive (Boyd) or fiction and non-fiction (David Herman); from accounts of
genre characteristics (Carney) and rethinkings of disciplinary structures
and boundaries (Jacobs, Pirlet and Wirag) to inquiries into literary phe-
nomena like the sublime (Miall) and the fantastic (Kukkonen) or linguistic
phenomena like coercion (Bergs); from a question about how a particular
cognitive context or individual history changes the reading experience
(Gerrig and Mumper, Troscianko) to higher-level ones about why readers
(critical and recreational) vary and resemble each other in their responses
(Raymond Gibbs) and how reading changes people (Oatley); from a chal-
lenge to received ways of thinking about readerly engagement (Polvinen) to
a knotty puzzle posed by a specific text (Hogan). It will become clear to you
once you read them, though, that these encapsulations are only one way of
conveying what the chapters do: we could just as well describe Herman’s as
a critical survey of the problem of non-human other minds, or Kukkonen’s
INTRODUCTION [7]
as a case study on the probabilistic models of the Bayesian reader. But the
variety of scales and scopes of questions asked and evidence presented,
approached with deductive and/or inductive methods, all with their own
rationales and priorities, makes clear that there really is no single template
for a standard CLSci publication: we could hardly be any further from, say,
a field in which all anyone does is apply a scientific finding to the reading of
a single text to generate a new interpretation. This can be and is done bril-
liantly, but there are a myriad other options for researchers in the field, and
it is heartening to see the inventiveness keep growing. Sceptics may say
that this heterogeneity is the field’s fatal flaw, but it must also be its forte.
When it comes to the use of primary literary texts, too, there is a huge
range of strategies, from more or less close readings of just one or a very
few texts to high-level surveys of general characteristics of a large num-
ber of texts or analysis of numerous small text fragments, to chapters that
do not discuss specific texts at all. Interestingly, the closest reading and
the very broadest argument go hand in hand in Boyd’s chapter on the con-
trast between narrative and lyric; here the specifics of textual patterning
are analysed at the lowest level to provide evidence for the ultra-high-level
hypothesis about the levels of effort required for cognitive pattern extrac-
tion. And while for the most part the texts considered are literary prose
fiction, poetry, and drama, Kukkonen brings in discussion of the links
between literature and visual art, and Herman compares and contrasts fic-
tional and non-fictional accounts of non-human minds.
Having exhausted the ‘Five Ws and an H’, our next set of questions
relates to the currents and tensions of interdisciplinarity: in the shifts or
mergings between disciplines, is consensus emerging or not, what happens
to terminology, to what extent are attitudes critical or embracing or both
at once, and are people worrying about the interdisciplinary or just getting
on with it?
There are some striking points of convergence in our contributors’
conclusions—Bergs and Boyd on the centrality of pattern recognition in
(literary) reading, as already noted, or Oatley and Polvinen on the nature
of literature as cognitive training. There are some areas of divergence too,
whether in differing attitudes to things like measures of transportation
(compare Gerrig and Mumper with Polvinen), or in thinking about whether
contrasting attitudes to texts manifest through simultaneity or vacillation
(compare Polvinen and Kukkonen). We see these differences not as incom-
patibilities, but as excellent starting points for future exchange.
In many of the chapters, there seems to be an easy interplay between
concepts and terms deriving from the cognitive and the literary side—cog-
nitive frames and natural narratology, construal level and characterization,
[8] Introduction
the P600 response and the sublime—with established terms of literary ref-
erence clearly still serving useful purposes when put in dialogue with oth-
ers that have quite different histories and conventions. The use of certain
cognitive terms indicates that there is still a lot of fluidity in the concep-
tual systems in use: Oatley, for instance, uses inferencing, theory of mind,
and simulation in an inclusive way that the more terminologically hard-
line might say one shouldn’t. Who knows where the scientific and memetic
competition will take us in the end. Perhaps surprisingly, though, no one
suggests that we need to replace existing concepts with new ones designed
specifically for cognitive-literary purposes: although there is plenty of crit-
ical engagement with the definitions and/or implications of well-known
concepts—like heterophenomenology in Herman, or aesthetic illusion in
Polvinen—the tendency here seems to be to work with the terms we have
inherited rather than offering up new ones.
On the matter of critique, we might expect the contributions in our sec-
ond part—literary scholars offering something back to the sciences—to
be the most overtly critical of scientific practices and frameworks, and this
turns out to be the case: Hogan remarks on the limitations of lab-based
experiments, for example, Polvinen on the problems with thinking com-
putationally about the imagination, and Herman not only on the need to
rethink narratology with the help of philosophy and anthropology but
also on how elements of that philosophy can and should be rethought
with the help of literary insights. By contrast, though, both Kukkonen and
Troscianko apply feedback or prediction principles quite uncomplicatedly
to the study of literature, but both with the aim of advancing the study
of the cognitive phenomena under discussion: predictive processing and
disordered eating, respectively. That said, the contributors to our third
part are happy to acknowledge the limitations of current scientific practice
too: Gibbs in relation to typical literary reading studies investigating ‘naïve
readers’ first-time pass through, and quick comprehension of, brief seg-
ments of text, usually artificially constructed for experimental purposes’,
for instance, or Bergs on the ‘substantial drawbacks’ of fMRI. (Although as
a linguist working at an Institute for English and American Studies using
historical and solidly empirical methods, Bergs is an excellent example
of where the opposition of ‘scientist’ versus ‘humanities scholar’ breaks
down.) A bit of healthy scepticism about traditional literary-critical meth-
ods might also be anticipated from the scientists writing in Part III, but
this is not really in evidence at all, with the possible exception of Gibbs’s
comments on the tendency of critics to think of their acts of reading as
quite unlike those of ‘ordinary’ readers, and so to feel legitimized in reject-
ing findings about the latter as inapplicable to critical reading. A brief note
INTRODUCTION [9]
of warning is, however, sounded by Carney when he considers what hap-
pens when prescriptive notions of the literary collide with ordinary read-
ers’ experiences—and advocates siding with the latter.
As for whether interdisciplinarity itself is the object of questioning,
doubt, or other kinds of meta-reflection, on the whole it seems not to be.
Assessing the status quo and offering suggestions for how to strengthen
the field is the point of Hartner’s opening chapter, but otherwise, though
most of our authors give brief scene-setting remarks about the disciplin-
ary encounters they will be drawing on, these are more explanation than
defence, and the usual procedure seems to be: set out why a cognitive-
literary approach is meaningful, and then put it into practice. On the
meta-level, Hartner makes some concluding suggestions about the aims of
interdisciplinary research that contrast with Herman’s position on ‘trans-
disciplinarity’, suggesting that although conducting research that demon-
strates the benefits of the humanities in broader contexts is an excellent
aim, it needn’t be one we always have in mind: ‘Literature is worth studying
for a vast variety of reasons; not all of them will necessarily be of scientific
or transdisciplinary value.’
By now it will have become clear that, like any categorical structure
imposed on complex works of individual scholarship, our ordering schema
is far from watertight. It’s easy to make the case, in particular, that the
contributions in Part I offer ‘transdisciplinary’ benefits back to the cogni-
tive sciences just as those in Part II do. By offering rich evidence of cogni-
tive phenomena that are manifested in salient and complex ways in literary
encounters, they arguably do what Kukkonen says of literature and ‘fantas-
tic cognition’: throwing each of their cognitive subjects into sharp relief,
cognitive literary study ‘helps make … more or less automatic features of
cognition noticeable and thus subject to analysis’. One of the most subtly and
unexpectedly encouraging trends in the whole book, actually, is that many of
our authors do not seem to feel the need to specify, in disciplinary terms,
where the projected benefits of their contributions lie: when investigating
what distinctive processes might be involved in the reading of full-length
novels, or how the linguistic phenomenon of coercion behaves in aesthetic
contexts, or what exactly the sublime is, these questions are of intrinsic
interest, and working out which ‘side’ ‘gains’ more from any given increase
in understanding may be beside the point. Of course, articulating which
disciplinary stockpiles we want to contribute to is often important, but
sometimes we can allow our questions and answers to speak for themselves.
Finally, we might ask how the classic flashpoints of the cognitive literary
field are dealt with by our contributors. We might name three in particu-
lar: How do findings about averaged-out experimental participants relate
[ 10 ] Introduction
to insights into individual experiences? How do the theoretical and the
empirical relate to each other? And how do findings about 20th- or 21st-
century experimental participants relate to questions about texts many
centuries or even millennia old?
The matter of the individual versus the general is broached in many
chapters, and takes centre stage in two—interestingly, both by scientists
(Gibbs, and Gerrig and Mumper). This concern from the scientific side with
the specificity more usually thought of as the domain of the humanities is
echoed in Oatley’s chapter too, though Pirlet and Wirag also engage with it,
and it makes brief appearances in lots of other chapters. The problem and
a solution are expressed concisely by Carney, who notes that literary texts
inherit the variability of the human mind, and so can suffer from shoehorn-
ing typologies, but that both also have regularities which emerge at the
statistical level, so that generalizations are not meaningless. Many of our
chapters are beautiful demonstrations of the simple reality that although
empirical methods can be used to iron out the differences between people,
they can also be used to highlight those differences—indeed, empirical
work that investigates responses other than one’s own is the only way of
doing that. This is part of perhaps the most immediately satisfying justifi-
cation for the entire field of CLSci (should one be needed): that instead of
basing conclusions about textual effects on the singular experience of the
critic-as-reader disguised as the generic reader, or accumulating new inter-
pretations of texts without acknowledgement of the cognitive factors on
which they depend, we can understand interpretations as cognitive effects,
and investigate their natural variations in others as well as ourselves. This
logic is put into practice not just in the kinds of research questions and
empirical evidence manifest in our contributions, but in some cases also in
their approaches as expressed through choice of writerly tone: the chapters
by Gibbs and Jacobs, both scientists, make particularly clear that personal
experience is a touchstone for how research is conducted and/or conveyed.
Another question bound to be asked about work in CLSci as conducted
by researchers trained in literary studies is what combination of theory
and empirical work it draws on or contributes to. David Miall is well known
as one of the pioneers of empirical literary studies, and Gibbs, Gerrig and
Mumper, Oatley, and Jacobs all present findings from experimental work
they have carried out. Amongst our humanities contributors, several give
clear outlines of how their suggestions could be tested empirically: a hypo-
thetical study using the three extant versions of Cazotte’s 18th-century
novella to see how readers tread the interpretive line between the uncanny,
the fantastic, and the marvellous (Kukkonen), or a prediction of changes
to readers’ approval of Joyce’s eponymous heroine Eveline as a function
INTRODUCTION [ 11 ]
of their varying tendencies towards empathic engagement with other
people (Pirlet and Wirag). Troscianko presents some pilot data from the
start of a ‘knowledge exchange’ collaboration with a mental health char-
ity, and Herman also makes clear the real-world ethical implications of the
research project he sketches out: mental-state attribution in narrative can
have effects back on the discourse domains in which they are located, and
thus help change how we think about other species’ minds and so treat
other animals.
When it comes to testing hypotheses, or even making the hypotheses
in the first place, about writers or readers of texts written centuries or mil-
lennia ago, there are obvious complications—indeed, they were raised by
one of the reviewers of our book proposal as needing more attention—
but our contributors do not seem fazed by them. Miall’s chapter deals with
the historically furthest removed textual examples, but he aligns Sappho’s
poem with travel accounts from the 18th and 19th centuries, and his analy-
sis makes clear that there is no principled obstacle to creating this kind
of line of connection between periods. Boyd’s argument relates to a fun-
damental enough feature of human cognition that illustrating it through
Shakespeare’s sonnets poses no problems. Kukkonen’s argument links the
history of aesthetic trends with the predictive models they engage, but in
general from our contributions one can infer that an adapted version of
Carney’s response to the ‘problem’ of individual variation applies to that of
historical variation: there are variations, but there are also commonalities.
The difference between the two cases is, of course, that if we have hypoth-
eses about reader response (or indeed authorial creation) that we want
to test, this simply cannot be done with historical readers or writers as it
can with 21st-century individuals; the most we can do are observational
studies along the lines of corpus analysis. But maybe this does not hugely
matter. We can do experiments with readers now and interpret our results
in the light of wide-ranging evidence of what is known about historical-
evolutionary trends in human cognition. This requires more interdisciplin-
ary collaboration, but perhaps that is no bad thing. It is certainly one more
tempting territory staked out for future exploration.
What we take from this survey of the territory of CLSci, at least as it
is inhabited by the 17 contributors to this volume, is the sense of a field
growing confidently into maturity. We imposed the tripartite structure,
but probably we needn’t have: people are doing all kinds of creative borrow-
ing and lending, from different starting points and with varying aims. You
must judge for yourself whether Hartner’s three principles for a respon-
sible CLSci are being adhered to, or whether you agree with them in the
first place, and we are sure you will have your own set of criteria by which
[ 12 ] Introduction
to assess what follows. But we hope that your reading experience will have
something of the quality of eavesdropping enjoyably on a mixture of ani-
mated conversations.
As for the near future of CLSci, well, we predict that scholars and sci-
entists from across the disciplines will work together more frequently on
closely collaborative projects, and that these projects will develop new
ways of doing mixed-methods research combining theory with qualita-
tive and quantitative measures. We also predict that 4E cognition—the
embodied, the embedded, the enactive, and the extended—will stay big,
but grow more differentiated as debates on what strength of claim can be
made about the contributions of context to cognition continue to mature.
Investigations of contextual effects, priming, and framing will, we imagine,
connect the linguistic and the rhetorical more closely with the other aspects
of the cognitive. There will be more work on how important dimensions
of reader variation affect the processes and the outcomes of literary read-
ing, and how these interactions may have implications for today’s social
and psychiatric challenges. The ever-seductive question of whether reading
literature makes us better (cleverer, more empathic, more moral) people
will be tackled from new angles, especially by developing ways of track-
ing longer-term changes in readers’ mental states and behaviours. In this
regard, we anticipate an increasing concern with more ecologically valid
methods for studying literary reading empirically, via more dialogue with
social anthropology and mobile tech innovation. Lab-based experiments
will continue to ask detailed questions about readers’ responses, with the
4E paradigm bringing the haptics, kinaesthetics, and ergonomics of liter-
ary text processing under scrutiny. Neuroscientific methods will, we hope,
grow more nuanced too, as conceptual developments like ‘second-person
neuroscience’ accompany technological advances. All this should keep the
cognitive literary scientists of the near future agreeably busy. Of course, we
could be wrong about any or all of this, but in a field as young and as vibrant
as ours, there is nothing particularly disquieting about that.
REFERENCES
Burke, Michael, and Emily Troscianko. (2012). Science and literary criticism. St John’s
College Oxford. Programme and abstracts at http://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/4073/
Science%20and%20Literary%20Criticism%202012_v4.pdf.download
Burke, Michael, and Emily T. Troscianko. (2013). Explorations in cognitive literary sci-
ence. Journal of Literary Semantics, 42(2).
Clark, Andy. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future
of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204.
INTRODUCTION [ 13 ]
PART I
INTRODUCTION
4. For an overview of current trends in the field, see Jaén and Simon (2012).
S C I E N T I F I C C O N C E P T S I N L I T E R A R Y S T U DI E S [ 19 ]
design introductory courses and textbooks covering the field as such, and
inviting others to view cognitive literary studies as methodologically vague
and theoretically confusing or inconsistent.
The latter criticism in particular strikes at the heart of the cognitive
field because notions of vagueness and inconsistency run counter to the
promise seemingly inherent in cognitive approaches to bring a touch of sci-
entific clarity into the notoriously vague study of literature. Indeed, both
the special appeal and the most poignant criticism of cognitive approaches
seem to be firmly tied to their interdisciplinary nature. Although Frederick
L. Aldama (2010) has claimed that C. P. Snow’s (1965) famous separation
between ‘the two cultures’ is artificial, ‘a line drawn in sand’ (2010, p. 1),
both critics and proponents of cognitive literary studies have repeatedly
highlighted the particular promises and challenges of attempting to bridge
the gap between the two spheres. While some critics have pointed out the
dangers of the scientific method (Sheenan, 2014, pp. 49‒52), others see
the move towards science as a way of establishing ‘a new humanities on
surer foundations’ (Gottschall, 2008, p. 176) and an opportunity ‘to make
the discipline and the institution of literature more accessible and more
connected with the world outside university and college life’ (Stockwell,
2002, p. 11). In any case, literary scholars who attempt to connect the two
cultures and venture into the realm of science seem to face a particular and
substantial set of challenges.
One of those challenges is connected to the perceived differences in
the nature of research in the two spheres of academia. The humanities
have long embraced the idea that research in literature and art does not
subscribe to the same methodology as the empirical sciences. While
Jonathan Gottschall (2008, p. 176) sees this as a disadvantage and com-
plains that the humanities seem to have ‘dismissed the possibility of gen-
erating reliable knowledge’, other scholars stress what they believe to be
an essential difference between scientific objects of inquiry and litera-
ture. The latter, in the words of Wolfgang Iser, ‘can be assessed, but not
predicted’ (2006, p. 5), as its study is neither centred on the analysis of
experimental data nor proceeds by solving explicitly spelled out problems
(pp. 5‒7). His position, which is still shared by many traditional literary
scholars, is based on the premise that empirical scientists and literary
scholars have fundamentally different research interests. According to
this somewhat simplistic and polarizing point of view, science attempts
to find evidence for solving problems and conclusively answering research
questions, while a successful or productive reading of a literary work is
based ‘on such parameters as originality, appropriateness, inventiveness,
or “insight value” ’ (Adler and Gross, 2002, p. 214). For traditional literary
Despite such claims there is, of course, no univocal agreement on the aims
of literary analysis and the practice of interpretation within ‘traditional’ lit-
erary scholarship. Nevertheless, many researchers working with cognitive
approaches still seem to be interested in creative readings and interpreta-
tions, and few have proposed that we should subscribe exclusively to sci-
entific methodologies. For this reason, scholars such as Marie-Laure Ryan
see the field as being ‘uncomfortably sandwiched between the speculative
and interpretive disciplines of the humanities and the experimental disci-
plines of the hard sciences’ (2010, p. 474). This situation creates a unique
challenge. By drawing on data, concepts, and methods from the sciences,
cognitive literary studies appear to promise insight into the ‘reality’ of
reading and writing. As a consequence, even those aspects of the literary
scholar’s work which remain ‘speculative’ and/or non-empirical run the
danger of becoming invested with an air of scientific and empirical author-
ity. The project of cognitive literary studies generally conveys an impres-
sion of offering positivist clarity, empirical evidence, and the possibility of
definite answers. At the same time, few studies really live up to this image
and go ‘as far as adopting the rigours of experimentation’ (p. 476). Lisa
Zunshine’s (2007) investigations of ‘theory of mind’ and ‘metarepresenta-
tion’, Alan Palmer’s work on ‘social minds’ (2010), or literary applications
of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s blending theory (e.g. Schneider and
Hartner, 2012) are examples of studies that design hermeneutic analytical
tools of their own by adapting concepts from the ‘hard’ sciences. As Ryan
points out, the majority of works in the field do not subscribe to the scien-
tific standards of the disciplines they borrow from, but usually remain ‘in
spirit strictly speculative’ (2010, p. 476).
Moreover, the strategy to borrow and adapt concepts comes with several
methodological pitfalls. As scholars seldom have thorough scientific train-
ing, they often lack detailed knowledge about the precise scope and the
potential shortcomings of the scientific theories they are using. A frequent
result, for example, is an exaggerated trust in specific scientific concepts or
perspectives, as work from areas in which one is an amateur often somehow
S C I E N T I F I C C O N C E P T S I N L I T E R A R Y S T U DI E S [ 21 ]
feels more reliable than ‘the more familiar, but embattled assertions’ of one’s
own field of expertise (Spolsky, 1993, p. 41). As a consequence, literary schol-
ars, according to Hans Adler and Sabine Gross, frequently ‘succumb to the
seductiveness of scientific terms and import them into literary analysis with
little consideration for their actual scientific use, treating them in effect with
poetic licence and happily engaging in creative analogies’ (2002, p. 211).
There is, of course, nothing wrong with creative analogies per se. In
fact, instances of what Gregory Bateson calls ‘loose thinking’ (1972, p. 84)
often constitute the initial stages of creative and successful research.
Bateson recommends that researchers ‘look … for wild analogies to their
own material’ (p. 87) in other fields of inquiry and then move from ideas
with yet ‘unsound foundations’ to stricter scientific thinking (p. 86). In my
opinion, however, ‘loose thinking’ should be made recognizable as such.
When poetic licence comes in the disguise of scientific terminology, when
what claims to be neuroscience turns out to be ‘neurospeculation’ (Tallis,
2008), cognitive literary studies run the danger of undermining their own
credibility. Combining a rhetoric of scientificity with epistemological care-
lessness is a sure way of providing ammunition to the critics of cognitive
literary studies. Vicious attacks such as Raymond Tallis’s article on ‘The
Neuroscience Delusion’ bear witness to the fact that epistemological short-
comings do not go unnoticed; they trigger critical responses which accuse
cognitive approaches of promoting reductionist views that fail to do justice
to the complexity of both scientific theory and literary texts.
As a scholar deeply interested in cognitive approaches, I believe that
we need to take seriously the concerns that have been voiced concerning
the special interdisciplinary nature of our field. The incorporation of sci-
ence into the work of literary scholarship arguably demands a heightened
degree of epistemological awareness and conceptual deliberation. In order
to forestall criticism, cognitive literary studies therefore need to engage in
a continued reflection on their concepts, aims, and methods. A helpful heu-
ristic tool for this purpose can be found in the model of explanatory levels.5
LEVELS OF EXPLANATION: A HEURISTIC MATRIX
Emergent qualities, which are found in every corner of complexity in the uni-
verse, are qualities not included in, and generally not predictable from knowledge
S C I E N T I F I C C O N C E P T S I N L I T E R A R Y S T U DI E S [ 23 ]
of, the qualities of the system in which they arise. The emergent qualities of the
simple chemical combination H2O, for example, are not found in the two gases
taken separately or mixed together. Similarly, complete physical and chemical
knowledge of the DNA molecule would not predict its function in reproduction.
Wilden, 1987, p. 1706
6. See also Paulson (1991, pp. 44–50). For a critical introduction to the notion of
emergence, see also O’Connor and Wong (2012).
7. On the notion and discussion of eliminative materialism which underlies Carroll’s
position, see Dietrich (2007, pp. 52–59) and Ramsey (2008).
8. In this context, see Gregory Currie’s discussion of the paradox of caring, in which
he argues that solutions to this paradox need to observe the constraint of coherence,
i.e. that they ‘should cohere with the best psychological theorizing’ and refrain from
postulating psychological mechanisms ‘not sanctioned by that theorizing’ (1997,
pp. 63–64).
S C I E N T I F I C C O N C E P T S I N L I T E R A R Y S T U DI E S [ 25 ]
utmost importance for any sensible cognitive approach to literature and
its processing.
Unfortunately, the need for such expertise constitutes one of the
basic challenges of interdisciplinary research in general.9 Work across
disciplinary borders ideally requires solid expertise in both fields. Yet
mastering expert knowledge in an additional discipline beside one’s own
is indeed a daunting task. Most traditionally trained literary scholars
therefore may find it difficult to acquire a solid footing in the cognitive
sciences.
Either way you look at it, there is an apparent gap that separates the mental
phenomena from solid matter. Consciousness does not seem to fit naturally into
the scientific framework that explains the physical universe. The difficulty of
10. See also Vandaele and Brône (2009, p. 3). Ryan (2010) makes a related point in
her discussion of cognitive narratology. Taking the example of a brain-imaging study by
Speer and colleagues (2009), she suggests that neurological findings often seem self-evi-
dent to the narratologist: ‘Do we need an MRI to tell us that reading isolated words does
not require the same mental activity as reading a story? Are brain scans necessary to
make us realize that there is something in common between apprehending an image of
something—be it verbal or visual representation—and apprehending its referent? …
Instead of opening new perspectives on narrative cognition the experiments of Zack
and Speer confirm what common sense tells us’ (pp. 471–472). For Ryan the study’s lack
of narratological relevance is symptomatic of a deeper problem: ‘current techniques of
brain imaging have not yet reached the necessary precision to tell narratologists some-
thing truly new and interesting concerning the cognitive foundations of narratives’
(p. 472).
S C I E N T I F I C C O N C E P T S I N L I T E R A R Y S T U DI E S [ 27 ]
relating the phenomenal world to the very different world described in physics
is known as the explanatory gap.11
Dietrich, 2007, p. 13, emphasis in original
Even if bridging this gap is theoretically possible, the solution will most
likely have to go beyond developing brain scans with higher resolution.
It will probably require a new understanding of the relationship between
mind and matter, since mental phenomena, according to Benjamin Libet,
‘cannot a priori be described by any knowledge of physical events and
structures; and, conversely, physical events (including the neuronal ones in
the brain) cannot be described by knowledge of the accompanying mental
subjective events’ (2004, pp. 181‒182).12
The mind‒body problem is certainly the most widely discussed explana-
tory gap in cognitive science, but an equally important gulf opens up spe-
cifically in cognitive literary studies between the analysis of general mental
processes and the subjective reading of specific literary texts—not to men-
tion the question of how individual acts of reception shape literature as
a cultural or political phenomenon. Again we find emergent structure on
those levels that scientific theory, for example in neuroscience or social
psychology, is currently incapable of adequately dealing with, partly due
to the staggering complexities involved in the reading of literature. In my
opinion, the existence of those gaps and the emerging idiosyncrasies found
on all explanatory levels suggest a third criterion for cognitive literary
studies: the principle of autonomy.
The idea of methodological and conceptual autonomy in literary stud-
ies derives from the notion of emergence and the related gap between the
explanatory potential of scientific approaches and the phenomena inves-
tigated by the humanities. While Thomas Gottschall, for example, wants
literary studies to ‘move closer to the sciences in theory, method, and gov-
erning ethos’ (2008, p. 3), I believe that the notion of a hierarchy of explana-
tory levels suggests that the most illuminating way of addressing literature
and culture is by working with conceptual means developed specifically
for these phenomena. During the development of adequate approaches,
scholars should by all means look beyond the borders of their discipline for
inspiration. Yet the incorporation of scientific concepts into literary anal-
ysis should ideally be free from false scientific pretence and avoid broad-
sweeping reductionist claims that naïvely equate lower-level phenomena
such as mirror neurons with higher-level phenomena like empathy.
11. The term ‘explanatory gap’ was originally coined by Joseph Levine (1983).
12. Again, this is a hotly contested issue in the study of consciousness. For a debate,
see Dietrich (2007, pp. 63–82) and Blackmore (2010).
S C I E N T I F I C C O N C E P T S I N L I T E R A R Y S T U DI E S [ 29 ]
CONCLUSION: THE MEETING OF LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
There are many good reasons for a literary scholar to be interested in the
cognitive sciences. After all, ‘the mind as such, and perception in particu-
lar’, as Monika Fludernik and Greta Olson point out, ‘have … been stock
features of all narrative enquiry since the days of Henry James’ (2011,
p. 8). There is no a priori objection to taking science as a source of infor-
mation and inspiration. In fact, I would go one step further and hold
with Tony Jackson, quoted earlier, that our discipline can hardly afford to
ignore empirical investigations of mind and brain and the resulting claims
‘about the biology and psychology of reading, writing, and responding’
(2000, p. 340) if we want to keep up with the pulse of time. Whenever new
information about mental processes becomes available and sufficiently
persuasive, it is irrational to refrain from exploring its explanatory value
for literature and culture. Engaging with science can in my opinion also be
a valuable asset with regard to the standing of the humanities in interdis-
ciplinary dialogue—if only because it enables the humanities scholar to
critically examine and question the scientist’s assertions.14
The contributions to the present volume testify to the exciting possibili-
ties of an illuminating and fruitful dialogue between science and literature.
The volume demonstrates that the particular appeal of cognitive literary
studies lies specifically in its interdisciplinary nature, which invites us to
think outside the boxes of our established disciplines. The meeting of the
two cultures not only has the potential to draw our attention to interest-
ing questions we have failed to consider so far but also asks us to review
basic theoretical tenets and to re-examine familiar phenomena from new
methodological angles. But although the appeal of cognitive approaches
lies in the field’s interdisciplinary nature, its potential problems do too. As
this chapter has argued, attempts at bridging the two cultures always come
with conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges that must not be
ignored.
Drawing on the idea of a hierarchical matrix of explanatory levels, I have
tried to outline some of the most common pitfalls and faux pas in the adap-
tation of scientific theory to literary studies. Among other things, I have
drawn attention to the awkward blending of scientific rhetoric and poetic
S C I E N T I F I C C O N C E P T S I N L I T E R A R Y S T U DI E S [ 31 ]
benefits of humanities research in a broader context. Nevertheless, I won-
der whether this is all that literary scholarship in general and cognitive liter-
ary studies in particular should endeavour to do.
The notion of emergent structure and the related principle of auton-
omy indicate that each explanatory level poses questions that may not
necessarily bear on other levels of inquiry. Literature is worth studying
for a vast variety of reasons; not all of them will necessarily be of sci-
entific or transdisciplinary value. However, if unidirectional but meth-
odologically sound borrowing from the sciences enables us to improve
our ‘reflective understanding’ of a literary work and helps us ‘to increase
the associative complexity of our response to that work—thereby, one
hopes, enriching our aesthetic experience’ (Hogan, 2008, p. 193)—then
cognitive literary studies, in my opinion, does not require any further
justification.
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Adler, H., and Gross, S. (2002). Adjusting the frame: Comments on cognitivism and
literature. Poetics Today, 23(2), 195–220.
Aldama, F. L. (2010). Introduction: The sciences and the humanities matter as one. In
F. L. Aldama (Ed.), Toward a cognitive theory of narrative acts (pp. 1–9). Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press.
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Blackmore, S. (2010). Consciousness: An introduction (2nd ed.). London: Hodder
Education.
Burke, M., and Troscianko, E. (2012). Science and literary criticism. St John’s College
Oxford. Retrieved from http://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/4073/Science%20and%20
Literary%20Criticism%202012_v4.pdf.download
Carroll, J. (1995). Evolution and literary theory. Columbia, MO: University of
Missouri Press.
Cohen, P. (2010, 1 April). The next big thing in English: Knowing they know that you
know. New York Times. Retrieved from http:///www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/
books/01lit.html
Currie, G. (1997). The paradox of caring: Fiction and the philosophy of mind. In M.
Hjort and S. Laver (Eds.), Emotions and the arts (pp. 63–92). New York: Oxford
University Press.
Dietrich, A. (2007). Introduction to consciousness: Neuroscience, cognitive science, and phi-
losophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fludernik, M., and Olson, G. (2011). Introduction. In G. Olson (Ed.), Current trends in
narratology (pp. 1–33). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Gottschall, J. (2008). Literature, science, and a new humanities. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Hartner, M. (2012). Perspektivische Interaktion im Roman: Kognition, Rezeption,
Interpretation [The interaction of perspectives in the novel: Cognition, recep-
tion, interpretation]. Berlin: de Gruyter.
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Schmidt, S. J. (2000). Interpretation: The story does have an ending. Poetics Today,
21(4), 621–632.
Schneider, R., and Hartner, M. (Eds.). (2012). Blending and the study of narra-
tive: Approaches and applications. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Sheenan, P. (2014). Continental drift: The clash between literary studies and cognitive
literary studies. In C. Danta and H. Groth (Eds.), Mindful aesthetics: Literature
and the science of mind (pp. 47–58). New York: Bloomsbury.
Slingerland, E. (2008). What science offers the humanities: Integrating body and culture.
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217(4566), 1223–1226.
Spolsky, E. (1993). Gaps in nature: Literary interpretation and the modular mind. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press.
Stockwell, P. (2002). Cognitive poetics: An introduction. London: Routledge.
Tallis, R. (2008, 9 April). The neuroscience delusion. The Times Literary Supplement.
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Vandaele, J., and Brône, G. (2009). Cognitive poetics: A critical introduction. In
G. Brône and J. Vandaele (Eds.), Cognitive poetics: Goals, gains and gaps (pp. 1–
29). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Waugh, P. (2006). Introduction: Criticism, theory, and anti-theory. In P. Waugh
(Ed.), Literary theory and criticism: An Oxford guide (pp. 1–33). Oxford: Oxford
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Zunshine, L. (2007). Why we read fiction. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
C O G N I T I V E A N D A F F E C T I V E N A R R AT OL O G Y [ 37 ]
phenomena of readers feeling for (and suffering with) fictional characters,
becoming invested in their fate (i.e. the story outcome), or developing read-
ing preferences for a particular genre based on the specific mood or emotion
it typically evokes—these all attest to the affective dimension of narrative
engagement. But how can these characteristic forms of engagement with
narrative be accommodated within a narratological framework? What func-
tional or operative contribution do they make to the reading practice?
First, by way of their directive function, affective responses draw our
attention to certain facets of the narrative that strike us as relevant, yet
might have escaped us in a more intellectual engagement with the text.
Emotions, in other words, ‘alert us to important aspects of the story such
as plot, character, setting, and point of view’ (Robinson, 2005, p. 107; see
also Miall, 2006, p. 53). By selecting and establishing a hierarchy among
the given pieces of information, emotions ipso facto shape readers’ under-
standing of what the text is about. Secondly, regarding the external com-
municative function of emotion, readers will assess fictional characters and
their actions based both on a ‘narrow’ cognitive (i.e. analytic and dispas-
sionate) evaluation and on affective criteria. In this context, empathic and
sympathetic responses towards story characters represent means of relat-
ing to the emotional experiences of fictional entities. By exploiting their
understanding of how emotion and individual motivation and agency are
interlinked in real life (knowledge gained via introspection or observations
of others), readers are equipped to apply emotion-based heuristics to ‘fill
in the gaps’ (Iser, 1978, pp. 170‒179) in characters’ portrayals or assumed
mindsets; they are, in other words, able to make informed (although idio-
syncratic) inferences about what motivates fictional characters to act in
the way they do in particular contexts and circumstances. In short, we
understand characters and the situations in which they find themselves
not merely rationally but also emotionally. To reiterate this in narratologi-
cal terms, emotional engagement with narrative is thus characterized as a
means of directing readers’ attention to story elements that correspond to
a field of current affective interest (internal function) as well as providing
an affect-derived scaffold that facilitates reader inferences about the fic-
tional characters’ motivation or agency (external function).
Beyond these general observations, acquiring a more differentiated
understanding of how readers’ affective responses to literature are grounded
in the way emotions function for readers in real life (i.e. outside the realm
of reading) requires that we delineate the nature and structure of emotions
in more detail. Emotion, for this purpose, can be more narrowly described
as a ‘process that unfolds as a situation is appraised and reappraised, and
as continuous feedback occurs’ between affective and cognitive-rational
1. See also Solomon (1976/1993), and, for a critical review of judgement theories of
emotion, Robinson (2005, pp. 8–16).
C O G N I T I V E A N D A F F E C T I V E N A R R AT OL O G Y [ 39 ]
monitoring feeds back on affective components only in the subsequent
stages of emotion-regulation, the post-hoc recognition that ‘it is a story
we are engaged with and that there is no appropriate action to take’ will
neither undo nor reverse the initial affective appraisal. Emotional stimuli,
moreover, do not need to derive from the factual realm (or extra-text),
but can equally be hypothetical or imagined. As Jenefer Robinson sug-
gests, ‘more complex cases of emotion in human beings might involve
affective responses not to a perception but to a thought or belief’ (2005,
p. 59). Presupposing, furthermore, what Jerrold Levinson (1997, p. 24)
calls an ‘anti-judgementalist stance’—that is, challenging the proposition
that ‘emotions for objects logically presuppose beliefs in the existence and
features of those objects’ (p. 23)—effectively provides a potent (although
partial) answer to the paradox of fiction.
Henceforth, granting emotional responses to literature the onto-
logical status of ‘real’ emotions is no longer a problematic proposition
(contrast this with the notion of ‘quasi-emotions’, i.e. emotions expe-
rienced through second-order, make-believe knowledge; Walton, 1990,
pp. 195‒204). As regards their intensity, however, (literary) emotions
depend on the power of the stimulus, which, in this case, is linked to
the cognitive activity of reading. But how do we account for the numer-
ous idiosyncrasies in readers’ affective responses to the same literary
work (i.e. to an identical matrix of plot design, character depiction, nar-
rative perspective, and so on)? In the case of literary reading—and in
blatant contrast to real-life events—the provision of information in any
story (including the pre-selected framing of events through narratorial
perspective or comment) is exactly equivalent for any reader; patently,
however, readers’ emotional evaluation differs not only in degree but
also in kind (joy, anger, disgust, etc.) for any given literary text. In sum,
therefore, how do we approach the ‘differing emotions problem’ (Hogan,
2003, p. 185) for an identical literary artefact? To start with, because
interpretations are the result of ‘narrow’ cognitive monitoring of our
non- cognitive appraisals, and these in turn depend on differing goals,
desires, and interests, there is likely to be disagreement in the resulting
‘broad’ cognitive overview of plot, character, and theme. In line with this
argument, experimental research by Dolf Zillmann (1995) has demon-
strated that (deliberate) moral considerations play a significant role in
justifying, conceding, and motivating discordant affective responses to
the emotional experience of others. In addition, differences in readers’
emotional susceptibility to a literary work can be partially explained by
the closeness or distance of the events and the situations of the charac-
ters to readers’ own lives (Myyry and Helkama, 2007).
C O G N I T I V E A N D A F F E C T I V E N A R R AT OL O G Y [ 41 ]
Renaissance villains. Pace constructionism, there seems to be something
‘real’ that can be shared across cultures, historical divides, and the realm
of readerly subjectivity alike. While individual life experience and moral
predispositions may therefore account for differing emotional assessments
among readers, basic emotion theory effectively provides an answer to the
‘shared emotions problem’ (Hogan, 2003, p. 167), or the question of why
readers habitually experience an overlap in their affective responses to the
same literary text.
C O G N I T I V E A N D A F F E C T I V E N A R R AT OL O G Y [ 43 ]
to-morrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos
Ayres [sic]. The passage had been booked. Could she still draw back after all
he had done for her?’ (pp. 33‒34, emphases added). By now, Eveline is in
the grip of her anxiety, which manifests itself in her physical and emotional
distress: ‘All of the seas of the world tumbled about her heart’, ‘nausea in
her body’ (p. 34). When Frank urges her to ‘Come!’, the entreaty is affec-
tively assessed as a threat, not as tenderness. Eveline responds with an
instinct to flight. In a ‘frenzy’ (p. 34), her strenuous opposition consists
in a—now literal—clinging to the present (‘She gripped with both hands
at the iron railing’, p. 34), a resolution reflected in a palilogical exclama-
tion: ‘No! No! No! It was impossible’ (p. 34). Eventually, in the final stage
of her distress, the accustomed routine of emotional stasis sets in: ‘She set
her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no
sign of love or farewell or recognition’ (p. 34). Eveline has finally slipped
back into a state of numbness and inaction, fittingly signalling her immi-
nent return to paralysis in life.
Eveline appears to epitomize the plight of many early 20th-century
women in Irish society, and ad-hoc rationalizations for her predicament
abound: the reader may attribute her inability to liberate herself to the
restrictiveness of social prospects designated to women like Eveline in a
patriarchal Irish-Catholic culture (i.e. Eveline as a victim of confining soci-
etal roles); he or she may relate it to an individual character flaw (i.e. Eveline
as a narrow-minded coward). Or else, in a synthesis of these ideas, her dire
living conditions might have prevented the heroine from being receptive
to new experiences and paths to happiness. Whichever intuitive rationale
is favoured, Eveline longs to escape, yet her reliance on routine and famil-
iarity overrides these impulses. In facing and rejecting a life-altering deci-
sion, and in her inability to seize the chance of finding happiness, Eveline
emerges as a tragic heroine.
Cognitively speaking, retracing the pathway of reasoning that underlies
the reading of ‘Eveline as a coward’, readers may attempt to understand her
plight intellectually, which will result in a ‘narrow’ cognitive judgement of
the basic situation she finds herself in as constricting and painful. A further
pragmatic comparison of Eveline’s present hardship with the possibility of
a blissful life abroad with Frank, who she knows is willing to provide for
her, protect her, and love her (p. 33), will lead readers to rationally assess
Eveline’s character as fearful and weak. Her indecision and eventual refusal
to leave might, upon dispassionate reflection, reveal her to be nothing
short of foolish. Without considering the heroine’s emotions, therefore, the
reader cannot even comprehend why there should be an internal conflict in
C O G N I T I V E A N D A F F E C T I V E N A R R AT OL O G Y [ 45 ]
be significantly altered by the incorporation of affective judgement. As
Herman suggests, to
take into account the cognitive and emotional states and processes of the charac-
ters as they act and interact in the storyworld … must be construed as integral
to the core events or ‘gist’ of the narrative, not as optional or peripheral ele-
ments that can be safely omitted.
2007a, p. 247, emphasis added
3. This claim is reminiscent of Käte Hamburger’s (1968, p. 67) assertion that lit-
erature is the sole discourse with the potential for conveying the ‘I-Origo’ of personal
experience.
C O G N I T I V E A N D A F F E C T I V E N A R R AT OL O G Y [ 47 ]
fruitfully be extended by ascribing emotions to the intrinsic core of nar-
rativity, namely ‘experientiality’ (as defined later).
The general framework of natural narratology is a cognitive constructiv-
ist one (Fludernik, 1996, pp. xii, 12). Narrativity, consequently, ‘is not a
quality adhering to a text, but rather an attribute imposed on the text by
the reader who interprets the text as narrative, thus narrativizing the text’
(Fludernik, 2003, p. 244). By stressing the constructivist aspects of nar-
rativity, natural narratology essentially foregrounds the reader and focuses
on the cognitive mechanisms underlying readers’ construction and inter-
pretation of narrative. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics and
schema (or frame) theory, natural narratology is predicated on the reader’s
pre-existing cognitive parameters, and based on the assumption that read-
ers rely on the same frames for the construction of meanings to interpret
(fictional) texts and (factual) real-life experience alike (1996, p. 12; see also
Gerrig, 1993). The term ‘natural’ in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology there-
fore corresponds to the human, i.e. it relates to narratology’s ‘anchorings
in human everyday experience’ (1996, p. 19) and to the ‘cognitive frames
[constitutive of prototypical human experience] by means of which texts
are interpreted’ (p. 12, emphasis in original).
The appeal of a reader’s recourse to established frames of knowledge
lies in the fact that this way of organizing knowledge is psychologically
credible, highly dynamic, and draws on readers’ individual real-life expe-
rience. Yet the experience of narrative is more than a mechanical imple-
mentation of pre-existing cognitive and affective mechanisms. Stories
feed back into how we perceive these contexts; narrative, by providing
aesthetically modelled experience, will engage readers with the lives
of (fictional) characters in a process that drives the formation of new
behavioural and cognitive patterns (such as perspective-taking, imagina-
tive powers, social learning, etc.; see Carroll, 2004; Boyd, 2009; Dutton,
2009) that might, in turn, enrich and alter readers’ responses to other
stories (Herman, 2007b).
Incorporating individual cognitive parameters into the framework (of
frames, scripts, and schemas) also offers crucial advantages for explaining
idiosyncrasies and similarities in readers’ cognitive and affective engage-
ment with narrative (see also Stockwell, 2002, p. 87). In this context, criti-
cism of ‘natural’ narratology has targeted the universality of the cognitive
set-up in particular. As a response, and particularly in recognition of the
subjective dimension of narrativization, Fludernik acknowledges that
the aesthetics of the narrative text changes drastically over time and that these
developments will tend to influence narrativization. Moreover, individual
In line with Fludernik, we argue that this is precisely where the heuris-
tic value of literary emotions can be located within the present ‘natural’
framework. Within natural narratology, emotional responses to literary
artefacts are seen to be particularly pertinent to the subjective dimension
of reader experience. Natural narratology, consequently, is able to expand
its purview and become even ‘more natural’ by exploring the affective com-
ponent of narrativization. By integrating emotions as a central subjectiv-
izing element of readers’ construction of narrativity, natural narratology
is able to strike a balance between the universal and the particular dimen-
sions of narrativization. The universal aspects of emotion (as represented
by the basic emotion approach) can, at least partially, account for why read-
ers can agree on certain interpretations in the first place, and why they
are able to recuperate narrativity from texts beyond their own restricted
historical period or culture (the ‘shared emotions problem’). On the other
hand, the cultural and individual contingencies of (literary) emotions form
part of the subjective dimension of narrativization and are therefore partly
responsible for differences in readers’ interpretation of a single literary
text (the ‘differing emotions problem’).
Additionally, and consistently with ‘natural’ narratology’s focus on
cognitive reader parameters, narrativity is reconceived as constituted by
experientiality, defined as the reader’s ‘quasi-mimetic evocation of “real-
life experience” ’ (Fludernik, 1996, p. 12) as established during the reading
process (p. 36).4 Experientiality is hence mediated by means of the reader’s
consciousness, or, in other words, all narrative is argued to ‘fundamentally
represent another’s consciousness’ (p. 374, emphasis in original) as stimu-
lated through narrative and temporarily construed by the reader. With
experientiality as the universal topic of narration (p. 50), every narrative
conveys the special subjective quality of events as they are experienced by
the individual reader.5 A natural narratology conception of narrative conse-
quently not only foregrounds the reader’s consciousness as locus of simu-
lated (fiction-derived) experience but posits experientiality as the defining
core of narrative—narrative, as a minimum definition, cannot exist without
an anthropomorphic experiencer (i.e. a human consciousness) at the level of
C O G N I T I V E A N D A F F E C T I V E N A R R AT OL O G Y [ 49 ]
narrative reception. Such a conception, incidentally, appears to diminish the
role of plot as an essential constituent of narrativity, a controversial posi-
tion contested, for instance, by Jonas Grethlein. As he argues for ancient
texts and modern paralittérature, ‘what entices the reader are not the rather
schematic consciousness processes, but the drive of the action’ (2015, p.
267) characteristic of numerous literary genres. This apparent contradic-
tion, however, can fruitfully be reconciled within the present approach if the
dynamics of plot (as presented in the story) are equally modelled to derive
from general parameters of cognitive reader construal, i.e. as based on those
common mechanisms of sense-making that enable individuals to project
time, action (and ultimately suspense) onto everyday memories, planning
for future events, or, in the present case, fictional literary incidents.
In much the same manner, and finally turning to affect, in The Feeling of
What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Damasio
elaborates that ‘we continually have emotional feelings … sometimes low
grade, sometimes quite intense, and we do sense the general physical tone
of our being’ (2000, pp. 285‒286). Reader experientiality (and ultimately
reader consciousness) consequently includes emotions as an experien-
tial facet of the reading experience that accompanies story construals at
all times and is aptly described as ‘continuity of the melodic line of back-
ground emotions’ (p. 93) throughout the reading process. In line with this
idea, Fludernik has emphasized the specific emotional quality of the nar-
rativizing experience as follows:
For the narrator [i.e. reader] the experientiality of the story resides not merely
in the events themselves but in their emotional significance and exemplary
nature. The events become tellable precisely because they have started to mean
something to the narrator on an emotional level. It is this conjunction of experi-
ence reviewed, reorganized, and evaluated (‘point’) that constitutes narrativity.
2003, p. 245, emphases added
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors would expressly like to thank Monika Fludernik for her invalu-
able advice and suggestions on all subjects pertaining to ‘natural’ narratology.
REFERENCES
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Frijda, N. H. (2007). The laws of emotion. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gerrig, R. J. (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds: On the psychological activities of read-
ing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Grethlein, J. (2015). Is narrative ‘the description of fictional mental functioning’?
Heliodorus against Palmer, Zunshine & co. Style, 49(3), 257–284.
Hamburger, K. (1968). Die Logik der Dichtung [The logic of literature]. Stuttgart: Klett.
Herman, D. (2007a). Cognition, emotion, and consciousness. In D. Herman (Ed.),
The Cambridge companion to narrative (pp. 245–259). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Herman, D. (2007b). Storytelling and the science of mind: Cognitive narratology, dis-
cursive psychology, and narratives in face-to-face interaction. Narrative, 15(3),
306–334.
Herman, D. (2009). Cognitive narratology. In P. Hühn, J. Pier, W. Schmid, and
J. Schönert (Eds.), Handbook of narratology (pp. 30–43). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Hogan, P. C. (2003). Cognitive science, literature, and the arts: A guide for humanists.
New York: Routledge.
Hogan, P. C. (2011). Affective narratology: The emotional structure of stories. Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Howe, D. (2013). Empathy: What it is and why it matters. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading. London: Routledge.
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Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. London: Penguin.
Kukkonen, K. (2013). Space, time and causality in graphic narratives: An embod-
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Berlin: de Gruyter.
Kukkonen, K., and Caracciolo, M. (2014). Introduction: What is the ‘Second
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C O G N I T I V E A N D A F F E C T I V E N A R R AT OL O G Y [ 53 ]
CHAPTER 3
‘Annihilation of Self’
The Cognitive Challenge of the Sublime
DAVID S. MIALL
INTRODUCTION
To please us, the sublime must now be abridged, reduced, and parodied as the
grotesque, somehow hedged with irony to assure us we are not imaginative ado-
lescents. The infinite spaces are no longer astonishing; still less do they terrify.
They pique our curiosity, but we have lost the obsession, so fundamental to the
Romantic sublime, with natural infinitude. We live once again in a finite natural
world. (p. 6)
In this view, we have lost that vision of the powers of reason that accord-
ing to Kant enable us to rise superior to nature in response to the sub-
lime, while recognizing the ‘unattainability’ of both the object in nature
and the ideas of reason. Put another way, as Wordsworth (1974) writes,
around 1811‒1812, in his fragmentary essay on the sublime: ‘it rouses us to
a sympathetic energy & calls upon the mind to grasp at something towards
which it can make approaches but which it is incapable of attaining—yet so
Here, Weiskel seems to be saying, is where we need to engage with the find-
ings of neuropsychology, and that what we may then find is that a series of
features and processes map our cloudy mental suppositions on to the real-
time operations of a working brain.
Weiskel in fact takes his psychological intuitions in the direction of
psychoanalysis, where I do not propose to follow him. What he suggests,
however, is that we may find within ourselves a cognitive structure cor-
responding to the sublime. Perhaps this can be identified through EEG or
fMRI, or some similar brain-mapping technique. We cannot, of course,
expect to identify a specific set of neurons where the sublime response
takes place; we might, rather, find a constellation of features in the brain
that contribute to sublime experiences, each of which may differ from
the next. There may be no ‘rules’, as Edmund Burke (1757/1998, p. 49)
puts it; ‘art can never give the rules that make an art’ (see also Attridge,
2004, p. 12). In what follows I outline an approach that may give us access
to some of the cognitive and neuropsychological features that help cre-
ate the sublime experience. I begin with an examination of one written
account of a sublime experience dating from the early 19th century by
Lady Morgan (1821), and go on to introduce descriptions by other authors
later in the chapter.
Since the early 18th century, the crossing of the Alps has been a sought-
after experience of the sublime. One traveller, Lady Morgan, crossing the
Alps in 1820, had read such accounts but felt compelled to disagree with
C O G N I T I V E C H A L L E N G E OF T H E S U B L I M E [ 57 ]
them. Her account, published in 1821 in her book on Italy, forms a particu-
larly interesting moment, since it suggests that for her the discourse on the
sublime is radically deficient. She is on the usual route for travellers from
France to Italy (via Lyon and Turin), about to cross Mont Cenis. Since the
time of Gray and Walpole who made the crossing in 1739, this mountain
has had a fearsome reputation for travellers, who engage themselves to be
carried by porters across its heights in baskets.
Whoever has wandered far and seen much, has learned to distrust the prom-
ises of books; and (in respect of the most splendid efforts of human labour)
must have often felt how far the unworn expectation starts beyond its pos-
sible accomplishment. But nature never disappoints. Neither the memory
nor the imagination of authorship can go beyond the fact she dictates, or the
image she presents. … An aspect of the material world then presents itself,
which genius, even in its highest exaltation, must leave to original creation,
as unimitated and inimitable. The sensation it produces is too strong for plea-
sure, too intense for enjoyment. There, where all is so new, novelty loses its
charm; where all is so safe, conscious security is no proof against ‘horrible
imaginings;’ and those splendid evidences of the science and industry of man,
which rise at every step, recede before the terrible possibilities with which
they mingle, and which may render the utmost precaution of talent and phi-
lanthropy unavailable. … Here experience teaches the falsity of the trite
maxim, that the mind becomes elevated by the contemplation of nature in the
midst of her grandest works, and engenders thoughts ‘that wander through
eternity.’ The mind in such scenes is not raised. It is stricken back upon its
own insignificance. Masses like these sublime deformities, starting out of the
ordinary proportions of nature, in their contemplation reduce man to what he
is—an atom. … Well may the countless races of successive ages have left the
mysteries of the Alps unexplored, their snows untracked: but … Gratitude
as eternal as the snows of Mount Blanc to them or him, who grappled with
obstacles coeval with creation, levelled the pinnacle and blew up the rock,
pierced the granite, and spanned the torrent, disputing with nature in all her
potency her right to separate man from man, and ‘made straight in the desert
an highway’ for progressive civilization!
1821, pp. 38‒40
From Kant’s perspective, Morgan here fails to rise above her own fearful
sensory imaginings; contemplating the destructive forces of nature, she
refuses to see that human reason is superior to anything in nature; on
the contrary, the scene shows man to be ‘an atom’. Yet, Morgan’s account
suddenly changes direction: perhaps she swings behind Kant after all in
C O G N I T I V E C H A L L E N G E OF T H E S U B L I M E [ 59 ]
CONFLICTS OF THE SUBLIME
For if I gaze on you but for a little while, I am no longer master of my voice, and
my tongue lies useless, and a delicate flame runs over my skin. No more do I see
with my eyes, and my ears hum. The sweat pours down me, I am all seized with
trembling, and I grow paler than the grass. My strength fails me, and I seem
little short of dying. (p. 127)
Longinus draws our attention to one key feature of the sublime: that ‘how,
uniting opposites, she freezes while she burns, is both out of her senses
and in her right mind’; and that this shows us not one emotion but ‘a con-
course of emotions’ that is beyond control or comprehension. Longinus
emphasizes the fusion of the emotions into a single whole as the feature
that gives the poem its distinction (p. 127). Yet, looking more carefully,
we find paradoxically that each sense of the poet is confronted by some
greater power that brings it close to failure: eyes that cannot see, hearing
obstructed by a hum. Her capacities for speaking or making sense of her
sensations and emotions are threatened. Again, experience of the sublime
creates an altered state of consciousness. The sublime, paradoxically, can
involve the effect of quotidian feelings and emotions being subjected to
a diminishment or humiliation in the face of an incalculably superior and
powerful emotional agency. As Longinus notes, speaking of the power of
the great writers: ‘they all rise above the human level. All other attributes
prove their possessors to be men, but sublimity carries one up to where
one is close to the majestic mind of God’ (p. 156). Thus in literature of the
sublime ‘we look for something transcending the human’.
Although focused on quite different contexts, both Morgan and Sappho
describe the impact of the transcendent aspect of the sublime as a total-
izing experience, pre-empting all else. Morgan dismisses the ‘trite maxim’
that the sublime elevates the mind; on the contrary it reduces ‘man to
what he is—an atom’ (1821, p. 39). For Sappho it involves a failure of the
C O G N I T I V E C H A L L E N G E OF T H E S U B L I M E [ 61 ]
senses that seems ‘little short of dying’ (Murray and Dorsch, 2000, p. 127).
Despite the fact that such remarkable literary and dramatic implications
are underpinned by profound cognitive phenomena, the aesthetic fea-
tures of the sublime have received little attention from cognitive science,
although there has been some study of related phenomena. In the next
section I outline briefly the work of two scholars in this field, Nico Frijda
and Jonathan Haidt.
Frijda (1986), who makes no specific mention of the sublime, provides
a brief discussion of similar concepts, amazement, surprise, and wonder (we
might also consider adding awe, astonishment, exaltation, and the verb to
astound). Frijda’s primary focus is on the physical correlates of these states,
beginning with the response to a sudden appearance. The emotion, whether
of surprise or wonder, initiates a passive, receptive state, an immobilizing of
the body. Amazement, he adds, involves ‘widening of the eyes, brief suspen-
sion of breathing, and general loss of muscle tone. The loss of muscle tone
causes the mouth to fall open, and may make the subject stagger or force him
to sit down’; the raising of the eyebrows and opened eyes set the attention
‘for peripheral stimuli wherever these may come from’ (p. 18). The system, in
other words, is set to respond primarily and immediately to danger. In Frijda’s
scheme amazement can be thought of as the most negative and the swift-
est version of several closely related emotions (amazement, astonishment, sur-
prise). In addition, they displace whatever emotions were taking place when
the interruption occurred. In contrast, wonder and awe encroach on the mind
and take it over more slowly. Examples might be approaching a great cathe-
dral such as Chartres, or attaining the summit of a mountain, or reading pas-
sages of poetry that describe such experiences. However, we may find in these
or other instances that emotions such as surprise or astonishment prepare us
for an ensuing experience of the sublime: within a brief interval (perhaps a
few seconds), a sense of the predicament of the self has developed in an array
of secondary emotions that confront the primary one.
While Frijda’s account, based as it is on evolutionary considerations, is
mainly concerned with negative construals of emotions such as surprise,
Haidt examines a positive emotion that is close to the sublime, that is,
elevation and its cognates. Elevation is regarded as a positive emotion, and
Haidt classifies it as one of the moral emotions in his contribution to the
Handbook of Affective Sciences (2003). Elevation, says Haidt, ‘seems to make
people stop, admire, and open their hearts and minds in a striking experi-
ence of liminality’, so that, as Haidt puts it, ‘elevation is caused by seeing
people blur the upper boundary between humans and God’ (p. 864).
In order to understand elevation, Haidt (2000) offers sketches of the
three components that he attributes to it: the circumstances in which the
The results of the study showed that ‘love and a desire for affiliation’ appear
to be common consequences of witnessing such events. Feeling ‘more lov-
ing and inspired’, participants in a subsequent experimental study in which
experiences of elevation were induced in the laboratory also reported being
more likely to subsequently volunteer for a charitable organization.
While Haidt designates elevation, wonder, and awe as moral emo-
tions, however, the sublime—or at least, some versions of it—appears
to be amoral, beyond the grasp of ethical systems. In Morgan’s account,
for instance, the sublime object, Mont Cenis, is figured as indifferent to
human interests. The verse by Sappho shows her speaker as entirely pos-
sessed by her response to the beloved; no ethical perspective is offered or
relevant (although we know virtually nothing about the circumstances in
which the poem was written). While it should be pointed out that many
18th-century accounts of the sublime appeal to the work of God in cre-
ating such landscapes, these references appear primarily to put in place
what we described earlier as the predominating emotion of the sublime
(such as astonishment), and no moral implications are present. Over time,
towards the end of the century, even such references to the divine tend to
disappear, replaced by a more immediate sense of the powers of nature. The
spectator of these scenes, comments one observer, ‘is struck with the com-
parative littleness of fleeting man … contrasted with the view of nature in
all her vast, eternal, uncontrolable [sic] grandeur’ (Williams, 1798, p. 63).
C O G N I T I V E C H A L L E N G E OF T H E S U B L I M E [ 63 ]
contemplate a picture of a river (in silence), or stand beside the river itself
where we can see a similar scene in reality and hear the sound of the water.
But how similar are these experiences? One depends on inner resources of
imagery and memory (the schema for a river), with an image presented in
two dimensions; the other depends on these too, but also on visual pow-
ers that allow for motion and the experience of force in three dimensions.
A number of studies in neuroscience have found that, far from being sep-
arate resources, imagery and perception activate the same brain regions.
I will outline the findings of one study by O’Craven and Kanwisher (2000).
Their study was based in part on the contrast of two conditions: visual
perception (as in viewing photographs of well-known faces or buildings
on the campus where the study was carried out) and imagery (hearing the
name for the same faces or buildings and being asked to form a mental
image of it). It was found that regions of the brain that were more active, as
shown by fMRI data, were specific to the stimulus type, being specialized
either for face perception or for specified places. Greater activation occurred
for vision than for mental imagery. The main finding of the study, however,
was that vision and imagery drew upon basically the same processing activ-
ities. Inspection of fMRI data showed that it was detailed enough to iden-
tify the stimulus from a single response: each type of response, whether
perception or image, had its neural signature. In summary, say the authors,
the areas in ‘the ventral pathway that were activated during imagery for a
particular stimulus type fell within the region activated during perception
of the same stimulus class (on average, 92% for places and 84% for faces)’
(O’Craven and Kanwisher 2000, p. 1016). Thus, ‘the neural instantiation
of a mental image resembles the neural instantiation of the corresponding
perceptual image’ (p. 1019). In addition, they point out that ‘our data are
the first to show that the content of a single thought can be inferred from
its fMRI signature alone’ (p. 1019).
Given the importance of the visual processing system in the human
brain, the main finding of this study, that perception and imagery involve
the same brain regions, suggests some far-reaching implications. It points
to another feature of sublime experience: the enactment in the brain of the
structures and stresses of the sublime object. We may hypothesize, then,
that the structures of the sublime are too powerful to be experienced in
their totality; they can be understood as exceeding and hence disturbing
the individual’s capacity for neurally representing and comprehending such
visions. As we have seen, this fact is anticipated by Morgan, in her com-
ments about our grasp of the powers of nature, which genius ‘must leave to
original creation, as unimitated and inimitable’. In this context, following
the insights of O’Craven and Kanwisher (2000), we may conclude that the
Mont Blanc was before us but was covered with cloud, & its base furrowed with
dreadful gaps was seen alone. Pinnacles of snow, intolerably bright, part of the
chain connected with Mont Blanc shone thro the clouds at intervals on high.
I never knew I never imagined what mountains were before. The immensity of
these aeriel summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a senti-
ment of extatic [sic] wonder, not unallied to madness—And remember this was
all one scene. It all pressed home to our regard & our imagination.—Though
it embraced a great number of miles the snowy pyramids which shot into the
bright blue sky seemed to overhang our path—the ravine, clothed with gigan-
tic pines and black with its depth below.—so deep that the very roaring of the
untameable Arve which rolled through it could not be heard above—was close
C O G N I T I V E C H A L L E N G E OF T H E S U B L I M E [ 65 ]
to our very footsteps. All was as much our own as if we had been the creators
of such impressions in the minds of others, as now occupied our own.—Nature
was the poet whose harmony held our spirits more breathless than that of the
divinest.
1964, p. 497
AT THE RHINE FALLS
C O G N I T I V E C H A L L E N G E OF T H E S U B L I M E [ 67 ]
Williams was an English woman who settled in France early during the
Revolution. She sent back reports on what she saw and learned about the
Revolution. She was briefly imprisoned in 1793, then obtained a passport
and left for travels in Switzerland during 1794. The book she published in
1798 includes both reports on the political situations she found in the can-
tons and descriptions of the scenery.
Williams’s report of a visit to view the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen in
northern Switzerland is written in sublime style, as follows:
Our path … concealed for some time the river from our view; till we reached a
wooden balcony, projecting on the edge of the water, and whence, just sheltered
from the torrent, it bursts in all its overwhelming wonders on the astonished
sight. That stupendous cataract, rushing with wild impetuosity over those bro-
ken, unequal rocks, which, lifting up their sharp points amidst its sea of foam,
disturb its headlong course, multiply its falls, and make the afflicted waters
roar—that cadence of tumultuous sound, which had never till now struck upon
my ear—those long feathery surges, giving the element a new aspect—that
spray rising into clouds of vapour, and reflecting the prismatic colours, while
it disperses itself over the hills—never, never can I can forget the sensations of
that moment! when with a sort of annihilation of self, with every past impres-
sion erased from my memory, I felt as if my heart were bursting with emotions
too strong to be sustained.—Oh, majestic torrent! which hast conveyed a new
image of nature to my soul, the moments I have passed in contemplating thy
sublimity will form an epocha in my short span!—thy course is coeval with time,
and thou wilt rush down thy rocky walls when this bosom, which throbs with
admiration of thy greatness, shall beat no longer! (pp. 59‒61)
For Williams, the Falls are both dangerous and inspiring. What may distin-
guish this account from the earlier ones I have presented in this chapter is
the sense of a process in thought. As she stands within a few metres of the
water, she seems to come to an understanding of something about the Falls
and about herself.
Her response to the Falls is articulated in three phases. As can be seen
from the tenses she employs, it moves from the present (‘it bursts in all
its overwhelming wonders’), through the past (‘I felt as if my heart were
bursting’), to the future (‘thou wilt rush down thy rocky walls’). In addition
to the distinctions due to time, Williams also traces three phases in the
process of her feelings: first she is overwhelmed (‘the astonished sight’),
then she senses herself as transformed (‘every past impression erased’),
and lastly she claims some novel historical insights (‘thy course is coeval
with time’). Also notable is the transition from detailed description of the
ANNIHILATION OF SELF
C O G N I T I V E C H A L L E N G E OF T H E S U B L I M E [ 69 ]
example, Tantric sexual practices, drawing on ancient Indian religion, have
been highly regarded as a gateway to spiritual wisdom. Their sublime emo-
tions offer an interesting parallel to those of the mystic. My comments here
refer mainly to the work of Georgiadis and his colleagues (2006), who were
able to study sexual experience in the MRI scanner. Perhaps the most sig-
nificant finding they report is that sexual climax in both sexes ‘was mainly
associated with profound rCBF [regional cerebral blood flow] decreases in
the neocortex’; this provides ‘strong evidence’ (if only correlational) ‘that
the frontal and temporal lobes have inhibitory control over sexual behav-
iour. Decreased perfusion [i.e. deactivation] of these regions would release
the inhibition and enable sexual behaviour’ (p. 3313). This effect was stron-
ger in women (Holstege and Huynh, 2011). They also found ‘additional
significant deactivation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC), a
region best known for its involvement in moral reasoning and social judge-
ment… . The significant deactivation of this region during orgasm implies
absence of moral judgement and self-referential thought’ (Georgiadis et al.,
2006, p. 3314). Again it is as if the boundaries of self, and self and other,
are effaced at that moment. This study, then, provides another example of
annihilation of self. (In an analysis of a poem by Baudelaire, Tsur [2003,
pp. 258‒261] arrives at a similar conclusion.)
Blood and Zatorre (2001) conducted a PET (positron emission tomog-
raphy) study of moments of musical experience, chosen by participants,
at which they reliably felt ‘chills’ (emotional and bodily responses). They
found, as stated in the title of their paper, that ‘intensely pleasurable
responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in
reward and emotion’. However, correlations were negative for rCBF to
‘chills’ from music with the median prefrontal cortex and posterior neo-
cortical regions. In other words, the more intense the chills, the greater the
deactivation of the frontal cortex.
These three domains—mysticism, sexuality, and music—are quite dif-
ferent, yet it appears that the main effect in each is to blur or erase the
neural representation of the self. There are many ways in which this insight
can be expressed. In contrast to the annihilation of the self, another way
of representing it is to refer to the sense of unity of self and universe. Here
is one of Wordsworth’s statements, for example (from the ‘Essay on the
Sublime and Beautiful’), which suggests the dissolution of the self that
thinks and reasons: ‘For whatever suspends the comparing power of the
mind & possesses it with a feeling or image of intense unity, without a con-
scious contemplation of parts, has produced that state of the mind which
is the consummation of the sublime’ (p. 354). Another context in which the
sublime self can occur is that of imminent death: Longinus, as we noted,
CONCLUSION
It seems likely that deactivation of the frontal cortex can occur under many
other conditions, as Carter (1999) suggests. A heavy input of information to
the frontal cortex from below, she says, is why ‘a sudden flood of emotion may
occlude thought’ or ‘why terror can (momentarily at least) wipe a brain clean
of thought’ (p. 183). But Williams’s account of the Rhine Falls, and Shelley’s
of Mont Blanc, go well beyond these examples. They seem to propose that the
most powerful experiences of the sublime available to us require the borders
of the self to be dissolved, allowing it to become a part of infinite space. What
remains to be studied with the empirical means at our disposal—behavioural
and neuropsychological—are the aesthetic implications of the moment of
poetic sublime: its ‘annihilation of self’, its temporary erasure of the memory,
its powerful feelings. These seem to be the constituents of the altered states of
consciousness that help develop our experience of the sublime.
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INTRODUCTION
The critical study of science fiction (SF) has always had a cognitive dimen-
sion. From the outset, researchers in the field highlight SF as a genre of
‘cognitive estrangement’ (Suvin, 1972, 1979) that alienates readers from
their habitual environment—a claim that orientates SF scholarship to the
present day (Hollinger, 1999; Milner, 2012). Nevertheless, for all that the
critical literature centres on the term ‘cognitive’, it makes relatively little
engagement with empirical research on how human beings actually think,
feel, or behave. In this, SF studies runs counter to recent trends in liter-
ary studies, which use insights from cognitive science, neuroscience, and
experimental psychology to explain how texts impact on readers (Zunshine,
2006; Hogan, 2013; Carney, 2014; Troscianko, 2014). Although none of
this mandates that cognitive approaches should be used in the analysis of
SF, the historical preoccupation with cognition on the part of SF scholars
does point to a potentially useful collaboration between the two fields.
My goal in the present chapter will be to pursue this collaboration.
Specifically, I hope to develop an account of SF that is attentive to how
the characteristic features of the genre trigger empirically attested ten-
dencies in human cognition. My main tool in doing this will be construal
level theory (CLT), a framework developed in social psychology for dealing
with the effects of distance upon cognition. (‘Distance’, in this connec-
tion, includes spatial displacement but also comprehends figurative forms
like temporal, social, and probabilistic distance.) The essential discovery
of CLT is to show that there is a reciprocal relationship between psycho-
logical distance and construal level (that is, level of abstraction in how
something is cognitively assessed), to the extent that extremes of distance
in the spatial, temporal, social, or probabilistic dimensions cause individu-
als to construe objects as being abstract, and extremes of abstraction cause
individuals to construe objects as distant (Liberman and Trope, 2009;
Trope and Liberman, 2010). It is evident, for instance, that we are inclined
to imagine probabilistically remote objects or events in very general terms
(‘if I win the lottery I’ll be generous to my friends’), whereas we envision
more likely objects or events quite concretely (‘if John pays me the £100
he owes me I’ll treat myself to dinner in that Italian place on Friday’).
Equivalently, abstract objects and descriptions are felt to be consonant
with distance (‘the archaeological record for H. sapiens evidences symbolic
play as far back as the Pleistocene’), where concrete objects and catego-
ries are consonant with nearness (‘Frank’s children played hide-and-seek
yesterday’). Starting from these modest insights, the experimental pro-
gramme of CLT has gone on to generate a rich body of results that link
manipulations of distance and construal level to changes in moral orienta-
tion, self-perception, emotionality, tolerance, conformity, creativity, and a
range of other attitudes and behaviours.
The value of CLT for the study of SF is that it provides an intellec-
tual resource for understanding key features of SF writing. For the fact
is, almost all SF relies on the maximization of psychological distance to
achieve its effects. Most obviously, this manifests in the cosmic setting of
much SF, but thematizations of time, the alien, and the improbable are also
staples of the genre. Given that CLT predicts very specific cognitive effects
to follow from this type of distance manipulation, it is thus follows that the
theory may well provide a powerful resource for understanding the psy-
chological impact of SF upon its audience. In the first instance, this will
offer valuable psychological insights to reception theory—a field that has
recently come to recognize the benefits of empirical results for understand-
ing how readers respond to texts (Hamilton and Schneider, 2002; Emmott,
Sanford, and Alexander, 2013). In the second, any successful account of
how a genre achieves its effects should be able to demonstrate its value by
accounting for features of that genre that are problematic or puzzling. My
CLT-informed account will do exactly this by resolving problems concern-
ing characterization, purpose, and linguistic register that have persistently
absorbed the energies of SF critics. Thus, using CLT to understand how SF
CONSTRUAL LEVEL THEORY
C O N S T R UA L L E V E L A N D S C I E N C E F I C T I O N [ 75 ]
attending’)—even if the detail in question (the venue) is held constant
(Trope and Liberman, 2000). More generally, studies have found that
linguistic, affective, taxonomical, and procedural judgements all tend
to focus on essential rather than contextual or incidental features when
paired with maximizations of spatial, temporal, social, or probabilistic
distance (Todorov, Goren, and Trope, 2007; Liberman and Trope, 2009;
Bruehlman- Senecal and Ayduk, 2015).
Conversely, manipulating the second variable, construal level, affects
perceptions of distance. For instance, social descriptions performed
using high-level, abstract designations such as ‘civilization’ are likely
to cue expectations of temporal or spatial distance (‘Roman civiliza-
tion’, ‘Japanese civilization’). Against this, low-level, concrete construals
evoked by the local condition of local-global processing tasks have been
shown by Woltin and colleagues (2011) and Luguri, Napier, and Dovidio
(2012) to decrease perceptions of social distance by inducing increased
levels of empathy towards minorities and out-groups. Experimental
manipulations of other measures of abstraction have also been shown
to affect judgements concerning self- control, psychological coherence,
creativity, and affect. These results confirm the CLT axiom that ‘differ-
ent levels of construal serve to expand and contract one’s mental hori-
zons and thus mentally traverse psychological distances’ (Trope and
Liberman, 2010, p. 442).
From all of this, it follows that if the claims of CLT theorists are correct,
CLT describes a fundamental aspect of human cognition. Judgements of
distance and/or abstraction inform almost every aspect of human behav-
iour, so the discovery of a link between these two variables represents an
important result. This is particularly so when it comes to researching coun-
terfactual thinking, or how humans conceive of what is not the case. Unlike
factual thinking, which is constrained by real-world causal structures,
counterfactual thinking can readily engage with extremes of distance or
abstraction that may only rarely be encountered otherwise. For this reason,
fiction—and in particular, speculative or experimental fiction—represents
a natural target for CLT, given that it is explicitly designed to evoke the
extremes discussed in CLT research. Nevertheless, though proponents
of CLT have been quick to apply it in areas like marketing, architecture,
and product design (Dhar and Kim, 2007; Dębek and Bożena, 2013; Luca,
2015), it has yet to be used in the analysis of literature. Thus, a strong prima
facie case can be made for the utility of CLT as a tool for explaining how lit-
erary works achieve their effects. While I shall demonstrate this here only
with respect to SF, I volunteer this exposition as an illustration of how CLT
might be operationalized in the wider field of literary studies.
Spatial Distance
Edmund Burke long ago noted that ‘as the great extreme of dimension
is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime
likewise’ (1757/1909, p. 100). Given the role played by the sublime in SF
(Robu, 1988; Nicholls, 2000), it is unsurprising that extremities of space
should represent a core feature of the genre. This is visible on a terrestrial
scale in early SF like Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
(1870/2001) and Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864/2008); the cosmic
analogue to this is the premise of almost all popular articulations of SF
up to the present day. However, extremes of displacement are not merely
background features of the genre: a number of core texts foreground the
‘spatial sublime’ as a topic of cognitive interest in its own right. One crucial
example is Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero (1970), where a malfunction with a
colonization ship’s drive means that it is unable to decelerate, so it tra-
verses intergalactic distances and, due to relativistic time dilation, outlasts
the universe itself. Other instances are Stephen Baxter’s Manifold series
(2000‒2003) and Gregory Benford’s Galactic Center saga (1979‒1999),
which both feature traversals of space and time that defy integration into
any conventionally human scale; striking cinematic evocations of the same
process can be found in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). Other manipulations of scale
occur with respect to what Peter Nicholls terms ‘Big Dumb Objects’ (2000,
p. 13)—namely, cosmic artefacts that dwarf human technologies and
explanatory frameworks. Prototypical examples can be found in Arthur
C. Clarke’s Rama novels (1973‒1993) and Larry Niven’s Ringworld series
(1970‒2012), which both focus on the encounter with mysterious alien
creations that are equal to (or vastly greater than) planetary dimensions.
C O N S T R UA L L E V E L A N D S C I E N C E F I C T I O N [ 77 ]
At the opposite extreme, the literature of the extremely small can be
found in those SF texts that explore the implications of nanotechnology.
Richard Fleischer’s film Fantastic Voyage (1966) offers an early (if unreflec-
tive) exploration of this; more recently, texts like Greg Egan’s Blood Music
(1985) and Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1996) meditate in detail on
the implications of manipulating objects on the nanoscale. Finally, extre-
mal topologies of space are dealt with in narratives like Robert Heinlein’s
‘He Built a Crooked House’ (1941/2010), Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War
(1974), and Christopher Priest’s The Inverted World (1974); in these works,
the emphasis falls on manipulations of the geometry of space by way of
extra dimensions, wormhole technology, and perceptual alteration. In all
cases, it is evident that SF accents psychological distance by foregrounding
extremes of physical space with respect to both extension and topology.
Temporal Distance
Social Distance
SF is, for Adam Roberts, ‘a genre devoted to the encounter with difference’
(2000, p. 118). Inevitably, the most effective vehicle for representing this
difference is the alien—a being that, in virtue of its different planetary and
evolutionary history, can only with difficulty be reconciled with human
values and behavioural norms. As might be expected, this difference is to
an overwhelming degree aligned with hostility, especially in popular SF;
this is readily seen in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), one of
the first convincing attempts to depict extraterrestrials. (Indeed, Wells’s
Martian tripods initiated an enduring association between the alien and
the insectile—subsequently visible in narratives like Heinlein’s Starship
Troopers [1959], Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game [1985], and Ridley Scott’s
Alien [1979]; see Carney [2012] for a discussion of this trope in modernist
literature.) A more nuanced representation of the alien can be found in
explorations like Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle (1966‒2000), where she
explores the outcomes of changing human sexual biology (in The Left Hand
of Darkness [1969], for instance, characters can be both male and female and
are only periodically sexually potent). Similarly, the Lilith’s Brood trilogy by
Octavia E. Butler (2000) focuses on the sexual dynamics of cross-breeding
humans with morphologically different aliens possessing three sexes.
On a larger scale, Stapledon’s Star Maker delivers an expansive survey
of the different forms of life across several possible universes. This tradi-
tion is continued in Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee series (1994‒2003), which
centres on a multi-billion-year war between species composed of baryonic
and non-baryonic matter. It is, however, in the work of Stanisław Lem that
the encounter with the alien is given its most philosophical treatment. In
novels like Solaris (1961/2012), His Master’s Voice (1968/1999), and Fiasco
C O N S T R UA L L E V E L A N D S C I E N C E F I C T I O N [ 79 ]
(1986/1987), Lem explores what it might mean for humanity to encoun-
ter an intelligence so alien that meaningful communication is impossible
(in Solaris this takes the form of a sentient, planet-sized ocean that defies
generations of human theorizing). A more recent iteration on the theme
of the radically alien can be found in Peter Watts’s Blindsight (2006), a
first-contact novel in which technologically sophisticated, non-humanoid
aliens are discovered to be entirely without consciousness (i.e. ‘zombies’
in the philosophical sense). Finally, in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch (1965), VALIS (1981b), and The Divine Invasion (1981a), the
alien is conflated with the divine by way of a gnostic cosmology in which
reality is revealed to be a corrupted simulacrum. As will by now have been
anticipated, these examples are given to illustrate the extent to which SF
amplifies social distance by engaging with forms of agency that escape easy
anthropomorphic categories.
Hypothetical Distance
For Umberto Eco, the narrative text is ‘a machine for producing possible
worlds’ (1984, p. 246)—a claim that is particularly true of SF, which explic-
itly thematizes the counterfactual. The most obvious way in which this
occurs is through the alternative history genre. As shown by psychological
research on the ‘availability heuristic’, familiar events are assessed as being
more likely to occur than unfamiliar ones (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973;
Wänke, Schwarz, and Bless, 1995); thus, any exploration of alternative his-
torical timelines is at the same time a traversal of probabilistic distance.
A typical early example of such an exploration is Castello Holford’s Aristopia
(1895), which imagines a settlement of North America that proceeds along
socialistic lines. Subsequent developments of the genre generally retain this
pattern of focusing on counterfactual outcomes to world-historical events,
with World War II inevitably attracting a large number of treatments. Most
of these are merely diverting, but narratives like Philip K. Dick’s The Man
in the High Castle (1962), Christopher Priest’s The Separation (2002), and
Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007) offer more sus-
taining meditations on the role of chance in human affairs. Equally, Kim
Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) delivers a thoughtful
counter-history of a world in which European civilization has been aborted
by a more virulent version of the Black Death.
More speculative use of the alternative history idea is to be found in
the ‘competing timeline’ theme, where narrative conflict is predicated on
the need to preserve or alter a given timeline in the face of counter-action
C O N S T R UA L L E V E L A N D S C I E N C E F I C T I O N [ 81 ]
terms of practical tasks (‘vacuuming the floor’) when located in the near
future. Similar results are obtained for spatial distance by Fujita and col-
leagues (2006), for probabilistic distance by Wakslak, Trope, Liberman,
and Alony (2006), and for social distance by Liviatan, Trope, and Liberman
(2008). In all cases, the point to retain is that experimental amplifications
of distance had the effect of dampening speculation about the contextual
determinants of an action and emphasizing its goal-directedness.
This observation is important for SF because it shows how the genre
enacts its heroic character. The development of ‘literary’ SF left behind the
naïve adventurism of the early pulp magazines, but the genre remains, in
Ursula K. Le Guin’s words, ‘a modern descendent of the epic’ (1980, p. 92).
As such, it is concerned with a cognitive stance that is proactive rather than
reactive, and which subordinates proximal actions to remote, even tran-
scendent, goals (Kreuziger, 1986; Cowan, 2010); in Elana Gomel’s words,
it ‘defamiliarizes humanism and points the way to transcendence’ (2014,
p. 32). Necessarily, this programme of representation will be facilitated by
using manipulations of distance that enhance the expectation and recog-
nition of self-motivated agents who are not imprisoned in the quotidian.
Indeed, viewing SF through this lens explains the puzzling lack of
well-drawn characters in the genre. As noted by Gwyneth Jones, SF has
‘little space for deep and studied characterisation’, preferring instead to
treat characters as ‘pieces of equipment’ (1999, p. 5). For critics like Brian
Attebery, this is explained as a reflexive attempt to foreground ‘the rela-
tionship between character as imitated person and character as story func-
tion’ (1992, p. 73). Critics like Scott Sanders, on the other hand, interpret it
as a deliberate critique of the inheritance of ‘complex, autonomous, unique
individuals—the idea at the heart of the Continental and Anglo-American
novel’ (2014, p. 133). However, though both explanations touch off impor-
tant points, they fail to explain why readers should be so forgiving of the
dearth of compelling characterization—elsewhere, the very motor of audi-
ence engagement with fiction (Keen, 2007). Here, CLT suggests that read-
ers tolerate formulaic characterization because that is exactly what they
have been primed to expect. Specifically, CLT shows that maximizing dis-
tance de-emphasizes the concrete, singular details that make the evoca-
tion of a character lifelike; instead, it produces a preoccupation with the
abstract idea of agency—and from this follows the formal interchangeabil-
ity of many SF protagonists.
My second hypothesis is that maximizing distance in SF narratives
should produce an exaggerated expectation of moral engagement on the
part of SF readers. Results from Eyal, Liberman, and Trope (2008) and Eyal
and Liberman (2012) show that moral aversion and moral approbation are
C O N S T R UA L L E V E L A N D S C I E N C E F I C T I O N [ 83 ]
away from the subject are imagined as having less emotional valence than
events moving towards (Davis, Gross, and Ochsner, 2011; Hart, Stedman,
and McComas, 2015). Given that a core function of politeness is to drain
social encounters of arousing emotions by way of ritual forms of deference
(Brown and Levinson, 1987; Keltner, Young, and Buswell, 1997), it thus fol-
lows that low levels of emotionality will be signalled by a polite register. In
fact, this is likely to be true of all registers, sociolects, and jargons that are
concerned with the communication of information over emotional stance,
even if CLT proponents have yet to test this experimentally.
In the context of SF, these results explain the notoriously formulaic style
of most SF writing. As Peter Stockwell notes, ‘the vast majority of science
fiction published over the last forty years has retained the conventional
pattern of fantastic content with prosaic stylistic delivery’ (2014, p. 102).
What is less clear is why this might be the case, given that innovators in SF
are, presumably, no less sensitive to the aesthetic opportunities of styliza-
tion than writers in other genres. Adopting a CLT perspective resolves this
issue by showing that, by eschewing the somatic and affective affordances
implicit in literary style (M. Burke, 2010; Bolens, 2012), SF satisfies the
refusal of emotionality associated with extremes of psychological distance.
Equally, the preponderance of technical neologism in the genre evinces a
move away from an affective register and into a pseudo-objective scien-
tific one. This is not to discount the claim that the use of scientific neolo-
gism in SF world-building forms ‘part of the establishment of plausibility
and verisimilitude’ (Stockwell, 2014, p. 117); instead, it is to suggest that
this world-building is itself informed by the psychological consequences of
maximizing psychological distance. Doubtless, for critics who identify the
literary quality of a text with its capacity to evoke the qualitative aspects
of experience (Pilkington, 1996; Fludernik, 2004; Herman, 2011; Lodge,
2012), this flattening of stylistically mediated affective impact may well
count against SF’s claim to ‘literary’ status. My view is that when a theory
devalues the concrete experiences of one group of readers on the basis of
an a priori prescription, it is the theory that should be rejected and not the
readers.
If one wished, one could discuss the effects of distance maximization
in SF at far greater length: the CLT literature, for instance, offers findings
on topics like categorization, self- control, psychological coherence, and
creativity that can be directly integrated into a critical discussion on SF.
However, even apart from limitations of space, the result would only be
to confirm the results established so far. Specifically, the three explored
effects—purposiveness, moral engagement, and affect-flattening—all
unite in a view of SF that sees it as consistent with inflated depictions
CONCLUSIONS
C O N S T R UA L L E V E L A N D S C I E N C E F I C T I O N [ 85 ]
cognitive approaches in literary studies is that, as ‘reductionist material-
isms’, they are insufficiently nuanced to ‘explain the textual particulars
that make works memorable’ (Gilmore, 2012, p. 313). Even if this objec-
tion were valid for cognitive readings of individual texts (it isn’t), large-
scale surveys of the type conducted here would remain unaffected by it.
As products of the human mind, literary texts inherit human variability;
thus, they do not usually reward being shoehorned into rigid typologies. At
the same time, like the human mind, they exhibit regularities that emerge
at the statistical level—and it is these that are of interest to genre theo-
rists (Moretti, 2004). Counterexamples can no doubt be cited against any
generic definition, and this is certainly true with respect to the SF defini-
tions offered here. Nevertheless, as John Holloway notes, to ‘promulgate
a law that literary illumination is always promoted by being sensitive to
shades and nuances, and never by assimilating respects of sameness which
they overlie and conceal, would be the most peremptory and sweeping
of all acts of standardizing assimilation’ (1979, p. 108). Ultimately, the
account of SF developed in the preceding pages is meant to be representa-
tive rather than prescriptive, and for this ambition to be successful, it need
only explain the aggregate features of the genre.
My second point concerns the value of CLT in highlighting how SF relates
to its contemporary genres and aesthetics. In this regard, CLT is useful in
showing how SF relates to modernism—a topic that has repeatedly come
up in critical discussions (McHale, 1991; Wegner, 2007; March-Russell,
2015). This becomes possible when we remember that CLT is concerned not
solely with the effects of maximizing distance on construal level but also
with the effects of maximizing construal level on distance. On this issue,
existing research suggests that ‘as psychological distance increases, con-
struals would become more abstract, and as level of abstraction increases,
so too would the psychological distances people envisage’ (Trope and
Liberman, 2010, p. 440). It is striking to note the extent to which these
inverse operations characterize the difference between SF and modernism.
Where SF maximizes distance by way of fantastic content, the modernist
emphasis on formal, mathematical, fragmentary, and kinetic modes of rep-
resentation (Marinetti, 1909; Lewis et al., 1914; Malevich, 1916; Gropius,
1919) often serves to maximize abstraction. One outcome of this is that
many of the affordances present in the content of SF are yielded by the
form of modernist art. Thus, where SF makes everyday social and psy-
chological arrangements abstract by foregrounding distance, modernism
makes these arrangements seem distant by foregrounding abstraction. The
result, in both cases, is to alienate audiences from the quotidian by subject-
ing the latter to exaggerated forms of logico-conceptual rearrangement. As
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Patterns of Thought
Narrative and Verse
BRIAN BOYD
PAT T E R N S OF T H O U G H T [ 95 ]
Now to our narrative example, Twelfth Night (1600). From the play’s first
speech, Shakespeare foregrounds Orsino’s prime aim—to woo Olivia—and
the special personality of this man that would make him ready to love at
a distance, able to feel confident of ultimately winning a woman despite
her firm rebuffs, and sufficiently sanguine and in control to keep sending
envoys to her on his behalf. The dramatist establishes character as the cause
of the ensuing effects, and the relevance of almost everything that follows
to Orsino’s initial aim of winning Olivia. Shakespeare then launches what
seems to be another plot line, and in another mood. After introducing
Orsino indulgently languid in the first scene, he now presents Viola, ship-
wrecked in a strange land but resolute and decisive. As soon as she hears
Duke Orsino named as the ruler of the region, she comments that she has
heard her father mention him, and adds, ‘He was a bachelor then.’ ‘And so
is now’, she is told (1.2.25‒26). Aha: a possible line of complication looms
already.
She hears that Orsino woos Countess Olivia and wishes she could serve
the countess, but when she hears that Olivia ‘will admit no kind of suit, /
No, not the duke’s’, she decides to travel to the duke in disguise as a male,
to be ‘an eunuch to him’ (1.2.41‒52). The problem she sees ahead of her,
merely surviving and finding support in foreign parts, we suspect may soon
be no longer the problem she actually faces. Indeed, in her next scene, we
find that Orsino not only has taken her on, but feels an unusual emotional
closeness towards this sensitive young ‘man’, and wants to share his inti-
mate feelings with ‘Cesario’—who in return, being in fact a woman, feels
even more unreservedly for him.
Romantic comedy thrives on the distance between frustration and ful-
filment in love. Shakespeare rapidly sets up a classic comedic pattern of
frustrated love: Orsino loves Olivia (1.1), who loves Cesario (i.e. Viola) (1.5),
who loves Orsino (1.4).
One of the most famous, most ‘lyrical’, as we say, most poetic, imagi-
native, and emotional speeches in Shakespeare is Twelfth Night’s ‘willow
cabin’ speech, purportedly characterizing Orsino’s love for Olivia, obliquely
expressing Viola’s love for Orsino, inadvertently awakening Olivia’s love
for ‘Cesario’. If it were a lyric, it would have a more open emotional reso-
nance, relevant to writer and reader, to anyone at all. But here, although it
has explosive eloquence, it first fits tightly into patterns of character and
cause and effect within the forward movement of the narrative, which is
what allows us to understand it so immediately.
Shakespeare needs to have Olivia fall in love promptly with Viola-as-
Cesario, and that despite the facts—hurdles he has raised himself—that
Olivia is in mourning, and that she has said she will foreswear the whole
PAT T E R N S OF T H O U G H T [ 97 ]
Because the narrative patterns converge in this way, we understand the
dramatic import of this speech instantly, even if we might be hard pressed
to say exactly what some of these lines mean. We understand their ‘lyri-
cal’ eloquence better than their exact meaning; but we understand their
role within the story effortlessly, because Shakespeare has prefocused
our understanding and expectations1 through so many different kinds of
pattern—of genre, conventions, characters, beliefs, desires, aims, inten-
tions, causes, and effects. For all this set speech’s detachability and ‘lyri-
cal’ intensity, its resonance is not expansively open as in lyric, but tightly
channelled into its narrative context. Even when we do come across the
passage detached from the scene and the play, we either recall its narrative
situation or, if new to the passage, scramble to infer something of its con-
text. Without more than that, it can seem mere grandiloquence. Within its
context, everything falls effortlessly and poignantly into place.
Now let’s switch from narrative to lyric verse, verse characterized by not
depending on narrative and, at its purest, excluding it altogether.
In Why Lyrics Last, I note that the only common feature of verse across
languages is that in verse, poets determine where lines end: they control
our attention by making us focus on particular strings of words in one
mental moment (Boyd, 2012, p. 16). Poets may not know it, or barely intuit
it, but their verse lines shape language to fit a human cognitive constraint,
the capacity of working memory. Focusing audience attention on a line at a
time, poets invite close scrutiny of each line and repay it by satisfying our
appetite for pattern (Hogan, 2003; Boyd, 2012; Fabb, 2014, 2015).
Patterns such as rhythm, rhyme, and syntactic or sonic parallelism,
independently or together, serve to demarcate and integrate lines of verse
in diverse traditions. So too does the patterning of imagery, juxtaposing
not just words but one domain of life and another (‘patterns of patterns’,
Bor comments, ‘which is essentially what analogies are’; Bor, 2012, p. 150).
And so does the very different kind of pattern—also common in lyric but
less recognized there—of information compression, compacting multiple
observations into a single statement, an abstraction or generalization.
Narrative organizes experience as automatically as a magnet organizes
iron filings, and it still does this even when recounted in verse. But pre-
cisely because lyric at its purest eschews narrative, it can turn the absence
of story to advantage.
After On the Origin of Stories I wanted to call my follow-up On the
Absence of Stories, but my publishers thought it sounded negative. It wasn’t
He maximises the openness of lyric, its freedom from the linearity of story. He
offers each new poem as an unpredictable challenge, not least in the unpredict-
ability of its relation to the poems before and after. He exploits the tension
between the autonomy of each sonnet and the variety of its potential relations
to its neighbors—emotional, thematic, verbal, rhyming, imagistic, structural;
continuation, contrast, echo, variation, reversal.
Boyd, 2012, p. 74
PAT T E R N S OF T H O U G H T [ 99 ]
For all his well-known challenges to Petrarchan convention, Shakespeare
still focuses on love, but complicates its psychology and attention-earning
power by adding elements of hate, or by mingling desire with dislike in the
Mistress sonnets, and idealization in the Youth sonnets with undertones
of disenchantment. Meanwhile, he also ramps up the appeal of patterns
other than the amatory. Helen Vendler (1997) has argued eloquently for
the centrality of pattern within individual sonnets; I echo and extend her
emphasis, but I also stress how Shakespeare amplifies the appeal and sur-
prise of the patterns between sonnet and sonnet.
Some sonnets stand by themselves, except as they form part of the
opening sub-sequence of 126 focused on the Youth if on anyone, or
the closing sub-sequence of 28 focused on the Mistress. Others form
sub-sub-sequences, up to seventeen at a time. Let’s focus on one such sub-
sub-sequence, starting with sonnet 33.
PAT T E R N S OF T H O U G H T [ 101 ]
sunlight. An additional pattern of alliteration links the two colour adjec-
tives, golden and green, one before and one after its noun. In line 4 gilding
continues the g-alliteration, and links tightly in sound, sense, etymology,
and evocation with golden, but the imagery, still focused on the same scene
and sun, moves all the way from kissing to alchemy.
As so often, Shakespeare uses patterns of structure as units of sense
and strategy, in this case in the setup in this first quatrain: the pattern of
the brilliant sun persists, but in three consecutively different images, the
royal look, the kissing face, the alchemical transformation, on mountain
and meadow and streams. As so often, he also varies the patterns as much
as he can on the syntactical level: in lines 2‒4, three verbs with with, one
late in the line, another early, the third late again; one line with a finite
verb, then two with participles; two lines with face imagery, then one with-
out. As throughout the Sonnets, he plays with patterns of variations, like
Beethoven varying the tone, tempo, idiom, and harmonies of the Diabelli
theme he transforms thirty-two times.
Shakespeare then follows the shift to the second quatrain with a shift
to clouds covering the sun and the bright day, and a sense of corruption or
shame (basest, ugly, hide, steal, disgrace) besetting the radiant morning, but
still linking with the language of the first quatrain (face, l. 3, l. 6; heavenly,
l. 4; celestial, l. 6). He extends the glorious morning-beclouded day image
through the first two quatrains, as if it were the octave of a Petrarchan
sonnet. He often complicates the pattern of the Elizabethan sonnet, with
its three quatrains plus couplet, by overlaying, as here, the pattern of the
Italian sonnet: an octave, then the volta, the shift of thought into what
would be the sestet of the Italian sonnet.
All Shakespeare’s sonnets are love poems, but exceptionally here he
has offered for the entire octave only a purely visual image that keeps love
unmentioned for more than half the sonnet. He has conjured up, evoca-
tively, the visually vivid vehicle of the image, but only right where the volta
comes, with the ‘Even so’ of line 9, does he start to introduce its tenor.
He pays us the compliment of trusting us to infer from ‘my sun’ that he
means the Youth who has been the focus of all the other thirty-two sonnets
so far (and has often been associated with the splendour of the sun, as in
‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’)—an implication strengthened
but still far from explicit in the he and him of lines 11 and 12. He uses the
structural patterns of the sonnet to perfection: just as the first two qua-
trains of the image’s vehicle are compressed into the one quatrain of the
tenor, so the four lines describing the glorious morning compact into two
on the initial radiance of his relationship with the Youth, and the onset of
gloom likewise contracts from four lines to two.
to condense the rest of the sonnet, as it were, from twelve lines into two, into
an emphatic closing epigram; or to advance just one stage further, to a clinching
argument; or to take the thought to a new plane; or to turn the tables suddenly
on the rest. On a first encounter we can never be sure whether the couplet will
repeat, condense, advance, divert or reverse.
Boyd, 2012, p. 33
PAT T E R N S OF T H O U G H T [ 103 ]
the sunny morning beclouded, but although the image of the sun quite
dominates the octave, the word sun never in fact occurs there. It enters
only with the tenor, the Poet’s love, in the sestet: ‘Even so my sun’. The
poem is about the disappearance of the emotional sun that lights up the
Poet’s life, yet in this tour de force the literal sun itself remains concealed
by the sonneteer. And after that single appearance of the word sun at the
start of the sestet, the word recurs only in the last line, twice, linking tenor
sun and vehicle sun explicitly within the one line. But if the word sun hides
throughout the octave, the word seen occurs in its first line (meaning ‘I have
seen such glorious sunny mornings’), and unseen in its last (the sun unseen
behind cloud), a deliberate formal bracketing, and with the three letters
of sun scrambled or obscured in ‘unseen’. And the s-n consonance of sun
and seen recurs in a different key in the last line, suns … stain … sun …
staineth. The sun also reappears in a different mode in the linking of heav-
enly and celestial in the first two quatrains with heaven’s in the couplet.
These are the kinds of things Helen Vendler, MacDonald P. Jackson, and
I have in mind when we stress the pleasure of pattern, the invitation to
discovery, and the rewards for controlled attention in the Sonnets (Vendler,
1997; Jackson, 2000; Boyd, 2012, 2016).
Like storytellers, poets are instinctive psychologists, but they apply
their instincts to different facets and conditions of human attention.
They instinctively parcel our attention a little at a time: first, to the line,
which when spoken takes about as long as we can hold sound in working
memory—and as we have seen, this is what explains the rough equivalence
of verse line lengths around the world. In short lyrics, such as sonnets,
poets also invite our concentrated attention to a whole work, enticing us to
linger until we have extracted as much pattern and point as we can for the
moment before we move on.
Poets appear to have recognized instinctively not only the duration
of our working memory but also the rough limitations of the capacity
of working memory: we can hold only about four chunks of information
there at a time (Bor, 2012, pp. 150‒153). In narrative, we can easily chunk
information into higher-level units (Viola’s situation, Olivia’s responsive-
ness, Viola’s willow cabin speech as a plea on behalf of Orsino and as an
expression of her own sense of steadfast unrequitedness). We can also
chunk together the rough sense of a sonnet, or of its sub-units, octave and
sestet, or quatrains and couplet, but other patterns, like rhymes, images,
syntax, words, sounds, letters (like the [implied but unspoken sun]-unseen-
sun pattern), are not automatically convergent, and not easily chunked.
We discover them slowly, returning to a poem and focusing brief beams of
attention on one or two new features at a time.
PAT T E R N S OF T H O U G H T [ 105 ]
To him that bears the strong offence’s cross.
Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.
Here Shakespeare seems to give his kaleidoscope the tiniest tap, while
showing how much even that slightest touch can reconfigure. He retains
the imagery of a promising day dismally dulled by cloud, but this time
makes it instantly personal. Whereas sonnet 33’s octave describes a per-
fect morning marred by a stormy sequel in concrete but universal terms,
and introduces the beloved only obliquely, only in the third person and not
until the start of the sestet, sonnet 34 turns immediately to the beloved,
in the second person and the first line, and to the Poet’s own experience of
this initially flawless morning: ‘Why didst thou promise such a beauteous
day, / And make me travel forth without my cloak … ?’ The ‘cloak’ adds
a note of almost novelistic realism, yet this sonnet remains a metaphor
about the relationship, not a narrative.2 The two opening quatrains of son-
net 33, fine weather and foul, condense again into the opening quatrain
here, as they had condensed in the third quatrain of sonnet 33, and the
‘basest clouds’ of 33 fly back as ‘base clouds’.
The personalization applies a new force to the cloud-sun imagery in the
opening of the second quatrain, ‘’Tis not enough that through the cloud
thou break / To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face’: the lines imply the
Poet’s tears, dried by the beloved’s showing again a sunny face. Where the
Poet forgave the Youth at the end of the previous poem, here he seems
unready to forgive, and after this ‘’Tis not enough’ he shifts from meteo-
rological metaphor to direct if unspecific reproach: a barrage of negatives
(not, no, not, nor), and then wound, disgrace, shame, grief, repent, loss, offend-
er’s sorrow, weak relief, the strong offence’s cross. Again Shakespeare evokes
the emotional shift from blithe love to wounded feelings, without specify-
ing at all what has happened.
But once again the sonnet pivots, in a different way, in the couplet. The
reproaches of the last six lines seem to have caused the Youth to show his
2. In her editorial comments, Emily Troscianko objected that this ‘feels like a forced
distinction: why can’t a metaphor have a narrative structure? (cf. Lakoff and Johnson
on e.g. the path metaphor).’ But the image of, say, life or a project as a path is not a
narrative but a template or schema, or rather a warehouse row of templates, that could
become narrative were specific detail selected and elaborated. To call the metaphor
schema life is a path a narrative is itself a misleading metaphor. Our minds respond
to abstractions or even concrete nouns in isolation, but respond in a different way to
the specifically advancing situations of narrative (Viola’s speech) than to the kind of
vague change of circumstance expressed in the central metaphor of sonnets 33 and 34.
PAT T E R N S OF T H O U G H T [ 107 ]
the felt shadow or offence, easily in sonnet 33, with difficulty in sonnet 34.
Sonnet 35 tries another angle, showing the Poet complicit in the beloved’s
offence by his very wish to excuse it more than it deserves. Sonnet 36 then
offers one further tap on the emotional and relational kaleidoscope: a new
thought, a new imaginative opportunity. Shakespeare flips the situation
over, in a way utterly different from, and indifferent to, the causal sequences
of narrative: What if the fault is not the beloved’s but the Poet’s, what if
the Poet’s mere complicity in the beloved’s guilt in 35 were expanded into
the Poet as the sole source of guilt? What if not the beloved other but the
speaking self is the guilty one, while the postulate of intense love remains
the same? In that case, given his love and his guilt, the Poet urges the
beloved not to associate with him, lest he become tainted by association.
In all of these sonnets Shakespeare takes the postulate of an absolute,
idealized love, but showing its first flaws: an emotional dimming (33), an
actual offence by the other (34), an offence shared by the poet in seeking
to excuse it (35), an offence or shame on the Poet’s part that he wants the
other not to have to share (36). Not only does this gloom or guilt start up
suddenly in sonnet 33, and vary itself with different intensities within the
sub-sub-sequence, then transfer itself to the opposite party, but it has no
consequences in the sonnets that follow, which easily return to the primary
postulate of the beloved’s perfections (sonnet 53 ends: ‘But you like none,
none you, for constant heart’).
How different this experience of reading is from that of Shakespeare’s
narrative and dramatic verse. Narrative and its constraining and instantly
apprehended patterns do not shape the Sonnets: lyric and its plethora of
open but delayed patterns do.
While superficially sonnets 33‒36 might seem to describe the same
trouble that has arisen in Shakespeare’s relationship to the youth, in fact it
becomes clear that the poet is testing out different kinds of possible trou-
ble. He is experimenting with vague scenarios or templates, offering new
ones each time, but not developing a story. Rather than moving from 0
to, say, 14 to 28 to 42 to 56 along a single axis, he moves from 0,0 to 0,14
in the first sonnet (to use Cartesian coordinates anachronistically), from
0,0 to 14,0 in the next, from 0,0 to 0,−14 in the next, from 0,0 to −14,0
in the next. He experiments in possibility space rather than advancing in
narrative time.
Narrative, especially literary narrative, rarely ignores the opportunities
of enriched attention to language and pattern that are central to verse.
Verse rarely ignores the additional interest, the supplied relevance, the
forward impetus, and the ease of processing that are central to story. But
when verse unwinds itself from narrative, in lyric, the mind’s processing of
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Boyd, B. (2012). Why lyrics last: Evolution, cognition, and Shakespeare’s sonnets.
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Boyd, B. (2016). Experiments with experience: Consilient multilevel explanations of
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Vendler, H. (1997). The art of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
PAT T E R N S OF T H O U G H T [ 109 ]
PART II
1. For a fuller discussion of simulation and literature, treating the principles and
parameters guiding simulation, see Hogan, 2013a.
imagining particulars from that perspective. However, as the mention of
character visualization and correspondent subvocalization suggests, simu-
lation is not confined to hypotheticals and counterfactuals. Indeed, though
it is not always fully recognized as such, simulation is a dynamic, ongoing,
interactive process that is part of every social encounter, including encoun-
ters with novels and letters. For instance, it occurs anytime one engages in
a conversation. Indeed, Theory of Mind (our understanding of other peo-
ple’s thoughts and feelings) centrally involves not only inference but also
simulation (on the involvement of both processes in Theory of Mind, see
e.g. Doherty, 2009, p. 48).
In all cases, simulation is a rule-governed procedure that integrates
both dispositional and situational factors, both enduring and ephem-
eral features of personality and circumstance. It is generally not a self-
conscious process and is open to introspection in only very limited ways.
Specifically, the rules governing simulation are no more available to intro-
spection than are grammatical rules. Other aspects of simulation are open
to introspection in roughly the manner that aspects of grammar are open
to introspection. For example, I just typed and subvocalized ‘aspects of
grammar’. In doing that, I was not self-consciously thinking of a rule for
forming regular plurals. Moreover, I could not introspect that rule (which
is more complex than the apparent ‘add “s” ’ procedure). Even introspecting
the mere fact that I formed a plural is complex and mediated by knowledge
that there is a word stem and a suffix. The situation is much the same with
simulation. For example, when I initially read the comments of the editors
on the first draft of this chapter, I found them rather disagreeable. This
was in part due to the way I unselfconsciously simulated the tone of voice
in which the text of the cover letter was (subvocally) delivered. I only real-
ized this when I self-consciously thought about the tone of that text and
re-simulated it differently.
Simulation is particularly important in literature. Indeed, the ‘imagina-
tive’ in ‘imaginative writing’ may plausibly be understood as a particular
use of ordinary processes of simulation. As the influential emotion psy-
chologist and award-winning novelist Keith Oatley put the idea, ‘the way
fiction works in the mind and brain is that when we read, hear, or watch a
story, we create and run a simulation of selves in the social world. This kind
of simulation was invented long before computers. It could not run on a
computer. It can only run on a mind constructed to understand itself and
others’ (2012, p. 172). The particular use of simulation in literature is argu-
ably a matter of intensification. Novels differ from ordinary counterfactual
imaginations in being more sustained, more elaborated, and more nuanced
in both their cognitive particularity and their emotional consequence. In
S I M U L AT I O N A N D E M O T I O N A L M E M OR Y [ 115 ]
successful works of literature are in effect thought experiments. They develop
scenarios of human action and interaction that depict emotions at work in
complex situations. As such, they are closer to achieving ecological validity
than most laboratory experiments, which tend to present participants with
highly artificial tasks removed from any ordinary human context. Of course,
they lack the full reality of studies that focus on factual occurrences—for
example, through some parallel to ethnographic observation or when par-
ticipants are asked to record their feelings and experiences at certain points
in the day. However, literary works have two advantages over such obser-
vational and prompted self-report studies. First, they do not involve the
distorting effects of outside scrutiny. The intervention of a researcher in a
social situation necessarily changes that social situation. Second, at least in
many cases, they are more fully and more expertly depicted. Field research
necessarily relies on the reports from the field, either those of the scientist
or those of the self-observing participant. It is rare that such reports have the
richness and precision of George Eliot or Balzac.
Of course, the mere fact that an author has envisioned a particular sce-
nario is hardly a guarantee that it is accurate to the way human cognition
or emotion operates. This is where the importance of ‘successful’ artistic
representation enters. The representational value of a work of art is sug-
gested by the systematically correlated response of a broad range of read-
ers. A broad range of readers have been moved by Othello’s jealousy, Lear’s
remorse, and Hamlet’s grief. Moreover, we may infer that they have been
moved systematically, not at random. If a reader is affected by the play, it is
likely that Othello’s jealousy led him or her to share those feelings empathi-
cally (even while seeing that they are based on errors) or to feel anger and
resentment—thus to respond with parallel or complementary emotions.
In either case, the response is systematically related to the depiction of
Othello, suggesting that there is something in that depiction that bears on
our own experiences of jealousy and our responses to jealousy in ourselves
and others. We might contrast the case of a work in which the representa-
tion of jealousy was not in keeping with our experiences of its origins and
trajectory. In that case, we would presumably not respond with parallel or
complementary emotions, but with indifference or disorientation.
This is not to say that we should simply assume the representational
validity of any work by Shakespeare—or by other successful writers, such
as Eliot, Balzac, or the case we will be considering, Arthur Miller. In other
words, we should not assume that the processes or structures a work sug-
gests are psychologically or socially accurate. But this is true for all research.
A given laboratory experiment or a particular field study suggests some
conclusions about the nature and operation of emotion. But it necessarily
4. See Hogan (2003) on these emotions and their relation to cross-culturally occur-
ring narrative genres.
S I M U L AT I O N A N D E M O T I O N A L M E M OR Y [ 117 ]
of literature. As to simulation, literature is (again) the product of our sys-
tematic, causally particular, perspective-guided imagination of situations
and events, most often people acting in social conditions. Indeed, litera-
ture and the arts are probably our most intense and fully elaborated forms
of simulation.
Simulation is especially germane here due to its importance for the
understanding of emotion. Focusing in particular on our comprehension
of other people’s minds, cognitive scientists distinguish two ways in which
we understand motivations and ideas: simulation and inference. In this
context, simulation is a (largely unselfconscious) process by which we envi-
sion someone’s feelings, beliefs, and intentions, integrating circumstances
and dispositions, as noted above. We do this based on our own implicitly
remembered experiences and actions, with their feelings, beliefs, and
intentions—also integrating circumstances and dispositions. Inference is a
more self-conscious or reflective process whereby we rely on more general,
‘theoretical’ premises, from which we draw conclusions. Some researchers
have suggested that we may be particularly prone to understand emotion
through simulation (Doherty, 2009, p. 49). This is perhaps unsurprising
in that the relative speed of spontaneous simulation (in contrast with
theoretical inference) would appear to have evolutionary advantages for our
response to other people’s (or even animals’) motivational attitudes in criti-
cal situations. As perhaps our most elaborate form of simulation, literature
seems particularly well suited to draw on emotional sensitivities—through
an author’s creative simulations and through the related, responsive simu-
lations of readers.
These points suggest that emotion is not the only psychological phe-
nomenon that might be illuminated by the cognitive study of literature.
Simulation is a crucial process in ordinary life. We engage in it all the
time: when we try to understand other people’s intentions, when we imag-
ine how we might have behaved differently in the past to produce more
desirable outcomes, when we envision future courses of action, and so on.
However, as just noted, there is perhaps no type of simulation that is so
fully and intensively developed as that of literary works. This is true not
only with regard to the characters and their actions in the storyworld. It is
true also of the author’s ongoing sense of audience, his or her tacit simula-
tion of the reader’s (simulative) response to the conditions and events of
the literary work, and thus the author’s sensitivity to possible misunder-
standings or divergent emotions on the part of a reader.
Put differently, our most accomplished authors are likely to be our most
accomplished simulators, at least in certain respects. As such, we would
expect their simulations—including their simulations of the process of
S I M U L AT I O N A N D E M O T I O N A L M E M OR Y [ 119 ]
The case of memory is simplest. Emotional memories are a specific type
of memory (LeDoux, 1996, p. 182). When activated, they serve to activate
the initial emotion system (or, we might add, an appropriately correlated
emotion system, especially in the cases of pleasure and pain). For exam-
ple, a sorrowful or angry emotional memory, once triggered, will revive
a feeling of sorrow or anger (though a memory of pain is likely to elicit
fear). However, perceptions and simulations of certain targets have emo-
tional effects independent of emotional memories. In some cases, these
propensities are innate. Among the innate elicitors of emotion are almost
certainly the emotion expressions of other people. In other words, we do
not have to acquire a happy response to smiling and laughter or a fear-
ful response to screams of fear or facial gestures of terror. Indeed, innate
emotional responsiveness to emotion expressions seems to be almost all
that is logically needed to build up most of our adult emotional repertoire.
Specifically, early sensitivities to caregivers’ emotional expressions help
to develop our emotion systems through critical period experiences.5 One
famous case of this concerns monkeys and snakes. It was thought for some
time that monkeys were innately afraid of snakes. However, subsequent
research indicated that monkeys routinely developed a fear of snakes by
observing their mothers’ fear of snakes (Damasio, 2003, p. 47). This illus-
trates the great importance of early experiences of empathy and emotion
contagion for the development of later emotional propensities. (Emotion
contagion involves egocentric emotion, whereas empathy is centred on the
other person. For example, in empathic fear, I am afraid for the person
screaming in terror; in fear contagion, I am afraid for myself.)
Simulation is much less well understood than emotion. Again, it is a
cognitive capacity for imagining particular conditions or causally entrained
sequences of situations and events that are not being and have not been
directly experienced. In How Authors’ Minds Make Stories (2013a), I argued
that simulation may be understood in terms of complexes of principles
with variables that allow for small changes in imagined scenarios. I am now
inclined to expand the account, viewing simulation as akin to some other
cognitive processes that are governed by broad and variable principles,
standard cases, and/or significant instances.6 The idea is consistent with
5. The phrase ‘critical period’ is used somewhat differently by different authors (for
discussion in relation to the theoretically and historically important area of language
acquisition, see e.g. Hyltenstam, 2011). I use the phrase rather broadly to refer to a
developmental period in which a particular system, such as an emotion system, is
uniquely sensitive to formative experiences.
6. For example, aesthetic response seems to involve all three (see Hogan, 2016,
ch. 4).
We are all familiar with the general scenario. Something happens that is
annoying, but one of the participants responds with anger; or something
happens that could give rise to anger, but one of the participants responds
with rage. Most of us have seen this happen both to other people and to
ourselves. There are two points where we find such overreactions in After
the Fall. Both concern the main character, Quentin, and one of his wives.
7. See e.g. Carlson and Kenny (2005) on spatial language comprehension and Decety
and Stevens (2009) on motor simulation.
S I M U L AT I O N A N D E M O T I O N A L M E M OR Y [ 121 ]
Specifically, they are instances of surprising rage that initiates violent
action, fortunately stopped by Quentin before it leads to harm.
The first instance is the culmination of an argument between Quentin
and his first wife, Louise. Quentin has come home late. In consequence,
he missed a meeting at his daughter’s school (which he had forgotten).
Earlier in the day, he had told Louise that he had to stay on after normal
work hours. In fact, he did have to stay on. Indeed, the executive commit-
tee of his law firm was meeting with him to decide whether he should leave
the firm. However, he somehow forgot about the meeting and went to the
park. When one of the partners in the law firm calls his home, Louise learns
that Quentin was not at work and appears to assume he is having an affair.
She treats him with cold contempt when he returns, though he tells her he
did not stay at work before she has a chance to confront him with the fact.
She does not change her attitude when he explains his problems at work,
but tells him that he has to sleep on the sofa. He protests that it will upset
their daughter when she sees this in the morning. Louise does not relent.
Quentin receives a telephone call telling him that a friend of his has com-
mitted suicide. Even after this, Louise remains adamant in her attitude.
She criticizes him further, with particular heartlessness given the preced-
ing events. He certainly has reason for irritation, even anger. But it is still
surprising, even somewhat shocking when ‘He starts a clench-fisted move
toward her and she backs away, terrified’. The ‘violence’ is ‘aborted’ (p. 608),
but remains distressing and unexplained, particularly given the fact that
Quentin is not an especially mercurial character. Although their divorce
does not actually take place for several years, this is the point when it is
first suggested. Indeed, it is the culmination and, in effect, the end of this
marriage for purposes of the play; Louise hardly appears after this point in
the narrative.
The second overreaction involves Quentin and his second wife, Maggie.
Quentin was delayed in returning home after a trip. Maggie questions
where he has been. It is not developed, but there is some suggestion that
Maggie suspects deceit. Although there is tension between them, it is still
surprising that Quentin announces that he will ‘sleep in the living room’
(p. 102). Not long after this, we learn that Quentin has been fired from
his job.
Quentin’s decision to sleep in the living room—subsequently extended
to sleeping at an inn—gives us a hint that the emotional memory of his fight
with Louise has been activated. Experiencing anxiety over his professional
S I M U L AT I O N A N D E M O T I O N A L M E M OR Y [ 123 ]
actually denies that the loss of employment has occurred. Quentin
responds, ‘I didn’t expect you to take it seriously’ (p. 103). Expectation
here is a form of simulation, probably implicit. At this point, we can
infer that Quentin’s anticipation of Maggie’s lack of compassion is prob-
ably the result of his implicit simulation being guided by his emotional
memory of the fight with Louise—an emotional memory that is, again,
narratively structured. In that memory, Louise was unsympathetic with
Quentin’s job crisis.
On the other hand, Maggie is clearly inebriated on alcohol and pills. She
is not quarrelsome, but pleading. Her terrible unhappiness is clear, though
so is Quentin’s understandable exasperation with her self-destructiveness.
What is less comprehensible is the fact that he berates her, calling her
‘inexcusably vicious’ (p. 107). Indeed, he attacks her the way that Louise
attacked him. The one concrete accusation he makes, the one that shows
she is ‘inexcusably vicious’, is that she ‘called [her] husband idiot in public’
(p. 107). If true, this could be viewed as an instance of humiliation. But we
are presented with no evidence that Maggie ever called Quentin an idiot.
Indeed, given her respect for his intelligence (evident repeatedly in the
course of the play), and the general social view of their mental capabilities
(as we can infer this from the play), this seems extremely unlikely. Here, we
may have an instance of the model actually adding elements to the simula-
tion, or in this case to the simulative reconstruction of explicit memories.9
Louise and Quentin had more than one argument. In the argument that
preceded the one we considered above, Quentin was asking Louise to admit
her faults. That is precisely what he is doing now with Maggie. At the end
of that earlier argument, Louise had called Quentin ‘an idiot’ and left, end-
ing the disagreement (p. 42). It seems at least (simulatively) possible, then,
that Quentin has filled in this element of his simulation of Maggie from an
emotionally salient memory of Louise.
This accusation does precipitate something of a quarrel, but it quickly
peters out and Maggie returns to her pleas for attachment-based care, or
mothering, from Quentin. Quentin’s indifference and rigidity in effect
keep him in the Louise role until, in a rash act, Maggie tries to swallow
a handful of pills. Understandably both frightened and angered, Quentin
knocks her hand, then begins to struggle with her for the bottle. For a cer-
tain time, there is a physical fight centred on trying to wrest the pills from
her. But, ‘suddenly … he lunges for her throat and lifts her with his grip’
(p. 111). Here, we have the same unexplained surge of violence that we saw
with Louise. It was undoubtedly reasonable for him struggle with her for
S I M U L AT I O N A N D E M O T I O N A L M E M OR Y [ 125 ]
forgetfulness. The connection is strengthened when we learn the reason
for the delay. Quentin’s father has suffered terrible financial losses in the
Depression and now learns that he is entirely ruined. He turns to his wife,
Quentin’s mother, devastated. Quentin’s mother has no sympathy. Rather,
she calls him an ‘idiot’ and says that she ‘ought to get a divorce!’ (p. 20).
The links with both anomalous scenes are striking. In each case, Quentin
himself is experiencing a crisis at his job, an insecurity that must inevi-
tably activate the emotional memory of his own father’s disaster. Indeed,
that disaster shaped Quentin’s own emotional relation to employment and
financial security. Louise is genuinely unsympathetic, at least in Quentin’s
memory (itself perhaps biased by the critical period experience). As such,
she does in many ways recall the reaction of his mother. Moreover, the
connection of both incidents with divorce is straightforward, even if the
divorce did not in fact occur with Quentin’s parents.
The connections with the Maggie scenario are looser, but perhaps more
striking for that reason. Again, after Maggie expresses some limited scepti-
cism about his losing his job, Quentin says ‘I didn’t expect you to take it
seriously’ (p. 103), indicating that he anticipated a lack of sympathy on her
part. We noted earlier that this might have had its source in the emotional
memory of his conflict with Louise. We can now see that there is an earlier,
critical period source in the story of his parents’ conflict over his father’s
professional failure. It is this critical period experience, enhanced by the
emotional memory of the Louise story, that guides Quentin’s spontane-
ous simulation of Maggie’s reaction beforehand and that leads him to take
her brief—and inebriated—response as definitive. We also now see why
Quentin might (simulatively) reconstruct his memory of Maggie to include
the accusation that she ‘called [her] husband idiot’ (p. 107). Empirical
research shows that people falsely remember the presentation of a par-
ticular word when they are given many items associated with that word.
For example, presented with ‘chalkboard’, ‘desk’, ‘podium’, and ‘classroom’,
participants may believe that they have heard the word ‘school’ (Eysenck,
2009, p. 278). Quentin’s recollection of Maggie’s insult could be of just this
sort. Having experienced all the concomitants of that derogation, Quentin
feels quite certain that he heard the derogation as well, though it seems
implausible to the reader familiar with Maggie’s behaviour and attitudes.
If so, this suggests that such simulatively created memories are a function,
not only of semantic networks, but of specifically emotional narratives
as well.
But we still have not quite explained the anomalous violence of the
two scenes. We have a clue in Quentin’s accusation against Maggie. Again,
Quentin’s criticisms of Maggie are vague generalities, for example that she
10. Lacan treats the signifier in a number of his Écrits (1966). A psychoanalytic con-
nection is not surprising, given the frame of the play, which recalls a psychoanalytic
session (Murphy, 2002, p. 314).
S I M U L AT I O N A N D E M O T I O N A L M E M OR Y [ 127 ]
But, again, it does not seem that Maggie did humiliate Quentin in this
way. Even if she did call him idiot in public (which seems unlikely), that
would have been more absurd than humiliating. Rather, the shame and
humiliation were Quentin’s father’s feelings. But where does the public
enter in Quentin’s father’s case? Immediately after his wife calls him ‘idiot’,
Quentin’s father comments that he hears ‘Somebody crying’ (p. 20). It is
Quentin. Quentin has heard the whole exchange. However unintention-
ally, Quentin’s mother has exposed her husband to shame in front of his
son—an act even more humiliating than such an insult made before a large
group of strangers.
This critical period experience had simulative and motivational conse-
quences. For example, it sensitized Quentin to his daughter’s feelings as he
simulated the results of his conflict with Louise. More important, it led to
his accusation about Maggie insulting him in public. In both cases, we see
again that Quentin’s simulation and emotional response were organized
by reference to this particular causal sequence, this narrative, in emotional
memory. Indeed, we begin to see further connections as well. Shame is to
a great extent a response to the disgust of other people. Quentin’s mother
clearly exhibits disgust at her husband. Later, Quentin’s memory of his
conflict with Louise highlights Louise’s exclamation, ‘You are disgusting!’
(p. 57). Indeed, it is in response to this insult that Quentin first says that
‘Betty will see’ (p. 57). In other words, his concern about his daughter,
though explicitly related to his sleeping on the sofa, is actually prompted
by his wife’s expression of disgust—just what he had witnessed as a child.
The most important feature of this critical period experience, however,
is the culminating rage of the later events. It is easy to infer that young
Quentin’s response to his mother’s disgust is empathic shame and humili-
ation for his father. Indeed, it is striking that Quentin’s father notices that
Quentin is there, but does not go to Quentin himself. Rather, he tells his
wife, ‘You better talk to him’ (p. 20). It is possible that this is simply the
gender-based division of labour that apportions comfort-giving to the
woman, thus stressing the uncomforting role the mother has just been
playing. However, it is also possible to understand the father’s reticence as
the result of shame and a feeling of inadequacy. In any case, it seems clear
that young Quentin felt this shame and humiliation empathically. These
empathic feelings may have combined with his own sense of shame and
humiliation at merely crying over the incident and, as a child, being inca-
pable of defending his father against the joint devastations of professional
and domestic life. Moreover, these feelings may have been enhanced by his
own response of disgust at his father’s apparently passive attitude, thus
his father’s inability to respond adequately to either the professional or
CONCLUSION
In short, After the Fall presents us with two instances of anomalous rage—a
phenomenon all too familiar from ordinary life. It implicitly explains those
events by reference to a series of structurally parallel narrative memories
rooted in Quentin’s childhood experiences. (See Table 6.1 for a schematic
representation of these parallels.)
Perhaps more significantly, the play has implications for our under-
standing of the human mind. Specifically, it indicates that emotional mem-
ories are organized into stories, which is to say, particular causal sequences.
These causal sequences are not necessary or law-like, nor even probabilis-
tic. Nonetheless, they serve as models for construing and simulating later
11. Towards the end of the play, Miller directly indicates that there are childhood
precedents for Quentin’s rage. Specifically, Quentin stops strangling Maggie and
begins strangling a phantasm of his mother (p. 111). Miller links this with a different
childhood memory—when Quentin’s parents had left him behind to take a trip. But
this explains nothing. The incident with the parents leaving Quentin behind has no
distinctive relation to his moments of rage. Thus, it is not clear why Quentin’s mind
would link the two at all. That distinctive relation bears on his father’s humiliation.
Moreover, the preceding analysis does not indicate that his anger at Louise and Maggie
is simply displaced anger at his mother. Rather, that rage results more indirectly from
cognitive processes in which emotional memories of his father’s humiliation guide his
simulation of later, complex interactions in a way that produces rage. It may be that,
in part misled by a certain version of psychoanalysis, Miller failed to understand the
psychological subtlety of his own play—an ordinary phenomenon (on authors’ misun-
derstanding of their own works, see Hogan, 2013b, ch. 3).
S I M U L AT I O N A N D E M O T I O N A L M E M OR Y [ 129 ]
Table . A SCHEMATIC OUTLINE OF THE STRUCTURAL PARALLELS AMONG QUENTIN’S EXPERIENCES OF MARITAL CONFLICT.
Parents Father not back, Job crisis Unsympathetic Expression of Mention of Hurt child Rage for/at father’s Paternal
late for an wife (‘idiot’) disgust; shame divorce (Quentin) humiliation passivity
important event
Quentin and Father not back, Job crisis Unsympathetic Expression of Divorce Hurt child Rage/humiliation Near violence
Louise late for an wife (‘idiot’) disgust; sleeps (Betty)
important event alone
Quentin and Father not back Job crisis Unsympathetic Chooses to sleep Divorce ‘in public’ Rage/humiliation Violence
Maggie wife (‘idiot’) alone
events: defining their causal configurations, filling in intentions or unob-
served actions, reconstructing relevant memories, and so on. In conse-
quence, the play suggests that one’s emotional responses are not responses
to the current situation alone. They are, rather, responses to the current
situation as organized and partially re-simulated by tacit reference to nar-
ratively structured emotional memories. The play provides further sup-
port for the view that empathic response is central to the development of
emotional propensities through childhood, critical period experiences. It
also indicates that such early, empathic experiences, perhaps particularly
those involving an attachment object, may have important consequences,
not only for emotion, but for simulation as well. Finally, After the Fall hints
that there may, in certain cases, be a perhaps surprisingly important role
for the emotional memory of words—or, rather, not words alone (thus not
language as a pseudo-objective structure), but the emotionally powerful
event of a particular utterance at a particular time in a particular voice.
One significant feature of this analysis is that it suggests connections with
psychoanalytic accounts of transference. It re-understands the psychoana-
lytic idea by reference to critical period experiences in the development of
emotion systems, emotional memories organized through particular causal
sequences or narratives, and simulation processes. This fundamentally
changes the descriptive characterization and explanation of the phenom-
ena. However, it does seem to capture the relevant insights of psychoanaly-
sis. The same point holds for the relations among the different narratives
isolated here and Lévi-Strauss’s idea of ‘transformation sets’ (1969). Here,
too, a cognitive and affective account both re-construes and re-explains the
phenomena, while preserving relevant insights. Finally, there is some link
with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic emphasis on the ‘signifier’. However,
the present account shifts away from the linguistic autonomism of Lacanian
theory to the particularity and, indeed, corporeality (or embodiment) of the
emotional memory—once again, to some degree preserving the insights,
but with a more descriptively and explanatorily adequate characterization
and development. Each of these links, suggested by Miller’s play—as well as
the exact processes governing the organization of emotional memory and
simulation—points to avenues for further cognitive and affective study,
both within and outside literature and the arts.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An earlier version of part of this essay was delivered at ‘The Science of Story
and Imagination’, Stanford University (2014), and at the Arthur Miller
S I M U L AT I O N A N D E M O T I O N A L M E M OR Y [ 131 ]
Centennial conference, Saint Francis College (2015). I am grateful to the
organizers and participants for their comments. The essay has also ben-
efited from the comments of Michael Burke and Emily Troscianko.
REFERENCES
S I M U L AT I O N A N D E M O T I O N A L M E M OR Y [ 133 ]
CHAPTER 7
INTRODUCTION
1. Other terms in use when discussing the imagination include ‘make-believe’ (e.g.
Walton, 1990), which is in use in developmental psychology and the anthropology of
play, and ‘simulation’, which is seen by many cognitive scientists as an integral part of
social cognition (e.g. Gallese, Keysers, and Rizzolatti, 2004).
2. The Transportation Scale is cited by Appel and Richter (2007); Sanford and
Emmott (2012); Bae, Lee, and Bae (2014); Phillips (2015); amongst others.
D O U B L E V I S I O N OF F I C T I O N [ 137 ]
Participants read dozens of c. 50-word narratives arbitrarily labelled as
either fiction or non-fiction, while their brains were scanned using fMRI.
The main findings here indicate that the texts flagged as non-fiction engaged
systems associated with the simulation of physical actions, whereas with
texts flagged as fictions the activation patterns were more like those asso-
ciated with ‘mind-wandering’ and ‘relational inferences’ (p. 26). Such
results, creating a tenuous connection between fiction-reading and the
open-minded readiness of hypothetical thinking, are attractive (see also
Richardson, 2011, pp. 685–687), and indicate that it is worthwhile to pay
attention to relational as well as action-related cognition in the processing
of narratives. However, since Altmann and colleagues wanted to focus pri-
marily on the intersubjective aspects of reading, the participants were also
asked to fill out the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) devised by Mark
H. Davis (1980). These results were then compared with the strengths of
the activation patterns indicating mentalizing—the act of imagining other
minds. Altmann and colleagues are careful as to the extent of the conclu-
sions they draw from these results, but the suggestion is that because brain
patterns indicating mentalizing are more strongly activated in individuals
who self-report a strong identification with fictional characters in general,
and because the same patterns of activation are more strongly manifest
in reading fiction than non-fiction, fiction can be said to differ from non-
fiction because it engages our interpersonal cognition more fully.
While the fMRI results themselves are intriguing, I would like to draw
attention to one detail in this study that is arguably problematic from the
point of view of the literary view of the imagination. Altmann et al. (2014,
p. 24) base the correlation between the fMRI results and the respondents’
general tendency to engage with characters on one of the four factors iden-
tified in the IRI—the ‘Fantasy Scale’ (Davis, 1980, table 3). This section
of the IRI questionnaire focuses on reactions to fictional characters, and
even though it is designed for the measurement of empathic skill rather
than the reading of fiction more generally, in it empathic identification is
conceptualized in roughly similar ways to immersion or transport in liter-
ary studies, and equated with successful engagement with fiction. Thus,
some Fantasy Scale items adopt the common shorthand of assuming that
‘good’ or ‘interesting’ stories or films are by definition those that promote
an empathic identification, and positive answers to questions like ‘When I
am reading an interesting story or novel, I imagine how I would feel if the
events of the story were happening to me’ (item 26) and ‘When I watch
a good movie, I can very easily put myself in the place of a leading char-
acter’ (item 23) are assessed as indicating a high tendency to empathize.
However, responses indicating whether or not participants tend to get
Despite the fact that many psychological and neurological studies of fic-
tionality have suffered from the conceptual problems described above, the
cognitive sciences can offer literary scholars valuable insights into how
our general cognitive skills are activated not only by the environments or
people represented in a text but also by the fact of their fictionality. These
insights are offered by the critique of the computational model that has
appeared in the form of the ‘4E’ paradigm. This paradigm takes the mind to
be embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended (Menary, 2009; Stewart,
Gapenne, and Di Paolo, 2010), and it presents a view of cognition that
replaces the computer-like input-processing-output model with a system
incorporating more complex—and more intractable—feedback between
an embodied being and a dynamic environment. As such, 4E approaches
draw not only on neuropsychology but also on phenomenology—a combi-
nation that the computational paradigm has resisted (e.g. Noë, 2004, 2012;
Gallagher and Zahavi, 2007; Thompson, 2007).
My focus is on the consequences of enaction and embodiment for the
imagining that readers undertake in experiencing fiction. Enactive cog-
nition broadly takes thought to be ‘the exercise of skillful know-how in
situated and embodied action’, in the sense that all our thinking—however
abstract and introspective—is in constant feedback with ‘recurrent
D O U B L E V I S I O N OF F I C T I O N [ 139 ]
sensorimotor patterns of perception and action’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 13).
Consequently, an enactive understanding of literary reading conceives it
also as a skill-orientated interaction between a reader’s embodied mind and
the literary object. Enactive cognition has already been shown to affect our
understanding of fictionality in interesting ways, and new scholarship has
presented analyses of embodied reactions to texts, including topics such
as sensing fictional spaces (Caracciolo, 2011), experiencing movement and
body boundaries (Esrock, 2001; Kuzmičová, 2012), or identifying embod-
ied feelings coded into the rhythms of narrative (Caracciolo, 2014). In her
examination of perceptual experiences of narrative, for instance, Emily
Troscianko (2013) emphasizes the difference between the enactive view of
imagining and the ‘picture in the head’ variety presented in older forms
of cognitive neuropsychology: ‘I don’t have a mental image of the cat I’m
imagining’, she writes, ‘but I perform the same kinds of exploratory behav-
iours as when I see one, with weaker forms of sensory feedback provided
from memory’ (Troscianko, 2013, p. 185). What is crucial in such literary
scholarship is its interaction with the enactive paradigm to produce a view
of the literary imagination as a set of complex processes that engage the
mind-body with the fictional environment offered by the text.
Troscianko (2013) has also drawn attention to the way in which our folk-
psychological assumptions about the imagination often lump together sev-
eral experiential aspects. Her example (drawing on Jajdelska et al., 2010) is
the way in which the concept of ‘vividness’, much used in questionnaire
studies of literary imagination, actually conflates two aspects: actual visual
detail and emotional intensity. The unacknowledged presence of this con-
ceptual amalgam, Troscianko argues, results in flawed experimental data
about the exact processes involved. In a similar fashion, I wish to unpack
another conceptual conflation: that what is being encountered during read-
ing is in some senses like a world, but is a fiction. I am particularly inter-
ested in the role of the clearly signalled fictionality of the literary work in
the reading process, and in how readers’ minds are able to assume a per-
spective that is simultaneously aware of the fictionality of the events it fol-
lows and yet fully cognitively and emotionally engaged with them.
For the purpose of unpicking this conflation, I draw on the theory of
enactive perception as presented in Alva Noë’s Action in perception (2004)
and Varieties of presence (2012). Perception, Noë argues, ‘is constituted not
only by the perceiver’s mastery of patterns of sensorimotor dependence,
but by the fact that the perceiver knows that his or her relation to the envi-
ronment is mediated by such knowledge’ (Noë, 2004, p. 65). According
to this idea of the ‘full-blooded duality of perceptual experience’, seeing
a silver dollar from an angle includes an experience of the elliptical shape
D O U B L E V I S I O N OF F I C T I O N [ 141 ]
knowledge by acquaintance, or knowledge by revelation—what [fictions
can] give us is know-how; rather than transmitting beliefs, what they equip
us with are skills; rather than teaching, what they do is train. They are not
informative, that is, but formative’ (Landy, 2012, p. 10). Of particular
interest is the way Landy bases the power of these ‘formative’ fictions on
the fact that in order to do the training they do, they must generate in
their readers a state of ‘conviction and distrust’ in the enchantment being
offered (ibid., p. 76). In his analyses of texts that range from the Gospel
of Mark to Mallarmé and Beckett, Landy thus lays open a form of writing
that connects with its readers most acutely on a level of ‘lucid self-delusion’
(p. 12). The combination of engagement with what seems to be the case,
and awareness of the fact that we are being presented with an illusion, is
a seemingly paradoxical mental state that is nevertheless required of us
when experiencing such fictions. At the same time, the fictions themselves
hone our skill in entering that state to an enduring and easy habit (see also
Landy, 2015, p. 572).
Landy’s ‘lucid self-delusion’ follows a tradition running from Aristotle’s
mimesis (see Halliwell, 2002) to Coleridge’s willing suspension of
disbelief—of seeing fiction as something that calls not for a loss of a sense
of reality, but for the maintenance of a dual attitude.4 It might be argued
that these two aspects of engagement with fiction should be seen as dis-
tinct processes, one a low-level and intuitive perceptual process, the other
a conscious and culturally organized process of interpretation (e.g. Hutto
and Myin, 2013, p. xviii). However, it is crucial to this view of fictionality
to recognize that perceptual and interpretive processes are always inter-
twined in reading, and that there are qualities in fictions which are avail-
able to the audience only when they use specific fiction-related cognitive
skills. Such is the argument made by Richard Walsh in Rhetoric of fiction-
ality (2007), where fictionality is presented as a communicative strategy
built into works of fiction by authors, and recognized as such by readers.
Fictionality is therefore a rhetorical mode that changes the way readers
comprehend the thing being represented: ‘awareness of its artifice is innate
in any response whatsoever to fiction as such’ (Walsh, 2007, p. 172). Thus,
losing sight of fictionality as a quality of the text would mean readers are no
longer experiencing fiction but have, instead, slipped into a non-fictional
mode of reading.
4. Further work in this tradition includes Wolfgang Iser’s The fictive and the imagi-
nary (1993) and Paul Ricoeur’s three-level mimesis in Time and narrative (1983‒1985/
1984‒1988).
In the space remaining, I will extend this theoretical discussion to the anal-
ysis of a novel which I believe cashes in on those imaginative processes
which the enactive approach to fictionality brings to light. Christopher
Priest’s The Prestige (1995/2004) is a meditation on the 19th century and
its tensions between spiritual and materialist sensibilities. This is a cultural
moment that many other writers have approached through the spiritualist
séances popular at the time (e.g. A. S. Byatt in her 1990 novel Possession),
but Priest chooses as his entry point a feud between two stage magicians.
In the novel, this conflict draws on two conceptualizations of magic, either
as naturalized craft or as actual supernatural power, and the novel itself is
similarly built on a conflict between naturalized narrative puzzles and fan-
tastical story events. As a result, The Prestige has resisted easy categoriza-
tions, and has been cited as science fiction or fantasy, and as Neo-Victorian
metafiction, having won both the mainstream James Tait Black Memorial
Prize and the World Fantasy Award.
The novel opens in the present day with a young journalist receiving
a copy of the diary of his Victorian ancestor, Alfred Borden.5 Borden was
a hard-working tradesman’s son who taught himself conjuring tricks and
eventually made his way to the stage under the name ‘Le Professeur de
Magie’. In addition to the story of Borden’s life, the diary includes sections
5. For an analysis of Christopher Nolan’s film version from 2006, where some sub-
stantial changes were made to the way the battle between the magicians is presented to
the audience, see Heilmann (2009/2010). The modern-day frame of the novel is hon-
estly less interesting than the Victorian magicians, and it was left out of Nolan’s film.
D O U B L E V I S I O N OF F I C T I O N [ 143 ]
where he explains his own attitude towards the secrets of his art. ‘Magic
has no mystery to magicians’, Borden believes:
Just like the audience of stage magic, the readers of Priest’s novel receive
this announcement of honesty from Borden, and both audiences acquiesce
to experiencing the mystery that follows. Even the very first word of the
diary, ‘I’, is simultaneously a truth and a lie, one that readers are designed
to accept at face value at first, but whose duplicity is made explicit later on.
Borden’s secret remains a secret to his stage audiences, but in the diary it is
D O U B L E V I S I O N OF F I C T I O N [ 145 ]
Angier’s diary knowingly repeats Borden’s diary illusion, as both the
original but physically damaged version and the final surviving but incorpo-
real version of Angier use the first-person singular in writing it. The switch
between the two occurs initially without express signal, but the narrative
situation of the diary eventually alerts readers by becoming seemingly
impossible, with Angier describing his own unconsciousness and paraly-
sis and finally even his own death: ‘At a quarter to three this morning my
life was brought to its end by a sudden seizure of the heart’ (Priest, 1995/
2004, pp. 323‒325). But unlike Borden’s diary, this time the narrative has
dropped enough hints about the doubling to make it reasonably easy for
readers to understand that Angier is writing about the death of his other
half. And even those readers who are caught by this first-person-for-two-
men trick for the second time are quickly let off the hook by Angier making
explicit reference to Borden’s doubled voice: ‘I have borrowed a technique
from Borden, so that I am I as well as myself’ (p. 325).
Yet, despite the fact that Angier’s narrative situation is naturalized to
an extent—he turns out not to be an undead man speaking from beyond
the grave—the fact of his doubling into corporeal and incorporeal versions
is itself a deviation from the rules of our reality. Thus with Angier, we are
no longer able to explain the doubled man as a psychologically twisted but
ultimately possible set of twins, and Priest no longer continues to operate
within the naturalist or realist literary tradition. The genre of science fic-
tion has been for a long time theorized mainly through its presentation
of scientifically believable speculation (e.g. Spiegel, 2008)—an approach
which relies on the assumption that invented technology inherently offers
more cognitive grounding than the supernatural phenomena typical to
fantasy. In The Prestige, Priest clearly plays with that assumption by hav-
ing Angier’s impossible magic act be made plausible by a machine invented
by a historical person. But even the science-fictional naturalization is only
the first step in the process dominating Angier’s story. During his career,
he was able to fool his theatre audiences into continuing to take the fic-
tional attitude towards his performances, but the full, grotesque conse-
quences of actual impossibility are represented to the reading audience.
These are manifested, first, by the description of the frame-tale narrator’s
final descent into the crypt among dozens of immobile but still conscious,
rubbery Angier copies—undead interstitial beings (Csicsery-Ronay, 2008,
pp. 195‒198) that are all the more horrifying for appearing in a series of
absurd poses:
The corpses all lay in different positions. Some were straight, others were twisted
or bent over. None of the bodies was arranged as if lying down; most of them
I eased myself backwards, not looking. As I reached the main aisle and turned
slowly around, [I] brushed against the raised foot of the nearest corpse. A patent-
leather shoe swung slowly to and fro. (Priest, 1995/2004, pp. 354‒357)
D O U B L E V I S I O N OF F I C T I O N [ 147 ]
as fiction, and with full knowledge of the meaning-making actions required
in that performance.
CONCLUSION
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Fantastic Cognition
KARIN KUKKONEN
Our brains build models of the world and continuously modify these models on the basis
of the signals that reach our senses. So, what we actually perceive are our brain’s models
of the world. They are not the world itself, but, for us, they are as good as. You could say
that our perceptions are fantasies that coincide with reality.
Frith, 2009, pp. 134‒135
Put simply, the brain is—literally—a fantastic organ (fantastic: from Greek phantastikos,
able to create mental images, from phantazesthai).
Friston, 2013, p. 1328
FA N TA S T I C C O G N I T I O N [ 153 ]
brain’ (p. 301). He makes the claim that the artistic process constitutes ‘a
type of found science’ about perceptual shortcuts and the simplifications
which the brain employs when recognizing objects and scenes. Similarly,
in Art and Illusion, Gombrich discusses Constable’s cloud studies, showing
how the artist draws sketches and changes their set-up systematically, as
he gets a grip on his visual possibilities as an artist. This practice arguably
constitutes the experimental set-up of ‘found science’. Gombrich writes, ‘I
think [Constable] felt that the history of science presented a story of con-
tinuous advance in which the achievements of one observer were used and
extended by the next’ (p. 175).
It seems that this discussion of Gombrich’s ‘beholder’s share’ and the
‘simple physics’ of artistic shortcuts have taken us a long way away from
predictive processing (which indeed does not play quite as central a role in
Kandel’s book as Friston makes out, and which Cavanagh does not mention
at all). Friston, however, is right to connect Gombrich’s ‘psychology of art’
with predictive processing. The mimesis of the work of art in Gombrich
is based not on its truthful representation of the real world, but on the
degree to which it engages the expectations of the spectator, thereby cre-
ating the illusion of mimesis that is both more artificial and more power-
ful. The viewer needs to be given both the opportunity and the means to
‘project what is not there’, through under-defined elements on the canvas
(a ‘screen’), and also clues for what inference to draw (Gombrich, 1959/
2002, p. 232). The viewer’s predictive models take centre stage, as artists
devise depth compositions and colour constellations which are empirically
incorrect but do not create immediate prediction errors. These instances
can give us insights into the make-up of the predictive model, not only for
the perception of art but also for the perception of the rest of the world.
Remember Chris Frith’s suggestion, quoted at the beginning of this arti-
cle, that ‘perceptions are fantasies that coincide with reality’. For him, the
brain literally ‘makes up’ the mind in that it constitutes the physical basis
of cognitive operations. The brain ‘makes up’ the mind in the extended
sense as well, because predictive processing in the brain gives rise to cog-
nitive illusions, such as the assumption that our minds are isolated and
private. It would take up too much space to go into the details of Frith’s
delightful account here, but basically, he suggests that cognition generally
relies on Helmholtz’s ‘unconscious inferences’ in visual, proprioceptive,
interoceptive, and other kinds of perception. We perceive, feel, intend, and
think after these unconscious inferences have related the sensory stimulus
to our predictive, probabilistic models. Like Gombrich’s notion of artistic
mimesis, Frith’s concept of cognition depends on expectations, understood
as virtual models. Predictive models, for example, readjust our perception
From our discussion of visual perception and artistic styles emerges a rela-
tively well-defined research programme for science and visual art within
a predictive processing framework. Can we posit a similar kind of ‘found
science’ for literature? Within the growing field of the cognitive study of
literature, the historical sciences have been taken into account for the dis-
cussion of cognitive phenomena in the texts of earlier periods (see e.g.
Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain [2001], Richardson’s The Neural Sublime [2010],
and Anderson’s The Renaissance Extended Mind [2015]), and there are note-
worthy attempts to make sense of neurological evidence through the inter-
pretive paradigms of the humanities. In Feeling Beauty (2013), G. Gabrielle
Starr discusses neurological studies of the sister arts (literature, painting,
and music) through Baumgarten’s notion of the aesthetic as ‘a blend of
FA N TA S T I C C O G N I T I O N [ 155 ]
sensation and knowledge such that we almost feel thought itself’ (p. xiv).
Paul B. Armstrong, in How Literature Plays with the Brain (2013), combines
the seemingly contradictory neurological indications of our predilection
for familiarity and regularity, on the one hand, and novelty, on the other
hand, through the principle of the hermeneutic circle that develops out
of the interplay between what is known and what needs to be explained.
Both Starr and Armstrong give rather general statements about the inter-
pretive models they propose, rather than tracing a specific set of cognitive
shortcuts through stylistic devices (as Cavanagh proposes) or unfolding a
historical narrative of the development of these devices through an archive
of artistic experimentation (as Gombrich does). With the predictive pro-
cessing and Bayesian approaches to literature still vastly underrepresented
in cognitive literary studies, the value of literary stylistic and narrative
features that create particularly instructive and insightful instances of
what I called ‘fantastic cognition’ in the title of this article still needs to be
asserted for literature.
Fantasy is traditionally the domain of literary study and is the subject of
many literary texts. So, in the interests of developing a ‘found science’ of
fantastic cognition from a literary point of view, let us have a look at what
is generally considered the foundational text of the literary fantastic, used
to exemplify Todorov’s initial discussion of the term: Jacques Cazotte’s Le
Diable Amoureux (The Devil in Love, 1772/1776/1965).1 In Cazotte’s story,
young Alvare chooses to dabble in the dark arts, and he summons a crea-
ture that takes the shape of first a camel’s head, then a dog, and later the
page Biondetto. Sometimes, Alvare finds it really difficult to make out who
is in front of him:
Le feu de ses regards perçait à travers le voile, il était d’un pénétrant, d’une dou-
ceur inconcevables: ces yeux ne m’étaient pas inconnus. Enfin, en assemblant les
traits tels que le voile me les laissait apercevoir, je reconnus dans Fiorentina le
fripon de Biondetto; mais l’élégance, l’avantage de la taille, se faisaient beaucoup
plus remarquer sous l’ajustement de femme, que sous l’habit de page.
1. Most of the works which we would intuitively classify as ‘fantasy’, such as Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings or Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, are in Todorov’s classification instances
of the ‘marvellous’, because here wizards and dragons actually exist in the fictional
world. The marvellous (le merveilleux) is a long-standing term in literary criticism that
pertains to the divine interventions, supernatural passions, and larger-than-life nar-
ratives that are not uncommon, for example, in the romances of the 16th and 17th
centuries. The realist 18th-century novel rejects it (generally), but with the rise of the
Gothic towards the end of the 18th century (of which Cazotte’s Diable Amoureux can be
considered a forerunner), the marvellous turns into a supernatural challenge for newly
won empirical epistemic certainties.
FA N TA S T I C C O G N I T I O N [ 157 ]
perception, proprioception, actions, thought processes, and direct speech
cognitively. The linguistic cues draw on a plethora of cognitive modes
and, for the most part, they add a screen of representation to the events,
actions, and thoughts in the narrative, and this needs particular attention
when matching the cognitive process to the textual example. Nonetheless,
we can say that literary texts work through a similar strategy of mimesis as
the one that Gombrich identified for visual art. In the linguistic mode, too,
literary texts offer readers space to respond and specify their inferences (to
‘project’, in Gombrich’s words), and they also provide the necessary cues
for doing so. Both verbal and visual mimesis work through the interplay
between cognition and the crafted exploitation of our cognitive predictive
models through the text.3
Literary texts like Cazotte’s differ from pictures not only in the verbal
mode of representation but also in their explicitly narrative construction.4
Elsewhere (2014), I have discussed narratives as containing a probability
design, a feedback loop between the probabilities of the fictional world
and the events of the plot, which create prediction errors and force readers
to revise their predictive model of the fictional world. Narrative, in other
words, shapes our Bayesian inferences. What does this have to do with bin-
ocular rivalry and duck-rabbits? It turns out that there is an interesting con-
nection between work on visual illusion and narrative. Jakob Hohwy notes
that when we are presented with pairs of ambiguous visual stimuli (such
as two duck-rabbits), a change of belief in the situation can determine how
we perceive them. A weakly narrative contextualization, such as ‘the duck
is about to eat the rabbit’ (2013, p. 131) creates what Hohwy calls ‘cogni-
tive penetrability’ from higher-level propositional expectation to cognitive
percept. The predictions of our conscious knowledge actually have an effect
5. Other stimuli used in earlier studies of binocular rivalry, such as grates with dif-
ferent orientations (Hohwy, 2013, p. 21, Figure 3), can perhaps also not as easily be
turned into narratives as the duck and the rabbit.
FA N TA S T I C C O G N I T I O N [ 159 ]
she is a sylph turned human, first to teach the magicians around Soberano
a lesson and second to be fit for Alvare’s love, will have to be read as a ruse.
The assassination attempt on Biondetta is then also probably set up by her
herself. If, on the other hand, Alvare dreams most of this, then we need
to start questioning the reliability of his narrative. Maybe he just imag-
ines the similarities between Fiorentina and Biondetto? Does he spin his
own narrative around the young woman Biondetta, perhaps in order to
mask the fact that he cannot commit to her? Does he wish to become a
charmer of the devil with such petulance that he simply imagines it rather
than practise actual witchcraft? After all, he admits himself that ‘jamais
rendez-vous galant ne fut attendu avec tant d’impatience’ (‘Never was an
amorous rendezvous awaited with such impatience’, p. 318) as his meeting
with Soberano to conjure the devil.
The two general predictive models (or ‘hyper-priors’, in the parlance of
predictive processing) reconfigure the textual evidence in conflicting ways.
These predictive, probabilistic models cue readers to pick up on different
elements of the text in the hope that they will confirm one hypothesis and
help to disambiguate the situation. As Friston puts it, ‘the raison d’être for
inference is to disambiguate among plausible and competing hypotheses’
(2013, p. 1329). The events in the narrative, the statements of the nar-
rators (and their slips of the tongue), serve readers as evidence to decide
which predictive model to apply to their reading of the text. Such infer-
ences are usually not part of the conscious experience in reading, mostly
because there is typically only one general predictive model for the fictional
world. In the feedback loop of what I call the ‘probability design’ of the liter-
ary narrative (Kukkonen, 2014), the plot events (and the new information
about the fictional world which they carry) leads to a revision of the pre-
dictive, probabilistic model of the fictional world. New observations hence
usher in a modification of the existing model that can be surprising and
unusual. The fantastic (in Todorov’s sense), however, systematically brings
the ‘unconscious inferences’ in literary reading to the fore because it forces
readers to hesitate between contradictory models, and thereby makes the
inferencing process in many instances more conscious.
Of course, not all the inferences in Diable Amoureux are foregrounded
explicitly through Alvare’s narration. Consider the following example, in
which Fiorentina appears at the dinner where Alvare is entertaining his
cabalist friends, right after he mentions to Biondetto that Fiorentina has
promised to attend:
‘J’étais ému jusqu’au fond du cœur et j’oubliais presque que j’étais le créateur du
charme qui me ravissait.’
(‘I was moved to the bottom of my heart and I almost forgot that I was the
creator of the charms that delighted me.’) (p. 323)
FA N TA S T I C C O G N I T I O N [ 161 ]
In the earlier instance, too, he might just as well have forgotten that his
wish had been the creator of Fiorentina’s appearance. As the narratorial
discourse reminds readers of the supernatural powers of the character
(ironically by stating that he had forgotten about them), they can revisit
the earlier instance and inscribe it (more or less consciously) into the gen-
eral predictive model which they are currently developing.
In Le Diable Amoureux, Cazotte sets in motion an intricate machinery
that draws on ‘unconscious inference’ (of the kind that pervades our every-
day cognition), the conscious inferences of Alvare as narrator, and the
(more or less conscious) revisiting of previous inferences on the part of the
reader in light of new information. At times, the narrative contextualiza-
tion does not serve to create the cognitive ‘penetrability’ through which
expectations shape percepts, but instead, creates the narrative, verbal
equivalent of a duck-rabbit. In the dinner scene, both Alvare’s act of van-
ity and the devil’s manipulation of him remain possibilities when consid-
ered generally, but as soon as we start thinking through the implications of
each of these options, we lose our grasp of the other option. Is Fiorentina
in ‘deshabillé’ due to the volition of Alvare (and his need to show off in
front of his cabalist friends)? Is it due to the devil’s psychological skill of
granting Alvare his wish in such a way as pleases his vanity best and gives
him the impression of being in control? These instances of ambiguity build
up throughout the narrative. They constantly remind readers of the basic
conflict between the realist hyper-prior (Alvare’s delusion) and the
supernatural hyper-prior (the devil’s trickery), and they make it difficult to
disambiguate between the competing hyper-priors, because the chains of
inferences that these enable can be pursued to such a degree that we lose
the other option from view.
FA N TA S T I C C O G N I T I O N [ 163 ]
whether models that others teach or endorse are reliable or prone to preju-
dice (Frith, 2009, pp. 167‒183).
Even if the fictional text remains ambiguous to the very end, perhaps
Cazotte himself can be prevailed upon to tell his readers how to read his
novella? In the epilogue, he tells us of the different incarnations which his
novella went through. In the version of 1772, Alvare sees through the tricks
of Biondetta and escapes the snares of the devil. Cazotte then reports a
second version (presented only to ‘personnes de sa connaissance’, ‘acquain-
tances’, p. 377), in which Alvare falls prey to the devil and suffers the well-
known consequences of eternal damnation. Finally, in the version of 1776,
Cazotte seeks to combine both options, creating a narrative in which
‘Alvare y est dupe jusqu’à un certain point, mais sans être victime’ (‘Alvare
is the dupe to a certain point, but he does not become the victim’, p. 377).6
Only this final version of the novella provides readers consistently with the
kind of ambiguity that leads to the sustained hesitation of Todorov’s fan-
tastic. Strictly speaking, all three versions of Cazotte’s novella would tend
towards the marvellous, because the devil plays a role in the fictional world,
but they do so to different degrees, because the powers of the devil change
across versions. As Todorov acknowledges, ‘the fantastic in its pure state’
is best ‘represented by a median line’ between fantastic texts that tend
towards the uncanny and those that tend towards the marvellous (1970/
1975, p. 44). Nevertheless, one can read the versions of Cazotte’s novella as
a process of experimentation, comparable to the artists’ sketchbooks which
Gombrich analyses in Art and Illusion. Smaller changes between the 1772
and the 1776 versions, and the long alternative ending of the 1776 ver-
sion, presumably lead to vastly different effects on readers. Here, Cazotte’s
novella might offer a ready-made experimental design for the empirical
study of reading and hence of predictive processing more generally.
A final duck-rabbit that enhances the ambiguity of Le Diable Amoureux
is the very title of the novella. Who is the ‘devil in love’? At first glance, it
seems most likely that this amorous demon is Biondetta. After the seem-
ingly successful seduction, she reveals herself to be the devil (which—at this
point—corresponds to readers’ expectations), and yet at the same time,
rather than triumph over the hapless soul she has snared, she confesses her
love for Alvare once more (‘ce cœur qui t’adore’, ‘this heart that adores you’,
p. 370). Even if characters make definite statements, confirming either
the natural or the supernatural, Cazotte immediately supplies clues that
make a conclusive inference problematic. Is the devil actually in love with
6. Cazotte goes on to add (p. 377) that the devil might have duped Alvare, but if he
had, Alvare would still have retained his virtue and hence triumphed over the devil.
One of the earliest and most powerful claims of cognitive approaches to lit-
erature is that the human mind works through devices that are commonly
considered ‘literary’, such as metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980/2003;
Turner, 1996) and narrative (Bruner, 1986, 1990). Fiction and the imagina-
tion, as scenarios we entertain and as a ‘default mode’ of thinking, have
more recently entered the fray (Richardson, 2011). Arguably, the study of
literary texts is as important as the cognitive sciences in the endeavour of
working out the elements of the ‘literary mind’ because it helps make these
more or less automatic features of cognition noticeable and thus subject to
analysis.
In the predictive processing model, we have virtual predictive models, or
‘fantasies’, which guide our perception and our cognition more generally.
The literary genre of the fantastic highlights hesitation in the use of these
‘fantasies’ in cognition, and hence it can serve as a repository of ‘found sci-
ence’, of the ways in which predictive processing operates between differ-
ent modes of cognitive ‘penetrability’. Cognitive literary study, informed by
Bayesian models of cognition and the literature of the fantastic, can con-
tribute to studies of how we refine our predictive, probabilistic models and
of whether awareness contributes to or detracts from these recalibrations.
In the cognitive sciences, the literary strategies of the fantastic can then be
employed for the design of experiments to study the cognitive penetrability
FA N TA S T I C C O G N I T I O N [ 165 ]
entailed by more general, propositional knowledge of the situation, as well
as the functions of awareness of such knowledge and its interpersonal reli-
ability. In cognitive literary studies, we can pursue ‘found science’ through
the ways in which authors experiment with different effects in manuscript
drafts or editions, how they make conscious the unconscious inferences
that predictive processing depends on, and how literary history more gener-
ally provides us with a body of evidence for our ‘fantastic cognition’.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
REFERENCES
FA N TA S T I C C O G N I T I O N [ 167 ]
CHAPTER 9
Feedback in Reading
and Disordered Eating
EMILY T. TROSCIANKO
INTRODUCTION
F E E D B A C K I N R E A DI N G A N D DI S OR DE R E D E AT I N G [ 171 ]
activity just is the mysteriously predictable thrill you get from that song
you currently have on repeat—still have to explain to everyone else why
an explanation that does not feel at all adequate actually is. In the absence
of a solution to the hard problem, my working assumption will be that it
makes sense to talk about experiential things—like thoughts, sensations,
and emotions—as different from but in direct interaction with physical
things like muscular contractions, hormone secretion, or nerve signalling.
Of course, there cannot be any completely neat separation: all the terms on
the experiential side also involve physical activity on the part of the neu-
rons, the muscles, the receptors, and so on. And some of this activity, like
the contractions of some muscles, can be directly experienced; some, like
the pH regulation of the blood, cannot. The relationship between the unex-
perienceable physical elements, the experienceable physical elements, and
the experienceable apparently nonphysical elements remains bafflingly
opaque. This opacity means that the simple feedback loops I will be discuss-
ing between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ pertain only at the highest level, where they
remain partially separable. Go down a little further, and the loops instantly
multiply and entwine with each other so thoroughly that the mind‒body
distinction becomes rapidly meaningless; go down far enough, and no one
knows what the loops might really look like, because no one has solved
the mystery of consciousness yet. A quarter of a century ago, Dan Dennett
wrote that ‘human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery’
(1991, p. 21)—defining a mystery as something we don’t even know how to
think about yet. The same can still be said today.
So, let’s return to the more easily comprehensible top level. In a healthy
person, physiological factors like bodyweight and energy metabolism,
behavioural factors like diet, exercise, and other routines, and psycho-
logical factors like attitudes to food and the body exist in an equilibrium
enabled by multiple forms of negative feedback. Just as small changes in
energy intake are adjusted for metabolically (Molé, 1990) to maintain a
stable bodyweight, so fluctuations in body-directed self-confidence may be
absorbed by small changes to dietary or social habits. If we then imagine
that a small but significant amount of weight is gained, thanks say to ill-
ness or Christmas, it is easy to see how a minor reduction in contentment
with body size and shape might result in a plan to make a small increase
in exercise or change in diet, or indeed how these might happen without
an active decision even being required, and how habits will then revert to
normal once the previous equilibrium is returned to (see Figure 9.1).
In someone with an ED, or vulnerable to developing one, things hap-
pen very differently. Figure 9.2 shows one possible way of modelling the
primary high-level feedback loop in anorexia nervosa. As you can see, the
Bodyweight
Feelings of fullness
Thoughts about food
Social habits
Mood
Self-esteem
Figure . Positive mind‒body feedback in anorexia nervosa. This model is a specific
instantiation of the general model presented in Figure 9.1, in which the feedback could oper-
ate in either direction. (See also Fairburn, 2008, p. 21.)
feedback here is positive rather than negative: the system moves away
from equilibrium rather than maintaining it. Wherever you enter the loop
(whether with unintended weight loss, or preoccupation with body shape
and weight for other reasons, or a temporarily low mood), each factor exac-
erbates the next, and a spiral deeper into illness is initiated. The reasons
why negative feedback may fail to maintain equilibrium in one particular
input‒output relationship in one person and not another may be genetic,
biological, and/or socioculturally informed: one person might lose a large
amount of weight due to a viral infection but then recover mentally and
physically as soon as the infection is fought off, whereas for another this
episode might be the start of a prolonged struggle with eating and their
body. But the crucial point to retain is that as soon as negative feedback
fails to correct a movement away from stability—that is, whenever the sys-
tem is insufficiently robust to perturbations—the cycle of positive feed-
back kicks in.
This kind of feedback model is used to understand ED psychopathol-
ogy in cognitive behavioural therapy, which emphasizes the interactions
between thought, emotion, behaviour, and physical state (e.g. Fairburn,
2008). Similar models have also been developed in the context of catas-
trophe theory (e.g. Zeeman, 1976), where the progressive abnormality
of attitudes towards food combined with ever-increasing hunger con-
stitute positive feedback leading towards instability between the two
extremes of bingeing and fasting (which depending on bodyweight
might be classified as bulimia nervosa, or as anorexia binge-purge sub-
type). The lack of stability assumed by these models is also supported
anecdotally by the tendency of ED sufferers to characterize their condi-
tions using words and phrases like ‘reinforcing’, ‘vicious circle’, or ‘spi-
ralling out of control’. (And a quick Google search for combinations like
‘bulimia spiral’ or ‘anorexia vicious circle’ can help start to turn these
anecdotes into data.)
Like any model at this level of generality, the model shown in Figure 9.1 is
incomplete when it comes to the lower-level mechanisms of change, but
it is significantly incomplete at this high level too. Given that physiology,
behaviour, thought, and emotion are represented at least cursorily in the
model, the main factors that are obviously missing are the contributions of
social and cultural factors.
Youth with disordered eating seek out thin-ideal media while at the same time
being influenced by the thin-ideal media that they consume. In turn, a feedback
loop develops (a downward spiral), in which thin-ideal media reinforces and
exacerbates eating disordered symptomatology, and disordered eating increases
interest in thin-ideal media. (p. 146)
F E E D B A C K I N R E A DI N G A N D DI S OR DE R E D E AT I N G [ 175 ]
further support for the ‘feedback loop whereby exposure to body-related
stimuli activates and reinforces an over-concern with one’s own body,
which in turn reactivates attentional biases toward body-related stimuli’
(Cohen and Blaszczynski, 2015, p. 9).
When feedback is present, causal relationships can be difficult to disen-
tangle. Cohen and Blaszczynski (2015, p. 9) suggest two possible ways of
interpreting the observed correlation between Facebook use and ED risk.
On the one hand, frequent exposure to thin-ideal content on Facebook may
reinforce body-related concerns, eliciting cognitive biases that prioritize
attention to thin-ideal content on Facebook. On the other hand, people
with a higher risk of EDs may be more likely to use Facebook, and given
the association of EDs with selective attention for appearance-related
cues, Facebook use may further reinforce ED risk via this particular vulner-
ability. In an ideal world, one would be able to establish which came first,
but given real-world complexities, this may never be possible. But taking
a feedback perspective means that deciding between hypotheses becomes
less important. For any individual within a given sample, the starting point
for increased body dissatisfaction may be either Facebook or a pre-existing
vulnerability, or the two may be temporally and causally indistinguishable.
The point is that a positive feedback loop is initiated, and once it is in place,
its result is the predictable instability of a cyclical movement away from
the starting state. The system dynamics rather than the initial trigger are
of primary importance in understanding what is going on.
The field is thus opened up for taking a similar approach to studying the
effects of other forms of cultural activity on those with disordered eating—
and here, of course, I want to talk about fiction-reading.
As an easy point of departure, we could make the same basic claims about
fiction-reading as Cohen and Blaszczynski do about Facebook use: exposure
to materials that deal with body-related phenomena activates or reinforces
an over-concern with one’s own body, which in turn reactivates attentional
biases towards body-related stimuli, which makes people seek out or notice
such materials preferentially to others, which worsens the over-emphasis
on the body. There are bound to be important differences here between the
picture-dominated social media and the wholly linguistic nature of most
adult fiction; in particular we might expect imaginative responses, includ-
ing mental imagery, to be elicited in very different ways (Troscianko, 2013,
Emotional state
Thought patterns
Bodily sensations
Bodyweight
F E E D B A C K I N R E A DI N G A N D DI S OR DE R E D E AT I N G [ 177 ]
(forced-choice) and qualitative (free-response) data. Other findings from
the data will be set out elsewhere (Troscianko, in preparation), but here
I want to concentrate on the free-response data and the evidence they pro-
vide for the role of feedback in the relations between disordered eating and
fiction-reading.
The data I will be presenting come from responses to a number of sur-
vey questions in which respondents were invited to elaborate on previous
forced-choice answers. The questions divide into three types.
One sequence of questions concerned the potential helpful or harm-
ful effects of reading in general. Having answered a series of forced-choice
questions on this topic (for example, indicating which of a list of possi-
bilities fitted their experiences of finding books helpful or harmful, like
‘Letting you see your eating disorder through someone else’s eyes’ or
‘Causing you to reflect obsessively on your eating and/or exercise habits’),
respondents were asked to ‘Please list any authors and/or titles of books
that have affected you in the ways described in the previous question, and
please briefly specify which book had which effect.’
Another sequence concerned the effects of reading on general mood, self-
esteem, feelings about your body, and diet and exercise habits. The questions
were asked once with respect to fiction about EDs and then repeated with
respect to ‘your preferred type of other fiction’ (the type which respondents
usually read, chosen from a list including genres like fantasy fiction, roman-
tic fiction, suspense/thriller, etc.). After each sub-section respondents were
given the chance to elaborate on the forced-choice answers with a general
prompt: ‘If you wish, please provide more details about [the change to your
eating and/or exercise habits] after reading [fiction about eating disorders]
here (including authors and/or titles if applicable)’.
Lastly, at the end of the survey we asked respondents, ‘Finally, is there
anything else you would like to share about your reading habits or how they
relate to your mood, eating, exercise habits, or similar? If so, please feel
free to use the space below.’
Responses to these three question types—which constitute all the open-
ended questions we asked—are included in the analysis that follows, which
takes the form of a search of all responses for the presence of descriptions
of feedback of any kind. Respondents were primed to employ particular
words and phrases (‘helpful’, ‘harmful’, ‘how you feel about your body’,
etc.), and were encouraged to think about possible causal relationships
between mental health and reading (‘affect’, ‘effect’, ‘change’, ‘improve’,
‘worsen’, etc.). However, at no point were they prompted specifically to
think about the more complex kind of causality manifest in feedback loops
either positive or negative. All indications that such feedback might be in
general
F E E D B A C K I N R E A DI N G A N D DI S OR DE R E D E AT I N G [ 179 ]
5. Reading → exacerbation of ED → negative self-assessment of self
for letting this happen → exacerbation of ED [] Makes me obsessive
and competitive and pushes me further into my eating disorder making me
feel inferior.
6. Reading → lower self-esteem and/or increased shame/embarrass-
ment → exacerbation of ED → more reading about EDs [] Can’t
really answer this. Most reading on eating disorders, factual or othrwise,
lowers my self-esteem. I’m so embarrassed to be reading about it that I don’t
let anyone see me with a book about eating disorders—i hide them.
7. Reading → worsened mood → worsened self-esteem/wellbeing
→ exacerbation of ED → worsened mood [] I tend not to read any-
thing that I know will negatively affect my mood, as this could then have a
knock-on effect on my eating habits or general self-esteem and wellbeing. So
I usually pick thoughtful but uplifting fiction. I also read a lot of non-fiction
on things such as animals, travel, anything that I can focus on. Since my
negative experience of reading fiction about an eating disorder (in Monkey
Taming by Judith Fathallah) I have avoided anything like this again for fear
of it triggering anything or just making me feel low.
8. Feel worse → read more → disengage from rest of life → feel worse
[] When I am having difficulty with my eating disorder I am more likely to
seek out stories about eating disorders, particularly short stories (published
or posted online) that glamourise eating disorders. I also spend more time
reading any fiction, often to the detriment of other aspects of my life, and
end up spending less time completing my academic readings or fulfilling my
role as an editor.
self-triggering
distraction
F E E D B A C K I N R E A DI N G A N D DI S OR DE R E D E AT I N G [ 181 ]
sufferer in the book. I feel inadequate and worried that I’ve been complacent
and not previously realised quite how lazy, fat, etc i was being and that I
need to do more to meet the eating disorder’s required standards because the
book just changed the goalposts.
F E E D B A C K I N R E A DI N G A N D DI S OR DE R E D E AT I N G [ 183 ]
2. Low mood → thoughts about body → reading → distraction from
thinking about body → improved mood [] It’s a distraction so I’m not
thinking about my body. Also thinking about my body is connected to low
mood—I usually only do it when depressed. So cheering up means I think
less/less negatively about my body.
3. Temptation to restrict eating → reading → reduced anxiety, increased
likelihood of eating [] I am more likely to prepare myself a snack or a meal
after reading. Sometimes when I am tempted to restrict I read for half an
hour before a meal to get myself into the mood. Often I read at table as a way
to counter anxiety and distract myself from the fact that I’m eating.
4. In recovery → reading → compromised recovery [] Eating disorder fic-
tion always negativly effects my recovery. I should not read them but I always
do. I have this sick fascination that draws me into them. I like to live vacarisly
through the characters because I cannot have my eating disorder.
The first three of these forms of feedback offer concrete avenues for devel-
oping therapeutic strategies involving fiction-reading. The positive poten-
tial suggested by the most common negative feedback structure, the simple
progression from feeling bad to reading to feeling better—centring on
mood as the initiating and the altered variable—is supported by quanti-
tative data from this survey. An improvement to mood is reported by a
majority of respondents as a result of reading their preferred type of ‘other
fiction’ (i.e. fiction not about EDs): of the 465 respondents with a history
of disordered eating who reported having read other fiction (68 said they
had not, and 240 did not answer this question), 336 (72%) reported a posi-
tive effect on general mood resulting from it. This result combined with
the beneficial negative feedback loops identified here together testify to
the possibility of displacing the often dangerous positive feedback in the
relationship between EDs and reading by stability-promoting negative
feedback, perhaps particularly with mood as a mediator. This means that
reading may be seen not just to offer benefits where none would otherwise
be available, but even more significantly to offer the potential to replace
structurally dangerous effects of reading with structurally stabilizing
effects.
Further work along these lines might also start to identify more spe-
cific features of the observed feedback structures which are likely to have
a bearing on stability. Two such features are the sensitivity with which
changes in input are detected by the feedback system, and the aggressive-
ness with which input changes are adjusted for by the system ‘controller(s)’
through outputs from the system. There is always a trade-off between
the two: the more aggressive the controller (attempting to control for
If I read about someone who is very anorexic (either states weight or graphic descrip-
tion) I feel fat and ugly. When i was anorexic and the author weghed more than me
I felt good, but inevitably they would describe losing weight and weiging less than me,
and then I felt fat and ugly. Sometimes I feel inspired to lose weight. (see also the
example under loop type 15 above)
F E E D B A C K I N R E A DI N G A N D DI S OR DE R E D E AT I N G [ 185 ]
about eating, but thoughts about someone else not eating that have the
distorting effects. This is potentially all the more dangerous, because the
sufferer need not think directly about food, but may think about it at two
removes: about (1) someone else (2) not eating it. Of course, this might
happen just as easily with other real people as with fictional characters,
but as an activity where the immediate task demands of normal life are
suspended, reading does offer a very good opportunity for uninterrupted
comparisons, as well as for comparisons made on the basis of even more
inadequate evidence than in direct social encounters. ED fiction, of course,
also offers easy access specifically to protagonists who eat unhealthily, but
while the not-eating is in these texts pathological, not-eating can figure
more or less innocuously in all kinds of ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction, where
eating gets in the way of plot, conflicts with the evocation of a particular
type of character or situation, or is otherwise not the kind of subject mat-
ter deemed quite worthy of inclusion. When as a reader one has cognitive
biases resulting from an ED, even the harmless absence of mentions of
mealtimes could create a reliable supply of false feedback about characters
and their relation to one’s own body and eating habits.
F E E D B A C K I N R E A DI N G A N D DI S OR DE R E D E AT I N G [ 187 ]
2011) indicated that, contrary to what had previously been believed, prag-
matic expectations and inferences about discourse coherence can influence
low-level syntactic processing, contributing to disambiguation as quickly
as do lexical, morphological, or syntactic cues. At a higher level, aspects
of cultural knowledge as well as individual differences in goals, expertise,
and experience drive interpretive choices that may also affect strategies at
the level of comprehension if not decoding. In these senses, reading can
be seen as one manifestation of the predictive processing that has been
argued (by e.g. Clark, 2013) to structure cognition as a whole: very broadly
speaking, we make predictions about what we are reading, which are either
confirmed or disconfirmed by the text itself, causing the prior model to be
either strengthened or updated. We might think of ourselves as ‘Bayesian
readers’ who make optimal decisions based on the available information
(Norris, 2006).
This basic structure is obviously subject to variation depending on the
type of text. For example, Richard Walsh (2006; and personal commu-
nication, 19 January 2016) has argued that fictional and non- fictional
narrative can be understood as different forms of semiotic feedback loop
(see also Carney, 2008, on lyric and catastrophe theory, and Rinaldi,
2008, on dynamical systems in Petrarch’s love poetry). In what began as
a productive misreading of Walsh’s argument, I would suggest that we
can think of fiction as tending to create a positive feedback loop between
textual content and interpreted meaning, whereas non- fiction creates
negative feedback because it refers more straightforwardly to things
outside the text. In non-fiction, broadly speaking, the role of the lan-
guage is to point towards a real- world referent, such that readers’ inter-
pretive expectations are progressively narrowed down towards identity
with the textual references and their real- world referents. In fiction, by
contrast, where the essence of the textual communication is as much
significance as referentiality (the ratio, insofar as it can be categorically
established at all, will depend on genre), more noise is present in the
system. Here, the reader is more likely to include a wider set of pos-
sible interpretations for every linguistic element, and the text is more
likely to encourage such interpretive openness; so convergence between
readerly expectations and textual reference does not necessarily occur
(see Figures 9.4a and 9.4b). The fictional structure would leave much
more space for the kind of highly filtered readerly engagement reported
by some survey respondents, driven as much by attitude as by the text
itself: Its hard to blame the books or the authord. I feel it’s more than your
ED screens out that information about pain and suffering and focuses on the
success, the control and power.
Recognition
Meow
Associations Furry
Mat
(b)
Goddess
Recognition Good/bad luck
Cheshire
Jabberwocky, grin
Associations Witches, broomsticks
Puss in Boots
Figure . (a) Text-interpretation feedback in non-fiction. The interpretive process and the
textual inputs are typically constrained and convergent. (b) Text-interpretation feedback in
fiction. Here both the interpretation and the textual inputs are more likely to be heteroge-
neous and therefore also divergent.
Alongside the specifics of text type, the nature of the reading situation
may also be expected to affect the probability of unstable positive feedback
developing in the reading process. If we consider the distinction between
solitary and group reading, for example, it is clear that the former allows
much more scope for interpretations that diverge from what is given in the
text to multiply unchecked, whereas the latter provides an inbuilt mecha-
nism for correction, or control, from the rest of the group; group discus-
sion, including perhaps criticism of a particular line of interpretation as
implausible or not supported by the textual evidence, can thus fulfil the
function of a feedback control mechanism. Where there is no such mecha-
nism, self-regulation is less likely, and ‘solipsistic interpretation and error’
more likely (Majkut, 2014). Similar considerations may apply to profes-
sional (traditional literary-critical, exegetical) reading versus reading for
pleasure. For scholarly readers, the pressures are primarily towards finding
readings that diverge from existing ones and are superior to them in detail
and ingenuity, skewing the selection pressure in favour of divergence from
textual reference. For recreational readers, the general aims of distraction
or escapism, or reading for plot, may encourage convergence between the
primary semantic associations of the words on the page and interpretive
possibilities that readers entertain. These kinds of factors, of course, make
designing experiments difficult, since even small changes in setting (test-
ing room versus living room, during the working day or in the evening) are
likely to be significant.
When it comes to the structures of fictional plot and fictional worlds,
Karin Kukkonen (2014) has suggested that a feedback model is needed
to account for their relationship with readers’ expectations, or predic-
tive models; readers may well find themselves with competing probabi-
listic models for a given fictional world, and ‘as readers move through
the narrative, they revise their beliefs about the shape of the fictional
world and (usually) get a progressively better grasp of its probabilities’
(p. 725), using any and all textual evidence at the fine grain of words and
phrases to the coarser grain of plot structure to contribute to the loop
between prior hypotheses and new observations. Fiction here differs
from the real world, and from non- fiction, in being designed expressly
‘to enable constantly new, unpredicted observations and thus reconfig-
ure the probabilities of the fictional world’ (p. 725).
Also importantly for our purposes here, this kind of model makes space
not just for narrowly ‘intellectual’ inference but also for embodied emo-
tional responses and the wider patterns of appraisal they contribute to,
whether directly plot-related emotions like suspense and surprise, or the
F E E D B A C K I N R E A DI N G A N D DI S OR DE R E D E AT I N G [ 191 ]
expected’—is sent repeatedly by direct pharmacologic action, bypassing
the usual controls that compare the current circumstance with prior expe-
rience (Hyman, 2007). The short-circuiting is not as extreme in restrictive
EDs as in most drug use, but the overlearning and overvaluation that are
lastingly inscribed through misweighted prediction errors have similar
implications for how we think about the relationship between interpreta-
tion and mental health.
We can understand the excessive significance that may be given to par-
ticular aspects of a text—like the body size or shape of the protagonist, for
example—as part of a complex series of feedback loops that structure all
elements of the reader’s interaction with the text, from the decoding and
semantic processing of the words on the page or screen, to the engage-
ment with plot, character, and genre, to the contextual effects of physical
and psychological state, motivations and intentions, mood, and setting.
Acknowledging the power of feedback for both good and ill at the many
contact points between reading and mental health can help us understand
and perhaps ultimately prevent or treat EDs more effectively. I hope to
have shown here how significant a contribution fiction-reading can make
to these feedback loops as a mediator of cultural causes and effects—some
common to other cultural forms, some specific to fiction. Unravelling the
details of this contribution, and developing new therapeutically valuable
models in which reading may act as a control mechanism to modulate feed-
back in beneficial ways, requires an ambitious cognitive literary science
able to talk and listen to literary studies, the medical humanities, psychol-
ogy and psychiatry, as well as disciplines more apparently distant like sys-
tems and control theory.
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Rethinking Heterophenomenology
Nagel concludes his 1974 article ‘What Is It Like to Be a bat?’ with specula-
tions about the possibility of establishing an ‘objective phenomenology’,
or a theory of what it is like to be a particular kind of creature based on
A N I M A L M I N D S A C R O S S DI S C O U R S E D O M A I N S [ 197 ]
the creature’s physiological structure, perceptual capabilities, behavioural
dispositions, and so forth. As Nagel puts it, ‘though presumably it would
not capture everything, its [objective phenomenology’s] goal would be to
describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form
comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences’ (p. 449).
Nagel further develops these ideas in his 1986 book The View from Nowhere.
In this study, Nagel seeks to make space for ineliminably subjective experi-
ences within a broadly naturalistic and scientific worldview. This project
leads to the following memorable formulation: ‘We will not know exactly
how scrambled eggs taste to a cockroach even if we develop a detailed
objective phenomenology of the cockroach’s sense of taste. When it comes
to values, goals, and forms of life, the gulf may be even more profound’
(p. 25).
By contrast, Dennett for his part suggests that there is no funda-
mental distinction between the way heterophenomenology plays out
in human‒human interactions, on the one hand, and in human‒non-
human interactions, on the other. As Dennett puts it in Consciousness
Explained, taking up Nagel’s central example, we can ‘rank order hetero-
phenomenological narratives for realism,’ rejecting those that assert or
presuppose
1. Uexküll’s idea of the Umwelt has been glossed by Evan Thompson (2007) as ‘an
animal’s environment in the sense of its lived, phenomenal world, the world as it pres-
ents itself to that animal thanks to its sensorimotor repertoire’ (p. 59).
Not only does this line of thinking further the argument that ascriptions
of subjectivity (both within and across the species boundary) should be
viewed as embedded in and shaped by particular kinds of contexts rather
than as singular, one-off attributions; what is more, James’s and Shapiro’s
work, like Gallagher and Hutto’s, suggests that despite Dennett’s critique of
A N I M A L M I N D S A C R O S S DI S C O U R S E D O M A I N S [ 199 ]
what he calls the ‘Cartesian Theater’ model of consciousness,2 his approach
reveals a residual mind‒body dualism, which involves a detached figuring
out of rather than a cognizant co-involvement with the postures and move-
ments of bodies, non-human as well as human.
As these considerations suggest, in any culture a range of contexts—or
what I will go on to describe in more detail as discourse domains—shape
acts of mental-state ascription across as well as within the species bound-
ary. Heterophenomenology, in this sense, is a cover term for a whole ecology
of ascriptive practices; this wider ecology needs to be taken into account in
characterizing human‒animal interactions and attributions of intentions,
emotions, volitions, and other mental states and dispositions across species
lines. Thus, again using the example of companion animals such as dogs,
Noë (2009) notes that although it is possible to treat a dog in biophysical
terms as a merely mechanistic locus of conditioned response, ‘if one is to
enter into the kind of relationship of cooperation and companionship that
characterizes our actual relations with dogs, one must leave the standpoint
of mechanism behind and instead view the dog as … a thinking being’
(p. 37). Stating the point in even starker terms, Noë writes, ‘There are two
fundamentally different ways of thinking about things. … From within one
perspective, it is impossible to doubt the mind of others. From within the
other, it is impossible to acknowledge it’ (p. 39). Here, rather than opting for
one or the other polarities of legible versus illegible animal minds, Noë sug-
gests that this dichotomy itself emerges from a larger ecology of ascriptive
practices, ranging from those in which animal subjectivity is blocked out as
a non-factor to those in which particularized, prolific ascriptions of mind to
non-human others are not only possible but mandated.
Crist (1999) reveals an equally diverse ecology of mind-ascribing prac-
tices in her investigation of changing patterns in scientific discourse about
animal behaviour from the 19th to the 20th centuries. Crist focuses on the
contrast between the vernacular language of action used by analysts such
as Charles Darwin and the French naturalist Jean-Henri Faber, on the one
hand, and the technical terms used by ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz
and Nikolaas Tinbergen, on the other hand. As Crist puts it,
grasped in the ordinary language of action [where animals are the subject of
verbs such as see, feel, pursue, etc.], knowledge of animal behavior is oriented
2. For Dennett (1991) the Cartesian Theatre model assumes that specific subsystems
of the mind/brain (e.g. those bound up with perception, long-term memory, and plan-
ning) come together in some ‘central thinking area’, ‘a Cartesian Theater, a place where
“it all comes together” and consciousness happens’ (p. 39).
From Heterophenomenology
to Narratology (and Back Again)
A N I M A L M I N D S A C R O S S DI S C O U R S E D O M A I N S [ 201 ]
Figure . A continuum of modes of speech and thought presentation (based on Leech
and Short, 2007; Toolan, 2001)
3. See Herman (2016) for a cognate discussion of narratological and stylistic research
on speech and thought presentation vis-à-vis questions of ‘mind style’ (Fowler, 1977)
and related phenomena in animal narratives.
(1) For days Cuillin [the last surviving white-tailed eagle in Britain] had
remained at a stance on the high cliffs at the easternmost part of the Shetland
Islands, facing the dark sea. She had groomed, she had stared, she had hunted;
now another dawn had come, and she knew there could be no further delay or
excuse. … How vast and grey the sea looked, how treacherous its swells and
dark places, how fearful the day! … She flew at 350 feet, and within an hour the
coast-bound fulmar were behind her and she was alone over the sea. It stretched
ahead, frighteningly vast, and she could only close her mind to what lay behind
her, and commit herself to its care. … when the first bout of real tiredness hit
her … she found her altitude sinking down to less than 200 feet. … A spar of
driftwood. A dead cormorant … too far out!
Horwood, 1982, pp. 45‒46
(2) As we began to look at all corvids with new interest, we saw Chicken [a rook
rescued by Woolfson’s daughter] do as the corvids around us did. In time, we
could recognise the complex series of movements of body, wings and feathers
that told of mood and inclination. … We began to discern her state of mind from
her stance, her walk, her feathers, to know that, when going about her day-to-day
business, untroubled and busy, the head feathers would be smoothed to her skull,
her auricular feathers (the panels of feathers by the sides of her head that cover
the openings that are her ears) flattened, with no ‘eyebrows’ or ‘ears’ visible—
the raised head feathers that indicate alternations of mood—no raised, irritated
crown of Dennis the Menace feathers around the top of her head, a posture that
indicates surprise, alarm, anger. Annoyance or some other stimulus, we saw,
could bring this about instantly; when teased, or crossed in any way, she’d fluff
her feathers, lower her head, adopt an aggressive stance, her leg feathers bagged
out and full.
Woolfson, 2008, pp. 72‒73
A N I M A L M I N D S A C R O S S DI S C O U R S E D O M A I N S [ 203 ]
narration into narrative report of thought act (‘she knew there could be no
further delay or excuse’), as Cuillin prepares to make her long, difficult flight
from Scotland to Norway. The exclamation mark that concludes the third
sentence flags this material as free indirect thought; modelling the frightful
aspect of the sea as it appears to the eagle, the succession of ‘how’ clauses
(‘How vast and grey’, etc.) evoke the animal’s landscape of consciousness
(Bruner, 1990), even as they simultaneously project the landscape of action
through which the bird must make its way. After a resumption of scene-
setting narration (‘She flew at 350 feet …’), the use of the adverbial phrase
frighteningly vast reintroduces the eagle’s emotional state and frames the
following further narrative reports of thought acts by the bird. Then, in the
concluding lines of the excerpt, Horwood uses the ascriptive method posi-
tioned rightmost on the scale in Figure 10.1: the italicized phrase too far out
with its attendant exclamation mark can be glossed as an instance of free
direct discourse. Here the narrative creates the sense that Cuillin’s surprise
at the cormorant’s atypical location, instead of merely colouring the narra-
tor’s presentation of events as it would in free indirect thought, manifests
itself directly on the page, maximally free of narratorial mediation.
By contrast, passage (2), from Woolfson’s non-fictional account, lim-
its itself mainly to recounting the ‘complex series of movements of body,
wings and feathers that’—as Woolfson and her daughters learn to infer—
‘told of [Chicken’s] mood and inclination’. Here the narrative focuses not
so much on the rook’s subjectivity per se as on the process by which her
human observers construct inferential pathways leading from the bird’s
bodily performances to hypotheses about her mental states and disposi-
tions. The passage recounts how Woolfson and her family initially used
a comparison set of corvids to identify salient behavioural patterns in
Chicken’s comportment and then derived, on the basis of repeated obser-
vations, translations of those patterns into subjective states—and vice
versa. Thus, rather than projecting Chicken as experiencing equanimity,
surprise, anger, annoyance, and so on, Woolfson’s account centres on the
process of familiarization through which such projections may become
possible over time. Passage (2) therefore remains positioned at or near the
leftmost end of the scale in Figure 10.1; it recounts how inferences concern-
ing avian thought acts or emotional states might be arrived at, rather than
directly ascribing those subjective states via techniques situated further to
the right on the scale.
Do passages (1) and (2) therefore support that argument that
genre— the categorization of a text as fictional or non- fictional—is the
main determinant of the relative richness and detail of mental- state
ascriptions to animals in narratives? Here I seek to push back against
(3) Nat [du Maurier’s protagonist] hurried on. … As he jumped the stile [lead-
ing to his family’s cottage], he heard the whir of wings. A black-backed gull dived
down at him from the sky. It missed, swerved in flight, and rose to dive again. In
a moment it was joined by others, six, seven, a dozen, black-backed and herring
mixed. … Covering his head with his arms he ran towards the cottage. They kept
coming at him from the air, silent save for the beating wings, the terrible flutter-
ing wings. He could feel the blood on his hands, his wrists, his neck. Each stab
of a swooping beak tore his flesh. If only he could keep them from his eyes. …
They had not learnt yet how to cling to a shoulder, how to rip clothing, how to
dive in mass upon the head, upon the body. But with each dive, with each attack,
they became bolder.
du Maurier, 1952/2004, pp. 19‒20
(4) He [the male peregrine falcon] flew fast, banking narrow turns, winding in
steep spirals, wings lashing and quivering. Soon he was high above me. He could
see the hills sinking down into the shadowed valleys and the far woods rising all
around, the towns and villages still in sunlight, the broad estuary flowing into
blue, the grey dimness of the sea. All that was hidden from me was shining clear
to his encircling eye. … He was desperate with the rage of the hungry hawk. …
Searing through the sky, the hawk in torment saw the land beneath him work
and seethe with birds and come alive. Golden plover broke their wild cries
A N I M A L M I N D S A C R O S S DI S C O U R S E D O M A I N S [ 205 ]
along the green surface of the lower air. The peregrine hissed among them like a
burning brand.
Baker, 1967, p. 150
5. Passages such as the following mirror Woolfson’s method in passage (2), where
the emphasis is less on the bird’s subjective experiences than on how bodily structures
and performances can be interpreted to generate hypotheses about what it might be
like to be a peregrine: ‘The whole retina of a hawk’s eye records a resolution of distant
objects that is twice as acute as that of the human retina. Where the lateral and bin-
ocular visions focus, there are deep-pitted foveal areas; their numerous cells record a
resolution eight times as great as ours. This means that a hawk, endlessly scanning the
landscape with a small abrupt turn of his head, will pick up any point of movement; by
focussing upon it he can immediately make it flare up into larger, clearer view’ (Baker,
1967, p. 35).
A N I M A L M I N D S A C R O S S DI S C O U R S E D O M A I N S [ 207 ]
kinds of reasons. Clearly, different sorts of ascriptive practices will be
deemed appropriate and warranted across these different domains: there
is a marked contrast between attributing specific intentional and volitional
states to a companion animal in the context of a familiar play ritual, on
the hand, and ascribing particular subjective experiences to now-extinct
animals based on the fossil record, on the other.
This last example allows me to home in on the concept of discourse
domains using other descriptive terms. Discourse domains codify or at
least organize more or less distinctive sets of assumptions concerning
what sorts of experiential worlds are available to the various kinds of
beings taken to populate the world.6 Such domains correspond, in other
words, to sectors within a larger ecology of mind-ascribing practices,
with each sector being distinguished by its own constellation of ascrip-
tive norms. In turn, these norms bear, in a top-down manner, on the
strategies used to present—and interpret—species of mind in narrative
contexts, whether fictional or non-fictional. For example, in a discourse
domain marked by an emphasis on the biophysical bases for human and
non-human behaviour, ascriptions of subjectivity will remain severely
curtailed, within as well as across the species boundary and in both fic-
tional and non-fictional accounts. Hence the ready traffic between behav-
iourist paradigms in psychology and foundational work in ethology in the
mid-20th century. Hence, too, the way both fictional and non-fictional
narratives can make use of the technique that Genette (1980) originally
termed external focalization. In this mode, exemplified in texts ranging
from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’ to
bedside shift reports by nurses and sailors’ log books, the narrative dis-
course is largely stripped of explicit references to agents’ subjective states
and experiences.
If domains of this sort profile human and non-human behaviour as rela-
tively event-like, and thus as subject to language games centring on concepts
such as ‘cause, law, fact, explanation’, other domains profile behaviour in
terms of actions more than events, and hence as subject to language games
centring on ‘projects, intentions, motives, reasons for acting, agents, and
so forth’ (Ricoeur, 1991, pp. 132‒33; for a fuller discussion of this con-
trast vis-à-vis animal narratives, see also Herman, in press). Compared
with discourse domains foregrounding what might be called the register
6. I write ‘more or less distinctive sets of assumptions’ here to leave room for possi-
bilities (discussed later) for overlapping, interacting, and emergent domains, and also
for domains governed by competing, sometimes contradictory norms for mental-state
attribution.
A N I M A L M I N D S A C R O S S DI S C O U R S E D O M A I N S [ 209 ]
A culture’s ascriptive practices Narratives
All representational
modes in domain
Nonfictional
genres
Fictional
genres
Narratives featuring
nonhuman animals
(5) That first night Lassie travelled steadily. Never before in her five years of
life had she been out alone at night. So there was no training to help her, only
instinct.
But the instinct within her was keen and alert. Steadily she followed
a path over the heather- clad land. The path filled her with a warm satis-
faction, for it was going south. She trotted along it confidently and
surely.
At last she reached a rise and then, in a hollow below, she saw the dim shapes
of farm buildings. She halted, abruptly, with her ears thrown forward and
her nose trembling. Her magnificently acute senses read the story of the habita-
tion below as clearly as a human being might read a book. … She started down
the slope warily. The smell of food was pleasant, and she had gone a long time
without eating.
Knight, 1940/1981, p. 96
(6) When Tuesday [focused] on my face, I saw a sincerity in his dark brown eyes
I hadn’t suspected. This dog was handsome. He was intelligent. But he was also
deep and emotional and hurting at the core. …
We stared at each other for a few seconds, and I could tell Tuesday was check-
ing me out, assessing the situation. He wasn’t timid. And he wasn’t selfish.
Something about the softness in his eyes told me Tuesday craved a relation-
ship, but he was too smart to fawn just because somebody handed me his leash.
I didn’t know why he was wary. I didn’t know he was sensitive. And needy.
A N I M A L M I N D S A C R O S S DI S C O U R S E D O M A I N S [ 211 ]
Figure . Key to the annotation system used for excerpts (5) and (6).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
A N I M A L M I N D S A C R O S S DI S C O U R S E D O M A I N S [ 213 ]
attribution in narratives, the patterns of ascription used in individual sto-
ries can reciprocally impinge on discourse domains, and potentially reca-
librate normative assumptions about species of minds—for instance, by
promoting a shift from the register of events to the register of actions to
account for humans’ relationships with particular (kinds of) animals. Thus
Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 2013 documentary film Blackfish, which links the
deaths of several animal trainers to the treatment of killer whales kept in
captivity at marine mammal parks maintained by the SeaWorld corpora-
tion, has contributed to the call for legislation to free the whales, on the
grounds that current practices violate the US Constitution’s prohibition
of slavery. This example underscores the need to develop a multi-scale,
and multi-directional, approach to the issues under discussion—one that
explores not only the top-down normative effects flowing from cultural
ontologies to discourse domains to ascriptive acts found in particular texts,
but also the way storytelling practices can themselves ‘reset’ default norms
for understanding animals and human‒animal relationships, incremen-
tally reshaping cultural ontologies in the process (Herman, in press).
Even more broadly, my analysis raises a number of the wider-scope
questions that will need to be addressed in future work: What forms of
relatedness are made possible by ontologies in which an expanded com-
munity of selves extends beyond the species boundary? And how are these
transhuman networks of affiliation figured in fictional texts, non-fictional
discourse on animals, the storyworlds of cinema, narratives for children,
and other storytelling modes? How do the attested characteristics of par-
ticular species, and the relative (in)frequency of humans’ interactions with
the members of those species, affect allocations of possibilities for trans-
human subjectivity in narrative contexts? To what extent can existing
paradigms for narratological analysis capture forms of cross-species rela-
tionality, as they manifest themselves in the structures of narrative dis-
course, and to what extent will new, transdisciplinary modes of inquiry be
required to develop what might be characterized as a narratology beyond
the human? How, in turn, might the concepts and methods that emerge
from such a narratology bear on ways of understanding humans’ place in a
more-than-human world?
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Snow, C. P. (1998). The two cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Toolan, M. (2001). Narrative: A critical linguistic introduction (2nd ed.). London:
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Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998). Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism.
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Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S.
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Woolfson, E. (2008). Corvus: A life with birds. London: Granta.
Embodied Dynamics
in Literary Experience
R AYMOND W. GIBBS JR .
INTRODUCTION
I wish I could spill forth the wisdom of twenty years of reading and writing
poetry. But I am not sure I can. …
And now it’s like I’m on some infinitely tall ladder. You know the way that old
aluminum ladders have that texture, that kind of not-too-appealing roughness
of texture, and that kind of cold gray color? I’m clinging to this telescoping lad-
der that leads up into the blinding blue. The world is somewhere very far below.
I don’t know how I got here. It’s a mystery. When I look up I see people climbing
rung by rung. I see Jorie Graham. I see Billy Collins. I see Ted Kooser. They’re all
clinging to the ladder, too. And above them, I see Auden, Kunitz. Whoa, way up
there. Samuel Daniel, Sara Teasdale, Herrick. Tiny figures clambering, clinging.
The wind comes over, whssssew, and it’s cold, and the ladder vibrates, and I feel
very exposed and high up. Off to one side there’s Helen Vendler, in her trusty
dirigible, filming our ascent. And I look down and there are many people behind
me. They’re hurrying up to where I am. They’re twenty-three-old energetic
climbing creatures in their anoraks and goggles, and I’m trying to keep climbing.
But my hands are cold and going numb. My arms are tired to tremblement. It’s
freezing, and it’s lonely, and there’s nobody to talk to. And what if I just let go?
What if I just loosened my grip, and fell to one side, and just—fffshhhooooow.
Let go.
Would that be such a bad thing?
As my eyes darted along these lines of text, my mind and heart seem-
ingly exploded with ideas, memories, feelings, and even new understand-
ings, all related to my past, present, and future life. I recalled my time as a
house painter, many decades ago, when I knew all too well the sensations
of being high up on an old, grey, aluminium ladder, feeling the wind blow
around me, sensing the cold, being gripped by loneliness, and wondering
how I got there and what I should do both in that immediate present and
in my life overall. Yet I also knew something of the poets mentioned in this
passage, having read some of their poems. I laughed aloud when seeing
that the famous American literary critic Helen Vendler, whose books I have
read, was sitting ‘in her trusty dirigible’ while ‘filming our ascent’. This brief
image perfectly captured Vendler’s role as a prominent observer, and ana-
lyst, of the ever-changing world of poetry.
But I also immediately recognized that this passage spoke to me about
my own present preoccupations as a busy academic. Too often I also feel
overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work I have committed myself to
doing: articles and books to write, journals to edit, professional talks to
give, teaching, burdensome administrative tasks, and so forth. To be com-
pletely honest, there are moments when I am paralysed by all that I have to
do and feel as if I too were stuck alone on the path of my life’s journey. And
the thought sometimes occurs to me: what if I too simply ‘just loosened my
grip, and fell to one side, and just—fffshhhooooow. Let go’? Indeed, ‘would
that be such a bad thing?’ My understanding of this possibility, an option
I both fear and welcome, was not an abstract realization, but something
that I, while in the immediate act of reading, imagined in an embodied
manner. I felt myself letting go of the ladder, again similar to ones I have
The scientific study of literary reading has traditionally focused on naïve read-
ers’ first-time pass through, and quick comprehension of, brief segments of
text, usually artificially constructed for experimental purposes. For the most
part, these studies try to capture something about what people ordinarily
do when encountering literary works, especially in regard to the fast-acting
unconscious processes which give rise to more conscious meaning products.
Yet the empirical turn in literary studies over the last few decades has brought
forth different findings related to a diverse array of reading experiences, rang-
ing from speeded interpretations of smaller text passages to slower, more
reflective, analyses of fiction and poetry. For example, one model of emo-
tion in literary reading, based on research and theory from cognitive science,
describes how different stages in reading, ranging from pre-reading to read-
ing, post-reading, and even non-reading, are influenced by various affective,
E M B O DI E D D Y N A M I C S I N L I T E R A R Y E X P E R I E N C E [ 221 ]
cognitive, and embodied factors (Burke, 2011). This ‘literary reading loop’
model, as Michael Burke calls it, has been applied to characterizing people’s
experiences of ‘disportation’, such as felt tension, felt motion, and release,
at varying moments during emotional acts of reading, especially at literary
closure. The text that participants read in a key study for this research pro-
gramme was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925/2000).
Not surprisingly, many literary scholars voice strong reactions against
these developments. According to many scholars, studying naïve readers,
such as college students who participate in experimental studies, has lit-
tle bearing on the expertise, and even connoisseurship, brought to bear
when literary critics explicate what texts mean and aesthetically provoke.
After all, ordinary readers do not possess the tremendous knowledge and
experience that trained literary scholars bring to any interpretive proj-
ect. Literary scholars do not aim to find ‘normative’ or ‘correct’ or ‘typical’
interpretations of texts, but create unique readings that are informed by
emotional, aesthetic, historical, cultural, and political concerns. As is seen
in debates within the art world over the rise of behavioural and neuroscien-
tific studies of visual art works (Massey, 2009), literary scholars often pre-
sume that an interpretive gap exists between what ordinary readers do and
the beginnings of their own personal literary analyses. Literary critics are
human beings too, stuffed with the same cognitive structures possessed by
naïve readers. Still, literary scholars have special skills that make their own
readings special and divorced from what ‘ordinary’ people do when they
encounter literature.
Is it possible to reconcile the scientific study of reading with the practice
of literary criticism? My primary claim is that almost all people imaginatively
project themselves into texts as a fundamental part of any act of linguis-
tic understanding. At the same time, the precise nature of these ‘embodied
simulations’ may differ, sometimes in very subtle ways, depending on the
background and experiences of the reader. This perspective asserts that there
are important commonalities between recreational and critical understand-
ings of literature, but that the ultimate products of embodied simulation
processes can vary considerably given variations in the texts read, the people
doing the reading, and their interpretive goals and motivations.
E M B O DI E D D Y N A M I C S I N L I T E R A R Y E X P E R I E N C E [ 223 ]
in texts. For example, studies on the ‘action-compatibility effect’ indicate
that people are faster to make comprehension responses for sentences like
‘John opened the drawer’ when they have to move their hands towards
their bodies to push a comprehension button than when they have to
move their hands away from their bodies (Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002).
The reverse pattern of results was observed when people heard sentences
implying movement away from the body, such as ‘John closed the drawer’.
Once again, people interpret sentences by imagining themselves engaging
in the very actions specified in the language, which in turn directly influ-
ences their embodied comprehension task (e.g. moving their hand to push
a comprehension button).
Experimental studies also indicate that embodied simulations are con-
structed incrementally during speeded sentence comprehension. Consider
the following statement:
The implied direction of the key turn in this case is clockwise. In one exper-
iment, participants read through each sentence by rotating a knob after
each chunk of words, indicated by the slashes in the above example (Zwaan
and Taylor, 2006). Participants were instructed to turn the knob in either
a clockwise or a counter-clockwise manner. The result of interest here was
that people were faster to read and comprehend the verb ‘started’ when
they made their knob turns in a clockwise direction than when making
counter-clockwise rotations. People essentially understand the key verb
‘started’ by constructing an embodied simulation of the implied movement
the car driver had to perform in order to turn this key and start the engine.
This illustrates that people do not wait till the end of the sentence to ini-
tiate their simulation processes. Embodied simulation processes are not
optional, after-the-fact operations that emerge only after a sentence has
been read and understood, but are an immediate part of people’s moment-
by-moment processing of linguistic meaning.
Not surprisingly, people with different experiences and expertise may
vary in the ways in which they construct embodied simulations. For exam-
ple, languages like Arabic or Hebrew are written right to left; others, such as
English and Italian, are written left to right; while still others, such as tradi-
tional Chinese, are written top to bottom. When Italian or Arabic speakers
heard sentences like ‘The girl pushes the boy’, and then judged whether
a picture properly captured the event, these participants responded dif-
ferently (Maas and Russo, 2003). Arabic speakers, for instance, took less
time to judge a picture as correctly depicting the event when the girl was
E M B O DI E D D Y N A M I C S I N L I T E R A R Y E X P E R I E N C E [ 225 ]
like ‘tear apart the argument’ their reported imagery exhibited significant
embodied qualities of the actions referred to by these phrases (e.g. people
conceive of the ‘argument’ as a physical object that when torn apart no lon-
ger persists; Gibbs, Gould, and Andric, 2006). Having people perform, or
even imagine performing, a relevant bodily motion, such as tearing some-
thing apart, enhances the mental images constructed when understand-
ing metaphorical phrases. Most theories of verbal metaphor use would
never predict that people can experience these phrases in such detailed,
embodied ways.
One unique study examined whether hearing an embodied metaphor
influenced subsequent bodily behaviour (Gibbs, 2013). People stood and
looked at a tennis ball 40 feet away as they listened to a short story con-
taining the metaphorical statement ‘Your relationship was moving along
in a good direction’. One version of the story ended up with the relation-
ship continuing to be successful, but another told of the relationship dete-
riorating. After hearing one of these two stories, people were blindfolded
and told to walk out to the tennis ball, stopping when they imagined arriv-
ing at it. Analysis of people’s walking behaviours showed that they walked
significantly beyond the tennis ball when the context suggested a positive
relationship, but, on average, did not get to the tennis ball when hearing
about the unsuccessful relationship. This same difference in walking behav-
iours, however, was not obtained when people read the non-metaphorical
statement ‘Your relationship was very important’ in the same two sce-
narios. None of the walking behaviours observed were due simply to peo-
ple’s mood after hearing about either the successful or the unsuccessful
relationship. It appears, then, that people understand the metaphorical
statement by building an embodied simulation relevant to the conceptual
metaphor LOVE RELATIONSHIPS ARE JOURNEYS, such that they bodily
imagine taking a longer journey with the successful relationship than with
the unsuccessful one. On the other hand, it is more difficult to create a
detailed embodied simulation for a non-metaphorical statement such as
‘Your relationship was very important’.
Finally, neuroscientific work has also showed activation in the motor
system of participants’ brains when they read literal (e.g. ‘grasped the
stick’) or metaphorical (e.g. ‘grasped the idea’) statements (Desai, Binder,
Conant, Mano, and Seidenberg, 2011), which offers additional evidence
that embodied simulations may underlie our understanding of metaphori-
cal meanings.
These experimental findings are clearly contrary to traditional accounts
of metaphor understanding, which generally assume that the ultimate
aim is to transcend physical, body-based meaning to arrive at abstract,
E M B O DI E D D Y N A M I C S I N L I T E R A R Y E X P E R I E N C E [ 227 ]
meanings, including what the author was trying to communicate and
what they thought was the poem’s broader meaning. Finally, partici-
pants were asked to read the poem one more time, and write down what
they now thought the poem was about and what the poet was trying to
communicate.
Participants’ written interpretations for each three-line segment, as
well as the poem’s overall interpretations, were analysed for their con-
tent. There are several points worth making about these data. First, the
participants provided extremely few personal associations to the dif-
ferent segments, which clearly suggests that people primarily focused
on the poem’s, and the poet’s, messages. This shows that interpreting
poetry, at least in this experimental setting, is not a matter of radical
deconstruction, but is significantly constrained by what readers assumed
may be the poet’s message. Second, although readers mentioned mun-
dane events about the simple topics in the poem (e.g. they noted stand-
ing in one place deciding what to do next), they mostly offered both
metaphorical and allegorical interpretations (72% of all participants’
verbal protocols).
For example, evidence of a general metaphorical theme is seen in one
reader’s thoughts about the first three lines of Frost’s poem:
The traveler, in making this tough decision, contemplates for a long time which
path to follow. This could be interpreted as a struggle or challenge in one’s life,
where one must decide which is the better path or way to go.
Another reader gave a specific metaphorical reading of the same three lines,
while also articulating a broader understanding of the allegorical theme
implicit in the poem. As this reader wrote,
The two roads represent different pathways in life that one may or may not
choose to take. Frost is saying that as a singular entity, you may only have a
singular history which is comprised of the choices you have made. Different
choices, or trying to clear a new road between the two existing ones (indecision)
would result in a new person. The last line deals with the hesitancy to make a life
changing decision. Options must be weighed carefully.
E M B O DI E D D Y N A M I C S I N L I T E R A R Y E X P E R I E N C E [ 229 ]
LIFE IS A JOURNEY, an understanding achieved through embodied simu-
lation processes (Gibbs and Blackwell, 2012). People read the passage and
immediately wrote out their responses to a series of questions, including,
among others, the following:
Please describe what the ‘infinitely tall ladder’ refers to or represents. Ninety-
five per cent of the participants noted that the ‘infinitely tall ladder’ was
symbolic of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY conceptual metaphor. People did not
explicitly mention the conceptual metaphor per se, but remarked on spe-
cific aspects of the mapping of journeys onto life, as when they noted how
a journey consisted of a source (i.e. the beginning or lower parts of the lad-
der), a path (i.e. the ladder itself), and a goal (i.e. success, fame, the solution
to the problem of writing the introductory essay). These references were
often linked to specific bodily actions related to the various poets climbing
the ladder.
What does the poet mean when he says he is ‘clinging to the telescoping lad-
der’ and he does not know how he got there? Almost all of the participants’
responses alluded to the poet’s clinging to the ladder as evidence of inse-
curity over what he was doing as a poet/editor and his potential for ever
achieving fame as a poet. Thus, the poet being stuck on the ladder referred
to something larger than just his being unable to make progress in physi-
cally climbing the ladder.
Who is a more famous poet—Graham or Auden? Who is a more famous
poet—Kooser or Kunitz? Not a single person reported that they knew any of
the poets referred to in the passage. However, almost 80% of the partici-
pants recognized that the ladder represented the journey towards success
such that poets higher up on the ladder were older and more famous, with
those on the lower parts being younger and less famous. Most other people
gave answers that were consistent with this journey metaphor (i.e. poets
higher up were more famous), but were unable to articulate the reasons for
their decisions.
Who is Helen Vendler and why is she ‘filming our ascent’? None of the par-
ticipants reported having ever heard of Vendler. Still, 75% of participants
observed that Vendler was a critic or documentarian whose work it was
to observe and comment on the poets’ activities as they climbed the lad-
der. A few participants even wondered whether Vendler’s presence had any
influence on the different poets’ ladder climbings!
What would happen if the author ‘loosened his grip’ while on the ladder and
‘fell to one side’? People said that the poet wanted to give up trying to be
successful and stop trying to write the introductory essay. Some partic-
ipants felt that the poet’s thoughts about loosening his grip and falling
aside reflected his desire to get a different perspective on trying to write his
E M B O DI E D D Y N A M I C S I N L I T E R A R Y E X P E R I E N C E [ 231 ]
all differ depending on individuals’ unique bodily experiences, past and
present, as shaped by their knowledge and expertise.
Interpreting some poems, such as ‘The Road Not Taken’, or certain fic-
tion, such as the excerpt from The Anthologist, may be relatively easy to
do given that these are motivated by the single, recurring embodied met-
aphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. But are people capable of interpreting liter-
ary excerpts that prompt a mix of simulation processes? Let me report on
another of my own embodied experiences of literary interpretation that
speaks to this question.
When in high school, I had the pleasure of reading D. H. Lawrence’s
novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928/2013). This novel describes a young
married woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), who is married to a
handsome man named Clifford. Due to a war injury, Clifford has signifi-
cant physical (sexual) limitations, but is also emotionally distant from
Constance. Eventually, Constance’s frustration leads her to have a sexual
relationship with the family’s gamekeeper, Oliver. Much of the novel con-
cerns the class differences, and struggles, between Constance and Oliver,
and also Constance’s realization that she must experience sexual love to
be fully alive.
One notable passage in the novel describes a time when Constance and
Oliver make love, which is special because she finally feels tremendous
emotional and physical engagement.
And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving,
heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion,
and she was Ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass. Oh, and far down inside her
the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, fair-travelling billows, and ever, at
the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder, from the centre of soft
plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, touching lower, and she was
deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, the heavier the billows of her rolled
away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable
unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself away from herself
leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion … (p. 210)
Wow! This passage, which is replete with metaphors, was quite memorable
to me when I read it at age sixteen. I clearly recall my imaginative engage-
ment with the text, as I envisioned myself being ‘like the sea’, with all of its
‘rising and heaving’, and what it must be like to be Constance ‘as the plunger
went deeper and deeper, touching lower’ and more. I am not a woman, yet
even so, my teenage imaginative abilities permitted me to ‘be there’ as if
I too was an active participant in the characters’ sexual adventure.
‘How did he know that today was my birthday? Did you tell him?’
‘It was in the paper.’
‘What! How old did they say I was?’
‘Forty.’
She swore when I said this, a sudden, crude outburst. It was all the more
shocking because Molly almost never swears. There was the incongruity of hear-
ing such a thing uttered in that particular voice, and I realised that she was as
capable of drawing forth all the ugly power an oath might contain as she could
the beauty and tenderness of other words. ‘I never heard such nonsense in my
life. I’m only thirty-eight.’ (p. 219)
E M B O DI E D D Y N A M I C S I N L I T E R A R Y E X P E R I E N C E [ 233 ]
own sensory experiences of ‘what it must have been like’ to hear Molly’s
outburst and feel her displeasure.
It’s a view from the inside, not from the outside. The phrase ‘close reading’
sounds as if you’re looking at the text with a microscope from outside, but
I would rather think of a close reader as someone who goes inside a room and
describes the architecture. You speak from inside the poem as someone looking
to see how the roof articulates with the walls and the wall articulates with the
floor. And where are the crossbeams that hold it up, and where are the windows
that let light through.
Doing literary criticism ‘as someone who goes inside a room and describes
the architecture’ is, we might now say, creating embodied simulations
to discover what it is like to ‘speak from inside the poem’. Vendler then
describes her preferred method for doing literary criticism:
I don’t believe that poems are written to be heard, or as Mill said, to be over-
heard; nor are poems addressed to their reader. I believe that poems are a score
for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You
don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.
You stand behind the words and speak them as your own—so that it is a very
different form of reading from what you might do in a novel where a character
is telling the story, where the speaking voice is usurped by a fictional person to
whom you listen as the novel unfolds.
Whenever literary critics ‘are the voice in the poem’ and ‘stand behind the
words and speak them as [their] own’, they are engaging in exactly the
same general process of embodied simulation that scientific studies have
shown recreational readers construct during their readings of both non-
literary and literary language.
Various empirical studies now support the claim that reading and inter-
preting literature involves embodied simulation processes. These processes
operate at different levels of granularity depending on a host of factors
having to do with the particular language being interpreted, the goals and
motivations of the reader, and that person’s individual personality and his-
tory. Some embodied simulations may be fragmentary, or incomplete, as
when a person is casually reading a news report, while others may be more
complex and ‘fleshed out’, as when literary critics intensely study a particu-
lar text over a long period of time. But all embodied simulations are critical
to readers’ experience of the interior of text worlds, and to feeling trans-
ported into the thoughts and actions of others. Research on the embod-
ied dynamics of literary experience is still in its infancy, and there is much
to learn about the depth and quality of simulation processes in different
situational and personal contexts. Still, research shows that the embod-
ied simulations people typically, unconsciously create when engaging with
E M B O DI E D D Y N A M I C S I N L I T E R A R Y E X P E R I E N C E [ 235 ]
literary texts can alter readers’ personalities (Djikic and Oatley, 2014),
and their mood, feelings of empathy, and aesthetic liking (Lüdtke, Meyer-
Sickendieck, and Jacobs, 2014). These behavioural studies have all been
conducted with naïve readers, yet their results may still offer insights into
the practices of literary interpretation.
Reading and criticizing literature are not separate activities. Of course, the
motivations, goals, and expertise that anyone brings to reading literature may
differ. My argument, however, is that literary experiences of all types are fun-
damentally grounded in embodied simulation processes. Empirical support
for the embodied simulation hypothesis adds weight to the relevance of this
idea for understanding how literary critics often arrive at their sometimes
more idiosyncratic readings of what texts mean and implicate. It may be a
natural response, when hearing of scientific studies of literature, for literary
critics to reject these findings because they characterize ordinary, average, or
normative reading processes. But the scientific research essentially offers a
foundation from which unique interpretations of literature may arise.
Everyone may automatically engage in embodied simulation processes,
where people imagine themselves participating in the acts specified by
language. These simulation activities are not mere neural actions that are
not part of individuals’ meaningful experiences. Even fast-acting, uncon-
scious processing shapes people’s thoughts, understandings, and actions.
Nonetheless, the meaning products of those simulations clearly differ
according to a wide variety of personal and contextual factors. Recognition
of this fact—that similar psychological processes may create different
interpretive products—is critical to closing the gap between the scientific
study of literature and the scholarly practice of literary criticism.
REFERENCES
E M B O DI E D D Y N A M I C S I N L I T E R A R Y E X P E R I E N C E [ 237 ]
CHAPTER 12
I n the novel The Slippage (Greenman, 2013), William has taken his friend’s
young son, Christopher, to play in a park. Christopher attempts to fly
a kite, with indifferent results: ‘Every few minutes it went into irons and
came crashing back to the ground’ (p. 120). Still, on Christopher’s account,
the crashes don’t spoil his enjoyment: ‘ “I don’t mind,” Christopher said.
“It’s fun to get it going again” ’ (p. 120). While most readers will find this
scene charming, some will likely have specific recollections of their youth-
ful successes and failures with kites. Some, in fact, might feel inclined to
offer Christopher mental council about how kites might be best kept aloft.
In fact, moments later, William’s neighbour appears and gives some solid
advice, but William isn’t entirely grateful: ‘He was right, William knew,
but Christopher was having fun running back and forth’ (p. 121). In this
context, some readers will likely feel scolded had they offered comparable
mental advice.
We use this brief scene to support a claim that we expect not to be con-
troversial: readers’ accumulated memories have a substantial impact on
their narrative experiences. The aim of this chapter is to make that claim
concrete, by drawing upon theories and empirical research from cognitive
psychology. We wish, in particular, to characterize readers’ thoughts and
emotional responses as they engage with a text. We suggest that each read-
er’s experience is unique and that cognitive-psychological analysis can help
explain how those unique experiences emerge. Note that when we speak
of accumulated memories, we include readers’ own life events as well as
the knowledge they have acquired through their interactions with narra-
tive worlds. Also, we use the term readers for convenience. The processes
we outline affect people’s experiences of narratives across media and types
of telling.
In this chapter, we outline basic cognitive processes that make con-
tact with readers’ memory representations as their narrative experiences
unfold. We describe how these basic processes influence readers’ infer-
ences and judgements about narrative events. We suggest how these pro-
cesses shape readers’ participation in narratives, with a particular focus
on readers’ assessments of their similarity to characters with implications
for their experiences of empathy. Finally, we consider how these basic pro-
cesses affect readers’ individual reports of their transportation to narrative
worlds.
1. In their classic demonstrations, Meyer and Schvaneveldt (1971) showed that par-
ticipants made faster judgements about related words (e.g. bread, butter) than about
unrelated words (e.g. nurse, butter). The results suggested that exposure to the initial
word of the related pair made the second word more accessible in memory. For narra-
tive experiences, basic priming processes similarly change the accessibility of informa-
tion in memory (for a review, see Cook and O’Brien, 2015).
Eventually the broad walk descended into a tunnel that cut beneath a carriage
road. On the other side of the tunnel, a broad plaza of red brick curved along the
shore of a pond. In the middle of the plaza he saw what he took at first for an
enormous winged woman, floating above a foaming cascade of water. No, not a
woman—a sculpture of a woman, perched atop a pedestal. The water flowed into
a wide, shallow basin at her feet, and then into a pool that stretched almost the
width of the plaza.
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In the context of this passage, it is possible to invent a great variety of
readers who differ in their Central Park expertise. Some may treat the foun-
tain as pure invention, whereas others will have anywhere from sparse to
extensive personal memories of Bethesda Fountain. In addition, some of
those memories may reflect real-life encounters with the fountain, while
others may reflect indirect knowledge (e.g. from other narrative works). All
of this diversity will likely have an impact on how readers experience this
moment.
Readers’ knowledge also has an impact on the inferences they encode.2
We use the term inference to refer to information that readers repre-
sent and that was not explicitly stated in a text. Expertise changes the
inferences that readers encode. For example, in the baseball study, high-
knowledge individuals were more likely to produce accounts of the game
that included elaborations of the original text (Spilich et al., 1979). We
would expect that as they experience Ahmed’s encounter with the foun-
tain, readers with extensive Central Park knowledge would encode dif-
ferent inferences than would less knowledgeable peers. They might, for
example, supplement their mental model of the text by filling in visual
details of the fountain.
In fact, theories of discourse comprehension have focused extensive
attention on the particular inferences that readers encode as they experi-
ence a narrative. Such analyses are anchored by the claim that any text
permits an infinite number of inferences (Rieger, 1975). In that context,
theorists have been particularly interested in characterizing the inferences
that readers regularly encode through the operation of automatic pro-
cesses (i.e. without engaging strategic effort) (for a review, see McNamara
and Magliano, 2009). Gail McKoon and Roger Ratcliff (1992) originated an
influential theory now known as memory-based processing. This position,
which has obtained extensive empirical support, asserts that there are no
automatic processes unique to circumstances of text processing. Rather,
‘the only automatic processes readers bring to bear on text processing
are ordinary memory processes’ (Gerrig and O’Brien, 2005, p. 228). The
memory-based processing approach asserts that readers encode inferences
which are supported by information easily available from memory (McKoon
and Ratcliff, 1992). Information from earlier in the text will often be easily
available, ensuring that some of the inferences readers encode will be quite
2. We use the term encode throughout the chapter to mean ‘encoded into memory’.
This usage is standard within text processing research (e.g. ‘If a reader can be said to
have understood an inference, then the required information must have been available
during reading and the inference must be encoded into memory,’ McKoon and Ratcliff,
2015, p. 52).
R E A DE R S ’ L I V E S A N D N A R R AT I V E E X P E R I E N C E S [ 243 ]
have demonstrated that readers are able to learn quickly what counts as
normal in particular narrative worlds. For example, Mante Nieuwland
and Jos van Berkum (2006) had participants read a story in which a yacht
was undergoing psychotherapy. At first, participants responded to that
information with surprise (as indexed by their brain responses). However,
five sentences later participants were no longer surprised when the yacht
engaged in activities that typically require the subject to be animate. More
generally, research suggests that readers readily use their accumulated
knowledge of particular narrative worlds to adjust their expectations of
what counts as normal (Filik, 2008; Filik and Leuthold, 2008, 2013; Foy
and Gerrig, 2014). We suggest that, in this particular case, readers’ knowl-
edge specific to Louisa changes the sample of memories that will be most
accessible to automatic judgements of normality. Thus, as readers cast their
thoughts back to Louisa’s disappearance, they are likely to experience her
behaviour as more normal (for her) the deeper they get into the novel. In
fact, we speculate that responses among readers will generally show more
variability towards the beginnings of extended narratives than towards the
ends.
The concepts we have reviewed suggest why readers’ narrative expe-
riences will change as they revisit narrative worlds at different points in
their lives. To begin, readers can acquire new expertise. If, for example,
a reader makes a thorough visit to Central Park between readings of The
Golem and the Jinni (Wecker, 2013), the subsequent experience of relevant
passages (e.g. ‘a sculpture of a woman, perched atop a pedestal’, p. 104) will
likely be quite different. More generally, readers will accumulate abundant
new memory traces that will serve as the source of background knowledge
for comprehension. Depending on readers’ local life experiences, memory
traces will differ in accessibility from reading to reading. For example, a
reader who has undertaken a spate of kite flying just before re-reading The
Slippage will experience that scene with memories in revised resting lev-
els of accessibility. Thus, each reader’s automatic inferences are likely to
change over time as a function of the information that is easily available
in his or her memory. Finally, to the extent that judgements of normal-
ity rely once again on information that emerges from automatic memory
processes, each reader’s sense of what is normal is likely to change as life
events accrue.
Note here that the processes we have described operate almost entirely
outside of readers’ conscious awareness. That is, readers do not need to
expend strategic effort to encode inferences or make judgements of nor-
mality. As such, they will often have little awareness of how and why their
narrative experiences diverge from those of other readers.
Consider events in The Golem and the Jinni (Wecker, 2013) in which the
golem, Chava, has regained control after a fugue state in which she severely
battered a rogue for assaulting a friend. When Chava recalls her inability
to control her aggressive instincts, she decides that she must destroy her-
self: ‘It was a simple decision, quickly made. She couldn’t be allowed to
hurt anyone again’ (p. 312). In response to this moment, we suspect that
most readers will expend mental effort to dissuade Chava from carrying
out her plan. They might, for example, hear a mental voice crying out,
‘Don’t do it!’
These types of mental contents, which are an important component of
readers’ narrative experiences, are called participatory responses (Allbritton
and Gerrig, 1992). The concept of participatory responses follows from the
participatory perspective on narrative experiences. This perspective suggests
that readers encode the same types of mental contents they would encode
were they actual participants in the narrative events (Gerrig, 1993; Gerrig
and Jacovina, 2009). To create a taxonomy of participatory responses,
Matthew Bezdek and colleagues (2013) asked experimental participants to
speak aloud while they watched brief scenes from Hollywood films. They
counted participants’ productions as participatory responses only if those
productions included content that was not a repetition of plot details or
inferences based on those details. Participants often provided content with
great emotional intensity. For example, participants watched one scene in
which they believed that a girl would trigger an explosion if she answered a
ringing phone. Here is one participant’s verbal response:
R E A DE R S ’ L I V E S A N D N A R R AT I V E E X P E R I E N C E S [ 245 ]
authors asserted that viewers and, by analogy, readers encode participa-
tory responses with reasonable frequency.
Other research suggests that such responses affect how readers assimi-
late narrative events. For example, narratives often provide a clash between
what outcomes appear likely versus what readers would prefer to happen.
We see such circumstances in The Slippage (Greenman, 2013). William has
been put on leave because he has punched his boss. We suspect that most
readers would prefer that William not be fired, although the firing seems
highly likely. In experiments that captured these types of clashes, par-
ticipants found it difficult to assimilate outcomes that mismatched their
preferences (Rapp and Gerrig, 2002, 2006). For example, participants
took longer to indicate that they understood an outcome sentence when
that outcome was unwanted. Of course, most narratives allow readers to
develop diverse preferences. Matthew Jacovina and Richard Gerrig (2010)
demonstrated that readers’ particular responses helped predict the time
course with which they assimilated narrative outcomes. They asked par-
ticipants to indicate their preferences in advance of characters’ decisions.
Imagine, for example, that readers had officially weighed in before William
had punched his boss. Some readers would likely have endorsed the action
(because the boss is an insufferable fool); others would likely have advised
William to forgo the momentary pleasure of decking his boss. Jacovina
and Gerrig’s data indicated that participants read statements of outcomes
more slowly if those outcomes clashed with their particular preferences.
As we have revealed, William does in fact punch his boss. Ultimately, he is
fired. Jacovina and Gerrig’s results suggest that readers who were in favour
of William’s actions would find it more difficult to assimilate the informa-
tion that he had been fired.
These projects indicate that readers encode participatory responses, and
that those responses have lingering consequences. For example, when read-
ers have different outcome preferences, those individual differences affect
their reception of the subsequent narrative events (Jacovina and Gerrig,
2010). Some of those outcome preferences will arise, no doubt, from read-
ers’ own collections of memories. To expand on that point, we narrow our
focus to readers’ responses to characters. Fundamentally, readers may pre-
fer that William punch his boss or not as a consequence of how much they
empathize with him. To move towards a discussion of empathy, we begin
with a consideration of similarity.
In everyday social interaction, people’s judgements of similarity have
important consequences. For example, people often determine which
other individuals count as members of their in-groups and out-groups
based on similarity (Turner and Reynolds, 2003; Shkurko, 2015). People
S ( A, B ) = θ f ( A ∩ B ) − α f ( A − B ) − β f ( B − A ) ,
R E A DE R S ’ L I V E S A N D N A R R AT I V E E X P E R I E N C E S [ 247 ]
cannot be used to classify them. This feature, however, acquires consider-
able diagnostic value if the object set is extended to include legendary ani-
mals, such as a centaur, a mermaid, or a phoenix’ (Tversky, 1977, p. 342).
This diagnosticity principle predicts that the features which are most salient
in any given similarity judgement will change depending on the features
made salient by the other objects present. More generally, depending on
the context, different features will take on different weight.
The results of West and colleagues’ (2014) research on cross-racial inter-
actions exemplify aspects of this analysis. They demonstrated that only
particular types of common features (i.e. important information about
the self) have a functional impact on similarity. The experiment also dem-
onstrated a way in which assessments of similarity depend on context. In
circumstances of low self-revelation, the students’ responses were largely
dictated by the salient feature of race. However, circumstances of high self-
revelation increased the salience of common features and thereby made
race less salient.
We can now apply this analysis to a literary example. Consider the char-
acter Gabriel from A Nearly Perfect Copy (Amend, 2013). Gabriel is male and
in his mid-thirties. He is an artist who believes that his work is underap-
preciated. He is a Spaniard who feels cultural alienation among his Parisian
peers. All of these attributes could enter into the equation as common or
distinctive features to determine how similar readers feel to Gabriel. Quite
plainly, the features will count differently as common or distinctive for
different readers. In addition, as the novel unfolds, feelings of similarity
will likely change as the salience of features changes. For example, at one
moment in the novel, Gabriel offers very strong opinions about Damien
Hirst: ‘Of all the contemporary posers who seemed to have charmed the
establishment, Damien Hirst seemed the most vile, mercenary, talentless
of the bunch’ (p. 79). For readers who do not know that Damien Hirst is a
real artist (the novel also includes fictional ones), this moment might have
little impact on their assessment of similarity. However, readers with art
world expertise will likely find themselves somewhere on the dimension of
agreement versus disagreement with Gabriel’s sentiments. Thus, different
readers will experience this attitude as a common or distinctive feature.
For some it will be highly diagnostic whereas for others it will not have any
particular salience. This one moment—and the other myriad moments in
which Gabriel thinks, emotes, and acts—may have a dramatic impact on
how readers experience their similarity to him. Thus, it is possible to assert
in a general way that similarity affects readers’ narrative experiences with-
out being able to assert what features will matter most for any particular
reader’s experience of similarity.
R E A DE R S ’ L I V E S A N D N A R R AT I V E E X P E R I E N C E S [ 249 ]
responses to this possibility as a function, in part, of perceptions of their
own similarity to William and Emma. The Slippage narrates unhappiness in
both William’s and Emma’s marriages. For some readers, who perhaps have
had unfortunate relationships, this unhappiness will provide a context for
empathy, and allow tacit approval for an affair. Others will likely disap-
prove of the affair, no matter what the circumstances. Among that group,
some will likely have moral objections (i.e. affairs are unethical) whereas
others might have pragmatic objections (i.e. the lovers will likely be caught,
with disastrous consequences). As we suggested earlier, different readers
will encode participatory responses consistent with their preferences (e.g.
‘You deserve this!’ or ‘Bad idea!’).
In the event, William and Emma do undertake an affair, including a
tryst in the art studio of William’s brother-in-law, Tom. After the affair has
ended, Tom makes the correct inference that William has behaved inap-
propriately in his studio. Tom’s proximal realization is that William has
intruded into Tom’s private cache of art works, but that leads to a greater
truth: ‘How does a man come to be in a place like this, looking at things he
shouldn’t?’ He paused, as if at the top of a hill, and then started down it.
‘And not looking at them alone, either’ (p. 233).
We imagine that readers would assimilate this discovery quite dif-
ferently as a function of their prior commitments (Jacovina and Gerrig,
2010). For example, those who disapproved for moral reasons might expe-
rience pleasure at William’s anticipated distress (e.g. they might hear them-
selves thinking ‘I told you so!’). Those who approved might experience guilt
because they didn’t do enough to warn William away from his actions (see
Gerrig and Prentice, 1996).
In summary, we suggest that readers encode types of mental responses
that parallel those they would encode were they real participants in events.
We have illustrated how readers’ life events will influence their perceptions
of their similarity to characters by determining, for example, which attri-
butes are most salient. We have followed other theorists in accepting the
conclusion that similarity affects empathy (e.g. Keen, 2006, 2007; Hogan,
2011; see also Komeda, Tsunemi, Inohara, Kusumi, and Rapp, 2013). Our
extension is to cite Zaki’s (2014) larger theory of forces that change the
probability that readers will approach or avoid empathy. Finally, all these
forces help determine the content of readers’ participatory responses and,
therefore, the idiosyncratic properties of their narrative experiences. To be
clear, not all participatory responses require empathy. Readers may be able
to develop an understanding of villains’ emotional states and still diligently
root against them. We have focused on similarity and empathy in large part
because they are so well established in theories of readers’ responses.
TRANSPORTATION
R E A DE R S ’ L I V E S A N D N A R R AT I V E E X P E R I E N C E S [ 251 ]
demonstrated that self-reports of transportation were positively corre-
lated with the extent to which readers’ beliefs were changed in response
to narrative information. The more they were transported, the more read-
ers accepted the narrative’s conclusions. In fact, research using self-report
scales has yielded consistent evidence that greater transportation is associ-
ated with greater belief and attitude change as well as greater enjoyment
(e.g. Green, Brock, and Kaufman, 2004; Appel and Richter, 2010; Tal-Or
and Cohen, 2010; Murphy, Frank, Moran, and Patnoe-Woodley, 2011; van
Laer, de Ruyter, Visconti, and Wetzels, 2014). These data support the claim
that readers’ self-reports provide valid information about the qualities and
consequences of their narrative experiences.
We wish to describe how the factors we have explored could explain
individual differences in readers’ self-reports of transportation. To do so,
we will review empirical research on factors that affect transportation.
For example, Green (2004) had participants read a story that was about
a gay man attending a fraternity reunion. Readers who knew gay people
or had familiarity with fraternities reported higher levels of transporta-
tion. Green conjectured that readers with greater familiarity may have
been able to produce more vivid mental images of the situations. She also
suggested that familiarity could lead to greater motivation to engage with
the narrative. Finally, she argued that familiarity might provide more con-
tact with readers’ own memories. These theoretical constructs are consis-
tent with the perspective on individual differences that we have developed
here. However, there may be circumstances in which familiarity leads some
readers to become alienated from a text or a character. For example, when
Gabriel in A Nearly Perfect Copy (Amend, 2013) maligns Damien Hirst, read-
ers’ familiarity with Hirst may, as we suggested earlier, change their assess-
ments of similarity to Gabriel and, at the same time, affect the extent of
their immersion in the text. Thus, we agree that familiarity likely has an
impact on readers’ experiences of having been transported. We only won-
der whether that relationship is positive for all readers.
Readers’ reports of transportation are also influenced by their responses
to particular characters. The fourth season of the television programme
Desperate Housewives features a six-episode arc in which a central charac-
ter develops lymphoma. In an experiment involving women who regularly
watched the series, participants reported their involvement with the char-
acter by providing ratings of ‘how much they liked, how similar they were
to, how much they felt like they knew, and how much they would like to
be like’ the character (Murphy, Frank, Moran, and Patnoe-Woodley, 2011,
p. 416; see also Murphy, Frank, Chatterjee, and Baezconde-Garbanati,
2013). The data indicated that greater involvement with the character (with
CONCLUSION
R E A DE R S ’ L I V E S A N D N A R R AT I V E E X P E R I E N C E S [ 253 ]
differently, as a product of their own individual memories of kites, parks,
childhood, and adult authority. We declared as uncontroversial the claim
that individual memories matter. We have attempted to bolster that claim
by describing basic memory processes that act in a largely automatic fash-
ion to individuate readers’ experiences. We have seen how those processes
affect fundamental responses such as readers’ judgements of the normality
of characters’ behaviours and their similarity to those characters. Readers’
judgement of similarity, in turn, can affect the empathy they feel towards
particular characters. We have argued, in addition, that readers’ familiarity
with aspects of narrative worlds as well as, again, their similarity to par-
ticular characters will help determine the extent to which they are trans-
ported into those worlds. Thus, the specifics of readers’ lives help structure
their participation in narrative worlds to yield unique experiences.
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R E A DE R S ’ L I V E S A N D N A R R AT I V E E X P E R I E N C E S [ 257 ]
CHAPTER 13
DISTRUST OF FICTION
what seems unintelligible is how we could have similar reaction to the fate of
Anna Karenina, the plight of Madame Bovary, or the death of Mercutio. Yet we
do. We weep, we pity Anna Karenina, we blink hard when Mercutio is dying and
wish that he had not been so impetuous. (p. 69)
I propose four bases for a psychology of fiction: a theoretical base that fic-
tion is mental simulation, a developmental base of how fiction derives from
childhood play, an evidential base of effects of reading fiction on people’s
understandings of others, and a second kind of evidential base about the
kinds of changes that can occur to one’s sense of self from engaging with
fiction.
A Theoretical Base: Simulation
If one reads Aristotle’s (330 b.c.e./1970) Poetics with this in mind, and
substitutes ‘simulation’ for its usual translations of ‘imitation’ and ‘copy-
ing’, it becomes clear that it is mimesis as simulation with which the Poetics
is principally concerned. Although narrative does indeed have world-
reflecting purposes, arguably this second sense, of world-creation, is more
important (Oatley, 1999). Simulations do require a mental leap from the
world of day-to-day experience to that of created, imagined, worlds and
the emotions we might experience in them, but there is nothing paradoxi-
cal about that leap.
I am going to read you some little stories about things that will sound funny. But
let’s pretend that I am telling you all about another planet. Everything in that planet
is different. Okay, now I’m going to tell you the first story about that planet …
First they are pirates sailing on a search for treasure, then their ship is wrecked,
and they are attacked by sharks; they reach the safety of an island, and build a
house (under the table). What to eat and how to cook it are problems that are
ingeniously solved. Their elaborate adventure, their quickly solved disputes (are
they being attacked by sharks or by crocodiles?), their extended conversations
about what happens next—all are captured by our video camera in the corner
of the room.
‘I’ll be x’, said my daughter, naming one of the characters in the movie, which the
friends had watched before. ‘You can be y’, she said to the girl who sat next to
her. There was some discussion among the four girls, until each had chosen who
would be who. Then they watched the film. (p. 24)
Evidence on Understanding Others
In The Republic, Plato says that whereas a craftsman has knowledge (epis-
teme) and skill (techne), ‘the artist knows little or nothing about the subjects
he represents’ (602b). A Platonic commentary now might be that an actor
who plays a doctor in a television series knows nothing about medicine.
This may seem compelling until one thinks that medical series on television
What of the effects of reading on ourselves? Maja Djikic and I, with col-
leagues Sara Zoeterman and Jordan Peterson (2009), randomly assigned
people to read either Chekhov’s most famous story, ‘The Lady with the Little
Dog’, about a man who meets a lady at the seaside resort of Yalta and starts
an affair with her, or a control text that was a non-fictionalized version: a
report from a divorce court. The non-fictionalized control version was the
same length, had the same information, and had the same level of reading
difficulty. Readers rated it as just as interesting, though not as artistic as
Chekhov’s story. Before we asked participants to read the text, we admin-
istered the Big Five measure of personality, a standard test that assesses
the traits of Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness,
and Openness. We also asked people to rate how strongly they were feeling
on 10 emotions. After reading we administered these same two measures
again. As compared with those who read the control text, those who read
Chekhov’s story were found to experience small but significant changes in
their personality. The changes were not all in the same direction. Each per-
son changed in his or her own way. These changes were mediated by the
Chekhov knew that artistic literature was not about getting people to think
or feel in pre-planned ways. In a letter of 1888 to his friend and mentor
Alexei Suvorin (Hellman, 1955, p. 57), he wrote that there are two things
one must not mix up:
the solution of the problem and a correct presentation of the problem. Only the latter
is obligatory for the artist. In Anna Karenina and Onegin not a single problem is
solved, but they satisfy you completely just because all their problems are cor-
rectly presented. The court is obliged to submit the case fairly, but let the jury do
the deciding, each according to his own judgment. (emphasis in original)
In another letter, written two years later, Chekhov said that in his writing
he assumed that his readers would ‘add the subjective elements that are
lacking in the story’ (Yarmolinsky, 1973, p. 395).
To see whether our finding was not just peculiar to Chekhov’s story,
Djikic and I, with another colleague, Matthew Carland (2012), did another
experiment in which we asked people to read one of eight literary short
stories or one of eight literary essays. (The data set was the same as that of
the study by Djikic, Oatley, and Moldoveanu, 2013.) The stories included
Frank O’Connor’s ‘My Oedipus Complex’ and Jean Stafford’s ‘A Country
Love Story’. The essays included John Galsworthy’s ‘Castles in Spain’ and
Rabindrath Tagore’s ‘East and West’. As in our earlier experiment, we mea-
sured readers’ personality traits and emotions before and after they read
the text to which they had been assigned. We kept the stories as written,
but modified the essays by small amounts, to keep their sense but to ensure
that their average length and ease of reading was the same as for the sto-
ries. We had expected that people who read a piece of fiction would show
most change to their personalities, but the genre of the text—fiction or
non-fiction—did not make much difference. Those who read a story or
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
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Under Pressure
Norms, Rules, and Coercion in Linguistic
Analyses and Literary Readings
ALEXANDER BERGS
INTRODUCTION
For more than 25 years, linguists have studied the phenomenon of coer-
cion (or type-shifting), in which an apparent mismatch between linguistic
elements lies at the heart of a (new) reading for a given utterance, as in the
infamous examples (1) and (2).
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 281 ]
automatically and without objection interpret (1) as ‘She smiled in such
a way that she was given an upgrade’. In (2) the inanimate subject noun
phrase ‘the ham sandwich’ is disallowed by verbs such as want which
require an animate (agentive) subject. And yet, (2) is easily interpretable
(by the second waiter in the particular context) as ‘The customer who ate
the ham sandwich wants to pay’. Even though these are two examples
of clear mismatches, speakers/hearers experience no trouble in finding
plausible readings for both utterances (though one has to acknowledge
that the second example needs more context to be understandable than
the first example). These new readings are said to be ‘coerced’ out of
those particular mismatches. The term ‘coercion’ (for related terms, see
below) signifies that in order to arrive at a meaningful interpretation,
items need to be ‘forced’ into a new and commonly not available reading
(by the speaker/hearer)—‘ham sandwiches’ cannot pay unless we inter-
pret them metonymically, and you cannot smile something, unless we
(are forced to) reinterpret smile semantico- syntactically as a verb like
buy. But how does that work?
At first sight, it appears that coercion should provide an ‘anything goes’
kind of licence. However, this does not seem to be the case. Even with coer-
cion as a mechanism to resolve mismatch, some utterances remain (almost)
uninterpretable, such as (3).
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 283 ]
(8) I was the only one who thought she drank the whole bottle.
(COCA, The Atlantic, 1998)
(9) Smith began the book after eight days at Ground Zero.
(COCA, USA Today, 2002)
(10) He sneezed the napkin off the table. (Goldberg,
Constructions, 1995)
(11) I’m lovin’ it. (McDonald’s)
(12) James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. (COCA,
Style, 1990)
Usually instances such as these are categorized as ‘anomalous’ and are not
treated as examples for mismatch and coercion. We can thus find sets of
sentences such as (15a‒c) below that illustrate regular versus mismatched
versus anomalous constructions.
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 285 ]
reading across that time span. In (16d) the stative verb believe is used in the
progressive, which usually signals active, ongoing action. Here, the inter-
pretation is rather that the state is only temporary and currently also rel-
evant. In (16e) the verb squeeze is incompatible with a directional adverb,
and in (16f) the want requires a human, or at least an animate, subject.
Just as we find numerous names for mismatch and coercion, there are
also quite a number of linguistic accounts of the mechanism itself. One of
the most central questions in this regard is whether coercion (i.e. the reso-
lution of mismatch) is a pragmatic, context-based operation or not.
1. The structure of so-called qualia features stems from the generative lexicon
(Pustejovsky, 1995). Pustejovsky defines them as ‘modes of explanation associated with
a word or phrase in the language’ and distinguishes between the following aspects: for-
mal (what a given element is), constitutive (what the element is made of), telic (what
the function of the element is), and agentive (how the element came into being).
Cognitive linguistics has offered yet another account for at least some of
the mismatch and coercion phenomena already discussed. Instances such
as (5)‒(9) have also been analysed as metaphor (5)‒(6) and metonymy
(7)‒(9).
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 287 ]
Needless to say, cognitive linguistics has not been the first approach
to treat examples like these as instances of metaphor and metonymy.
Philosophy, rhetoric, and literary studies offered complex discussions as
early as Greek and Roman antiquity. Cognitive linguistics added to these
well-established perspectives in that it brought to the fore the cognitive
underpinnings and general cognitive mechanisms responsible for the pro-
duction and reception of metaphorical and metonymical constructions
(this is not the right place to discuss this in any greater detail; see e.g.
Gibbs, 2008; Ortony, 2008; and Fludernik, 2011). What is interesting for
the present discussion is that some cognitive-linguistic analyses of exam-
ples such as (5)‒(9) need little or no recourse to concepts such as mismatch
or coercion (Ziegler, 2007, would be one such example).
Metaphors and metonymies such as these are treated as features of
everyday language, often motivated by embodied cognition and expli-
cable through mechanisms such as conceptual integration (or ‘blend-
ing’, see Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) and conversational inferencing
(see Ziegler, 2007, p. 1003). Francisco Gonzálvez-García (2011) takes
a more moderate position and convincingly argues that metaphor and
metonymy do not render coercion superfluous, but that these concepts
are actually compatible with each other. With reference to Peter Harder
(2010, p. 247), he explains that metaphor and metonymy can be seen as
bottom-up, cumulative conceptual processes, while coercion (and syntax
generally) are rather top-down processes that assign syntactic functions.
In particular, Gonzálvez-García argues that grammatical constructions
(as in the frameworks of Berkeley Construction Grammar, Sign Based
Construction Grammar, or the Lexical Constructional Model) can ele-
gantly provide us with constructional templates (constrained by syn-
tax) operating as top-down mechanisms in combination with metaphor
and metonymy (as bottom-up meaning construal) in order to arrive at
a ‘proper understanding of the division of labor between lexical mean-
ing and grammatical meaning’ (2011, p. 1348). Coercion is then the
essential mechanism that allows for the interpretation of ‘mismatches’
within a certain ‘interpretive latitude’ (p. 1348) determined by syntax.
Furthermore, Gonzálvez-García argues that there is a group of construc-
tions (the so- called subject-transitive in English, as in You think him guilty
or They called me a Frankenstein) which does not ‘appear to be amenable to
an explanation in terms of metaphor or metonymic extension alone (at
least synchronically), thus pointing to the inevitability of retaining the
mechanism of coercion’ (2011, p. 1350). Reasons for this include the com-
plex semantico-pragmatic constraints that affect this group of construc-
tions, as well as the fact that these constraints lead to a variety of related
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 289 ]
works of art (e.g. the use of ground in Vermeer’s single-figure paintings
from 1660s, where he used specific elements in the ground to reduce any
impression of physical movement; and the intentional ‘cancellation’ of
figure-ground relations in 20th- century art). The simple and yet cen-
tral idea is, in a nutshell, that aesthetic experience can arise when input
is unexpected, at least to some degree (Silvia, 2014, p. 265). This idea
can already be found expressed in the early 18th century, when Joseph
Addison took Horace’s famous dictum that art should ‘prodesse et delec-
tare’ (‘instruct and delight’) and instead claimed that art should (also)
‘surprise and delight’ (Addison, 1712). And the role and nature of ‘sur-
prise’ in art has been a matter of debate ever since (see the comprehen-
sive outline and discussion in Miller, 2015). For our present purposes,
suffice it to say that aesthetic effects can arise when there is a pattern, a
background, against which something new and unexpected (a mismatch)
stands out. This unexpected input is the cause of additional processing
and computing, which in turn has sometimes been implicated in the
cognitive-psychological basis of aesthetic pleasure (e.g. Schmidhuber,
2009). Here are just two examples:
(18) He came back without the fan, only with the casual
observation that he couldn’t find it. As he dropped this
cynical confession he looked straight and hard at the
candidate for the honour of taking his education in hand.
(Henry James, The Pupil, 1891/1909, p. 511)
(19) Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie—
A closet never pierced with crystal eyes—
But the defendant doth that plea deny
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
Shakespeare, sonnet 46, c. 1609/2002
These are just two very simple examples that help to illustrate the occur-
rence and use of mismatch in the verbal arts. In Henry James (18), the verb
drop is combined with the object noun phrase his confession. In the previ-
ous section we classified this as complement coercion, since drop actually
requires a physical, material object that can be dropped. Similarly, take in
hand also requires a physical, material object, but in this case it is combined
with his education, again requiring complement coercion in order to make
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 291 ]
So what has traditionally been described as metaphor and metonymy in
literary theory and rhetoric can also be captured by mismatch and coercion
accounts. This does not necessarily mean that the latter are superior to
previous accounts. But perhaps they can offer a more general account of
language use.
In particular, from a literary point of view, it is interesting to think about
mismatch and coercion beyond the single sentence (i.e. with larger units).
For example, when we consider Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed
Youth’ (21), we see that this poem was written as a Petrarchan sonnet with
an English, or Shakespearean, rhyme scheme (ABABCDCD EFFEGG) and
in iambic pentameter.
Do (22) and (23) still count as mismatch and coercion, or should they be
classified as ‘anomalous’? One might argue that, since these utterances
cannot be parsed by regular cognitive and linguistic means, as can exam-
ples (13), (14), and (15c), they may not fall under the rubric of mismatch
and coercion. There is no regular, constrained, and predictable mechanism
that helps to coerce a new meaning out of these combinations. This is not
to say that they are not meaningful. Both Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Ball’s
Gadji Beri Bimba are, of course, interpretable. But these interpretations
must have recourse to aspects beyond language, or even contextualized
language, itself. The ‘language’ that is used here is not the same as the con-
ventionalized tool of communication that is used in the other examples
(18) and (19) above.
Having looked at mismatch and coercion from the viewpoint of cogni-
tive linguistics and literary studies, in the next section I will turn to cog-
nitive neuroscience, for two main reasons. First, this is one of the fields
where mismatch and coercion have been studied extensively in order to
get a better picture of language processing in the brain. And secondly, the
discovery of unique neurophysiological correlates to coercion would sub-
stantially strengthen the suggestion made earlier, that coercion is actually
a very basic cognitive principle.
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 293 ]
COERCION IN NEUROSCIENCE
Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
(24) The journalist (α) wrote (β) began (γ) astonished the article
before his coffee break.
(25) The baby (α) ate (β) tried (γ) panicked the banana before the
short nap.
(26) The housewife knew that the guests (α) ate (β) tried (γ)
displeased the salmon after the music started.
(27) The nanny said the toddler (α) used (β) mastered (γ) alarmed
the seesaw before his second birthday.
Interestingly, the coerced (β) examples did not modulate any activity in
the traditional language areas such as Broca’s or Wernicke’s area. Rather,
they correlated with increased activity in the ‘anterior midline field’ (AMF),
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 295 ]
stimulus in question, the smaller the amplitude, and vice versa. It is thus
not unexpected that coerced constructions would tend to elicit a higher
N400 amplitude than non-coerced constructions. Much more interesting
is the fact that Kuperberg and colleagues found no significant differences
in amplitude for coerced constructions within a dominant context (e.g.
The author began the manuscript, where the interpretation began to write is
strongly suggested) and open interpretations (e.g. The man began the book,
which is more open and could plausibly include began to write, to read, to
study …). Anomalous constructions (The author astonished the book) also
showed a similar N400 effect as the coerced stimuli. However, anomalous
stimuli also showed a robust late P600 effect (i.e. a marked positive peak at
about 600 ms when the final word of the sentence—SFW—is presented),
which the coerced constructions and the controls did not show. This P600
effect is usually associated with syntactic processing, reanalysis, and high
levels of syntactic complexity and indeterminacy. Kuperberg and colleagues
speculate that the observed N400 effect might be due to the participants
noticing the mismatch between the verb and its complements, and making
(more implicit, automatic) attempts to resolve this mismatch (by coercing
a new reading out of the complement). The observed P600 effect at the
SFW, however, might then be due to more explicit attempts to resolve the
(anomalous) mismatch by constructing unstated specific activities that
could have been implied by the verb-argument combination.
The N400 is known to be sensitive to a wide array of factors, such as
categorical feature-based, animacy-based, and association-based relation-
ships, including those grounded in real-world expectations, as well as in
pragmatic relationships. Kuperberg and colleagues therefore also suggest
that the observable effects could be signs of attempts to retrieve unstated
meaning that may lead to plausible interpretations (2010, p. 2698).
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 297 ]
novel problem-solving, calculation, and deduction (BA 6), and governance
of eye movements, planning, processing uncertainty, reasoning, calcula-
tion, and logic (BA 8). Some of these more general cognitive skills (novel
problem-solving, deduction, processing uncertainty, and reasoning) could
obviously also be related to the resolution of mismatch.
Husband and colleagues (2011) conclude that coercion can be interpreted
as a complex compositional operation that naturally leads to greater activ-
ity in language regions, such as the left inferior frontal gyrus. Syntactic
and semantic violations, however, lead to differential activity in a much
broader network of brain regions, including the left ATC and bilateral AG.
This suggests, on the one hand, that left ATC and bilateral AG are sensitive
to these particular aspects (grammaticality and plausibility, respectively),
but perhaps not to compositionality (which is a key issue for the coerced
sentences). On the other hand, this finding also seems to suggest that mis-
matches (but not violations) are parsed as regular linguistic expressions
in the usual linguistic areas, while syntactic and semantic violations and
anomalies are a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon.
In the previous sections I discussed coercion studies using MEG, ERP, and
fMRI. Unsurprisingly, the resulting picture is not entirely uniform or con-
clusive. Table 14.1 summarizes the results.
MEG studies pointed towards increased activity in the ‘anterior mid-
line field’ (AMF), triggered by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).
The vmPFC is generally implicated not in linguistic reasoning, but rather
in social cognition. These studies also found some M350 effect, but were
unclear about the role of N400. Ultimately, this suggests that coercion
might be a process related to other general cognitive processes outside lan-
guage, in particular social cognition. ERP studies found a clear N400 for
coerced sentences, but not for anomalous sentences. The latter also showed
a marked P600 effect, which is associated with post-hoc processing of syn-
tactic complexity and anomaly. Coerced sentences did not show this effect.
This in turn points towards coercion being a regular linguistic process that
only requires some degree of additional processing in the mental lexicon.
Anomalous structures seem to be fundamentally different. Finally, fMRI
seems to complement these findings and point out that coercion correlates
with increased activity in the normal language areas, while anomalous sen-
tences are associated with a much broader network of activation, which
could also mean that they need recourse to general cognitive mechanisms.
When we try to combine the three aspects of mismatch and coercion that
have been discussed in this chapter (linguistic approaches, literature, neu-
roscience), a number of interesting findings surface. First, it seems plau-
sible to assume that coercion is a very general cognitive mechanism which
helps to resolve mismatch. Mismatch, in turn, is a phenomenon which
tends to be dispreferred (in the sense that mismatch needs to be resolved
as quickly as possible) and leads to an increase in cognitive activity in the
search for meaning. A similar point was already made by Frederic Bartlett in
the 1930s, when he discussed his ‘effort after meaning’ principle (Bartlett,
1932). The idea is that, instead of discarding incongruous information as
nonsense, we tend to perform operations that lead to some sort of sense
even in the face of mismatches and anomaly. We often perceive these cog-
nitive operations as pleasant in some sense, and they seem to be part of the
aesthetic experience. Coercion as a very basic and general cognitive opera-
tion does not make other notions such as metaphor or metonymy redun-
dant. Rather, it seems to form the basis for these phenomena.
Secondly, there seems to be a fundamental difference, linguistically
and neurophysiologically, between mismatches that are susceptible to
coercion, and what I have termed anomalous structures (i.e. structures
with grammatical or semantic incongruences which cannot be resolved by
coercion). Problem-solving for these kinds of structures involves other
cognitive structures, a much wider network in the brain, and more
language-independent thought processes than coercion. Whether the aes-
thetic effects are different for mismatch plus coercion and anomaly remains
to be seen, though at first sight one would expect anomalies to pose greater
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 299 ]
problems and perhaps be more quickly rejected than mismatched struc-
tures. Coercion, just like metaphor and metonymy, might also trigger some
reactions in the more generalized cognitive and neural domains, but these
are far less significant than the ones we find in anomalous contexts.
REFERENCES
N OR M S , R U L E S , A N D C O E R C I O N [ 301 ]
CHAPTER 15
Metaphorically, the page thus stands to the reader as a flower to a bee, and not, as
one might have argued, as a picture of a flower to a bee: flat, odorless, and hopelessly
unchanging.
Nell, 1988, p. 38
INTRODUCTION
If word recognition is the central process underlying the reading skill, then
it makes sense to start any theory of literary reading with that miraculous
performance of the human mind (Jacobs, 2001, 2011). If word recognition is
impaired, as in dyslexic and alexic patients who can only read very slowly or
letter by letter, respectively, reading longer pieces of text becomes difficult
or impossible and the pleasures offered by reading poems or novels become
aloof (Jacobs, 2001; Jacobs and Ziegler, 2015). The key to these pleasures is
acquired early in life and depends on genetic as much as on environmental
factors. The fact that the meaning of words is first learned through the ear
has important consequences for visual word recognition and literary read-
ing in general: it is highly likely that even in silent reading most words are
automatically phonologically (and prosodically) recoded even in proficient
readers, and that lexical meaning construction requires a prior activation
or coactivation of the sound of syllables and words (Conrad, Stenneken,
and Jacobs, 2006; Jacobs and Ziegler, 2015). If the sound echo of written
WORD VALLEYS
LIBELLE is the German word for dragonfly and was once selected from
among many thousands of proposals from German-speaking people
all over the world as the most beautiful word of the year for children
(Limbach, 2004). In Limbach’s book, a nine-year-old child describes
the micropoetry hidden in this three- syllable word in a very clear, sim-
ple statement—at the most studied of all levels of observation in liter-
ary reading studies, the subjective experiential one assessed by explicit
The assonance to the sound gestalt of the base word (time) provides a
rhyme with the creative power of evoking—by association—that other
word’s semantic field and contrasting or fusing it with its own (Schrott
and Jacobs, 2011). This associative process likely constitutes the most
basic skill underlying creativity and poetic experiences in (figurative)
language reception and production, namely the ability to discover hid-
den similarities in word pairs, idioms, proverbs, puns, metaphors, or
verses. Koestler (1964) called it bisociative thinking, a process allowing the
discovery of a relationship between one object or pattern and another
object or pattern. Perhaps the activity uncovered in the LIFG during the
processing of novel metaphoric NNCs (Forgács et al., 2012; Kuhlmann et
al., 2016) is a neural marker of bisociative thinking. This possibility is sup-
posed by a study by Barbara Rutter and colleagues (2012) on conceptual
expansion (i.e. the extension of an existing concept to include new fea-
tures and attributes, thereby widening its original definition) during the
processing of metaphoric sentences like ‘The clouds have danced over the
city’: again, the LIFG showed significantly increased activation relative to
control conditions. Given that the study by Isabel Bohrn and colleagues
(2012b) discussed next also found increased LIFG activity for defamiliar-
ized proverbs, the LIFG bisociative thinking hypothesis appears to warrant
further research.
JEMANDEM SEIN HERZ AUSSCHÜTTEN (to pour out one’s heart to some-
one) is a German idiom from the PANIG corpus (Citron, Cacciari, Kucharski,
Beck, Conrad, and Jacobs, 2015) meaning ‘to talk openly with someone
about one’s problems’ and part of a study in which we wanted to learn more
about the role of figurative language in conveying affect. The results sup-
ported the idea that figurative expressions are more emotionally engaging
than literal expressions (Citron and Goldberg, 2014) and add another step-
ping stone to our mountain-climbing adventure from affective-aesthetic
single word processing to literary experiences with entire poems or novels.
WER WAGT, GEWINNT (who dares, wins) is a familiar German proverb
used in a study we ran (Bohrn et al., 2012b; Bohrn, Altmann, Lubrich,
Menninghaus, and Jacobs, 2013; see also Menninghaus, Bohrn, Knoop,
Kotz, Schlotz, and Jacobs, 2015) in order to discover the neural correlates
of defamiliarization effects, a key element of foregrounding theory (van
Peer, 1986). ‘Wer klagt, gewinnt’ (who laments, wins) is a defamiliarized,
artful variation of this proverb (keeping rhyme and rhythm of the original,
but changing the meaning by way of substituting only two letters), called
anti-proverb (Mieder, 2008). Contrary to our expectations, when partici-
pants rated groups of familiar proverbs together with ‘anti-proverbs’ (and
other control conditions), overall they preferred the former over their art-
ful adaptations (Bohrn et al., 2012b). This confirmed the standard finding
from empirical and theoretical (neuro)aesthetics that familiarity is a key
element of beauty and aesthetic liking (Leder, Belke, Oeberst, and Augustin,
2004; Leder, Gerger, Dressler, and Schabmann, 2012; Leder, Markey, and
Pelowski, 2015; Reber, Schwartz, and Winkielman, 2004; Kuchinke et
al., 2009; Leder, 2013). However, since in our (anti-)proverb corpus, only
about 30% of variance in beauty ratings was accounted for by familiarity
(Bohrn et al., 2013), that leaves about 70% of variance unexplained and
thus a lot of space for theorizing in neurocognitive poetics (Jacobs, 2015b).
When correlating the individual beauty ratings with functional neuroim-
aging data, we discovered that some spontaneous aesthetic evaluation
takes place during reading, even if not required by the task (silent reading).
Positive correlations were found in the dorsal striatum of the basal ganglia
(i.e. the caudate nucleus, a key structure of the dopaminergic system) and
in medial prefrontal cortex, likely reflecting the rewarding nature of sen-
tences that are aesthetically pleasing. Interestingly, a study on sentences
containing functional shifts (i.e. the use of a semantically appropriate word
in a syntactically inappropriate role) taken from plays by Shakespeare, like
‘He was no longer alone in the world; he was wived to a kind and beautiful
VERSE LIFTS
ES IST EIN BRAUCH, VON ALTERS HER: WER SORGEN HAT, HAT AUCH
LIKÖR! (From ancient times it has been true, / He who has cares, has
liquor, too) is a couplet from the popular German humorist and poet
Wilhelm Busch (1832‒1908), whose rhymed and metred narratives have
been published in several languages including English. As shown in a study
STANZA RISES
Figure 15.1 shows my eye movements and gaze fixations while reading the
first part of the love poem ‘Wo hast du all die Schönheit hergenommen’
(Where did you get all this beauty) by the German poet Ricarda Huch on
a computer screen in one of the eye-tracking labs of the Dahlem Institute
for Neuroimaging of Emotion (D.I.N.E.). The places where my gaze stopped
to allow the brain to take in the visual information required for achieving
the ultimate goal of reading, making meaning, are indicated by the circles.
Their size codes the duration of these fixations. The lines indicate the sac-
cades that propel the gaze forwards or backward to the next stop. During
these saccades I was virtually blind, while during the roughly 50 stops on
the eight lines, 61 words, and 84 syllables (11 or 10 per line), lasting 250 ms
on average, my brain not only went through the highly automated routines
of word recognition and sentence comprehension but also computed the
next landing point on the line, anticipated and preprocessed the next word
and/or sentence, re-activated (and partly re-enacted) memories generating
emotions and (reflective) thoughts, and did a myriad of things I was not
aware of and will never be.
A lot of—as yet unanswered—questions can be generated from the
‘gaze blobs’ pattern of Figure 15.1 at all levels of text, context, and reader
analysis. For example, what did I know about Ricarda Huch and what
mood was I in when I chose the poem? What would change if I read the
poem from a book in my favourite chair at home? How different would
my son’s gaze pattern look (context and reader analysis)? Why did the
poet choose a poem form with an alternating 11/10 syllables per line or
ABAB rhyme structure (text analysis)? Why did I read this poem with a
rate of approximately 250 words per minute (wpm) (i.e. in a relatively
slow mode)? Why did my gaze involuntarily (i.e. without my conscious
control) stop only twice on the word BEAUTY but four times on the word
LIEBESANGESICHT (face of love). Why do I like the poem, especially line
three (reader response analysis)?
What is needed to answer these and related questions are studies on
poetry reading using eye-movement recording technology, but very few
exist (though see Koops van t’Jagt, Hoeks, Dorleijn, and Hendricks, 2014),
and even in my own lab, we are only beginning to adopt a more system-
atic approach (for a study measuring pupil size variation while listening to
limericks, see Scheepers, Mohr, Fischer, and Roberts, 2013). There is some
literature, though, reporting behavioural and neuronal measures during
the reading of stanzas (e.g. Carminati, Stabler, Roberts, and Fischer, 2006;
O’Sullivan et al., 2015) and peripheral-physiological measures during the
PASSAGE HILLS
(a) Screams of terror rent the air: the fighters scattered, Death Eaters and
Hogwartians alike, and red and green jets of light flew into the midst of the
oncoming monsters, which shuddered and reared, more terrifying than ever.
Rowling, 2007/2014, p. 528
(b) Hagrid helped Harry on the train that would take him back to the
Dursleys, then handed him an envelope.
‘Yer ticket fer Hogwarts’, he said, ‘First o’ September—Kings Cross—it’s all
on yer ticket. …’
Rowling, 1997/1999, p. 87
When participants read passages like the ones taken from the Harry Potter
series, a specific part of their brain—in the mid-cingulate cortex—showed
selective activity which may be a neural correlate of the perhaps most amaz-
ing of all phenomena related to the reading act, immersion (Hsu, Conrad,
and Jacobs, 2014). The observation that this activity is higher in ‘fear-
inducing’ passages (a) than in emotionally ‘neutral’ ones (b) is evidence for
two key hypotheses of the NCPM: the Panksepp-Jakobson hypothesis, men-
tioned earlier, and the fiction feeling hypothesis (Jacobs, 2015b). The latter
states that narratives with emotional contents invite readers more to be
empathic with the protagonists and to become more immersed in the text
world, including through engagement of the affective empathy network of
the brain (mainly the anterior insula and midcingulate cortex), than do sto-
ries with neutral contents. The hypothesis was tested in several studies from
my group using short narratives that were constructed to induce empathy
and emotions like fear and joy, as compared to neutral passages:
(c) Florian and his father are making a model air plane fly together. The airplane
crashes down and is broken. Florian starts to cry. The father ignores him.
(d) Jens is standing at a river and can’t get to the other side. He takes a saw
and cuts down a tree. Jens carries the heavy tree to the edge. He lays the tree
over the river and balances to the other side.
In a first study, Brink et al. (2011) had four- to eight-year-old children lis-
ten to a series of ‘micro-stories’ like the ones in (c) and (d), either eliciting
affective and cognitive empathy (c) or depicting neutral scenes which relied
(e) A farmer steered his harvester into a cornfield where his children were play-
ing hide-and-seek. Suddenly the machine seemed stuck, so he got off to find the
fault. When he realized that he had run over his children, he took his own life.
In a second study comparing neutral narratives with those like the one
in (e), taken from the popular game Black Stories, Ulrike Altmann and
colleagues (2012, 2014) looked at whether readers’ affective mentalizing
networks were more likely to be activated in short stories with negative
emotional contents than in stories with neutral valence. The results cor-
roborated both aforementioned hypotheses, showing that with increas-
ingly negative content, stories engaged the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus
and additional subcortical structures commonly involved in emotion pro-
cessing, such as the caudate body, or (left) amygdala. Interestingly, in
this study we also discovered that empathy and immersion can depend
on reader personality: the bilateral anterior insula and the right poste-
rior cingulate cortex showed a stronger activity (coupled with medial pre-
frontal cortex) for individuals who reported a stronger tendency to feel
concern for other people, as assessed by a self-report scale of empathy.
STORY KNOLLS
(f) As my old father now stooped down to the fire, he looked quite another man.
A frightful convulsive pain seemed to have distorted his mild reverend features
into a hideous repulsive diabolical countenance. He looked like Coppelius: the
latter was brandishing red hot tongs, and with them taking shining masses bus-
ily out of the thick smoke, which he afterwards hammered. It seemed to me, as
if I saw human faces around without any eyes—but with deep holes instead.
‘Eyes here, eyes!’ said Coppelius in a dull roaring voice. Overcome by the wildest
terror, I shrieked out, and fell from my hiding place upon the floor. Coppelius
seized me, and showing his teeth, bleated out, ‘Ah—little wretch,—little
wretch!’—then dragging me up, he flung me on the hearth, where the fire began
to singe my hair. ‘Now we have eyes enough—a pretty pair of child’s eyes.’ Thus
whispered Coppelius and taking out of the flame some red-hot grains with his
fists, he was about to sprinkle them in my eyes.
Hoffman, 1816/1844, p. 144
POEM MOUNTAINS
These 20 lines form Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem ‘Des Morgens’ (‘In the
morning’, 1799), a remarkable five (stanza) by four (line) ode of the alcaic
type with alternating rising and falling rhythmic periods and numerous
enjambements, no rhyme, rather vivid personifying adjectival imagery,
strongly amplifying valence, archaizing tone (language/grammar), and a
‘me-subjectivity’. In a recent study on the reception of 24 German ‘mood
poems’ from three centuries (Jacobs et al., 2016), this was the one poem
that induced conspicuously increased heart rate variability in readers, an
indicator of emotional intensity and suspense during the processing of spo-
ken and written narratives (Wallentin, Nielsen, Vuust, Dohn, Roepstorff,
and Lund, 2011; Lehne et al., 2015). Whether this change in (para-)sym-
pathetic activity is due to increased efforts of meaning-making and/or a
heightened aesthetic feeling is a hot open question for future studies.
In related work on the reception of poems from the volume ‘verteidi-
gung der wölfe’ (defence of the wolves) by the German poet Hans Magnus
Enzensberger (b. 1957), we succeeded for the first time in predicting the
basic affective tone of poems (e.g. sad or friendly) based on an operational
definition of (internal) sound that allows a quantitative, statistic valida-
tion by use of the Emophon algorithm (Aryani, Jacobs, and Conrad, 2013;
Aryani, Kraxenberger, Ullrich, Jacobs, and Conrad, 2015). We interpret
this as evidence that the iconic associations of foregrounded phonologi-
cal units contribute significantly to the emotional and aesthetic percep-
tion of a poem by the reader and the author, as assumed by Jakobson
(1960).
Comparing the processing of different variants of prose (functional vs.
evocative) and poetry (accessible, difficult, and self-selected, i.e. brought
to the lab by participants themselves) using fMRI, Adam Zeman and col-
leagues (2013) found that brain activation increased with increasing ‘liter-
ariness’ in predominantly left-sided regions, including the LIFG and areas
of the basal ganglia. The differential activation in the left hemisphere by
literariness was interpreted in line with evidence that these structures
are engaged by complex syntax and semantic ambiguity, and supports the
above-mentioned role played by the LIFG.
Because the primary vehicle for ludic reading is formulaic fiction … —that is,
long, continuous texts of moderate difficulty … and high predictability—‘bolt-
ing’ the text is feasible, because experienced readers have little difficulty captur-
ing the gist of the material by skimming it. (p. 20)
In contrast, my own reading speed from Figure 15.1 above (250 wpm)
would thus qualify as ‘rauding’ or even as intensified ‘rauding’ during the
reading of mainly foregrounded poem verses.
In the most extended of empirical novel reading studies that I know
of, an eye-movement study by Ralph Radach (1996; see also Radach and
McConkie, 1998), four participants read the first two parts of the book
Gulliver’s Travels (about 160 book pages). The study focused on issues of
It is difficult to make an accurate and complete diagram of what happens when one reads.
Burke, 2011, p. 159
Can the results of empirical studies such as those discussed in this chap-
ter, examining all kinds of micro-, meso-, and macroscopic aspects of
literary reading, with all kinds of methods, producing a heterogeneous
wealth of data and effects, be integrated under one theoretical roof? The
easy answer is ‘not yet’, the hard one: perhaps ‘not at all’. The literature
on empirical studies of literary reading offers various well-founded and
empirically supported hypotheses, which basically focus on one or few
selected aspects of the reading act, such as the foregrounding hypothesis
(van Peer, 1986), David Miall and Don Kuiken’s (2001) defamiliarization-
reconceptualization cycle, or Keith Oatley’s (1994) model of emotional
literary responses. However, general theories or computational process
models like those dominating mainstream experimental reading research
in cognitive psychology—dealing with non-literary text materials and
being of only limited validity for the study of literary experiences (Miall
and Kuiken, 1994)—are still a second major desideratum (for an over-
view, see Jacobs, 2015b).
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The power of emotional valence-from cognitive to affective processes in reading.
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vs fiction—how paratextual information shapes our reading processes. Social
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Aryani, A., Jacobs, A. M., and Conrad, M. (2013). Extracting salient sublexical units
from written texts: ‘Emophon’, a corpus-based approach to phonological iconic-
ity. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 654. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00654
Aryani, A., Kraxenberger, M., Ullrich, S., Jacobs, A. M., and Conrad, M. (2015). Measuring
the basic affective tone in poetry using phonological iconicity and subsyllabic
salience. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 10(2), 191–204.
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figurative language—A quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies
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Emboldened page ranges refer to chapters; page numbers in italics refer to figures or
tables.
2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 56, 77 Aldama, Frederick L. 20
4E paradigm of mind (embodied, Alexander, M. 74
embedded, enactive, Algom, D. 81
extended) 139, 143, 169 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) 283
aliens (in science fiction) 79, 80
absorption. See immersion Allbritton, D.W. 245
abstraction 5, 74–76, 86, 98, 266, 268 allegorical literature 227–234
abstract events 225 alliteration 305
accommodation 283 allusions, intertextual 147
action-compatibility effect 224 ‘All You Zombies’ (Heinlein) 78
Action in Perception (Noë) 140 Alony, R. 82
actor-observer difference 264 Alps 55, 57, 61
Addison, Joseph 290 alternate realities 136
Adler, Hans 20, 22, 29 alternative history genre 80
aesthetic experience 32, 290, 299 Altmann, Ulrike 137–138, 308, 313
aesthetic illusion 9, 139 Amend, A. 248
aesthetic reading processes 303–325 amygdala 309, 313
aesthetic response 120n6 analogies 98
aesthetics, neuro- 308 Anderson, M. 155
aesthetics of text 48 Anderson, Poul 77
aesthetic theory 55 Anderson, T. 169
aesthetic trends 12 Andric, M. 226
Affective Narratology (Hogan) 35 animals 12, 22, 23, 44, 94, 95, 118, 180,
affective reading processes 303–325 195–216
affective responses 38. See also anomalous sentences 295–298, 299, 299
emotions, literary anorexia nervosa 170, 172–173, 175,
affiliation, need for 249 185, 191
After the Fall (Miller) 113–133 Anstey, F. 78
agency, human 5, 38, 80, 82, 85 anterior insula 312
and narrative 100–101 anterior midline field (AMF) 294–295,
Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the 298, 299
Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (Owen) 292
from Vienna 1900 to the Present Anthologist, The (Baker) 219, 232
(Kandel) 152 anthropology 6, 9, 13, 136n1
Alabastro, A. 247 anti-proverbs 308
Appel, M. 252 BAWL (Berlin Affective Word List) 306
Archer, D. 269 Baxandall, Michael 155
Aristopia (Holford) 80 Baxter, Stephen 77, 79
Aristotle 142, 263 Bayesian cognition 151, 155, 165, 188
Armstrong, Paul B. 156 Bayesian inferences 158
art, psychology of 154 Bear, Greg 79
art, visual 8, 152–155, 157–158, 222, Beat (eating disorders charity) 177
289–290 Beaty, R.E. 69
Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology beauty of words, cues for 306
of Pictorial Representation Beck, L. 308
(Gombrich) 153–154, 164 behaviourist paradigms 261
art distinguished from craft 273 ‘beholder’s share’ 153–154
artificiality in fiction 147 Belke, B. 308
artists 153–154 bell curve 45n2
Aryani, A. 316 Benford, Gregory 77
Asimov, Isaac 81 Bergen, B. 223
assonance 305 Bergh, C. 191
Astington, J.W. 264 Bergs, Alexander 5–9, 279–301
Äström, C.J. 171 Bergson, Henri 310
Attebery, Brian 82 Berkeley Construction Grammar 288
attention 104 Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) 306
attitude change 252 Bernini, M. 170
attribution, mental-state 12, 213 Bezdek, M.A. 245, 253
Attridge, D. 57 biases 117, 185–86, 176, 177
audience, sense of 118 Bible 59
Augustin, D. 308 ‘Big Dumb Objects’ 77
Author Recognition test 269 Big Five personality measures 271
authors’ misunderstanding of own Big Six topics 5
works 129n11 Bilandzic, H. 251
automatic memory processes 242–244 bilateral anterior insula 313
autonomy, principle of 4, 6, 18, 25–29, 32 bilateral inferior frontal gyrus 313
awareness 165–166 Binder, J. 226
Ayduk, O. 76 binocular rivalry 157, 159n5
‘Birds, The’ (Du Maurier) 205
Baezconde-Garbanati, L. 252 bisociative thinking 307
Bailey, H. 305 Black, Jessica 271
Bailis, Daniel 262 Blackfish (film) 214
Baker, J.A. 205–206 Blackwell, N. 230
Baker, L. 175 Blaszczynski, A. 175–176
Baker, Nicolson 219 blending 21, 283, 288. See also
Balakian, J.N. 115n3 metonymy
Ball, Hugo 293 Bless, H. 80
Banaji, M.R. 247 blindness, inattentional 153
Bar-Anan, Y. 81 Blindsight (Watts) 80
Barnes, Jennifer 271 Blood, A.J. 70
Baron-Cohen, S. 269 Blood Music (Egan) 78
Bartlett, Frederic 299 Boas, H.C. 289
basal ganglia 308, 316 Boden, Margaret 47
Bateson, Gregory 22 body dissatisfaction 175–176
Baudelaire, Charles 70 body dysmorphia 185
[ 328 ] Index
body image 175, 179–180 caring, paradox of 25n8
Boers, E. 227 Carland, Matthew 272
Bohn, W. 78 Carlson, L. 121n7
Bohrn, Isabel 307–309 Carminati, M.N. 311
Bolens, G. 84 Carney, James 5, 7, 10–12, 188
Bor, Daniel 93–95, 98, 104 on CLT and science fiction 73–92
Borden, I.A. 270 Carroll, Joseph 24, 48
Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. 297 Carroll, N. 98n1
Bortolussi, M. 265, 319 Carroll, Noël 105
Bould, M. 85 Carter, R. 71
Boulenger, V. 225 Caruso, D.R. 46
Bourrit, M.T. 55 Castano, Emanuele 137, 271
Boyd, Brian 5, 7–8, 12, 267 catastrophe theory 174, 188
on cognitive patterns 93–109 categorization 84, 121, 204
on ‘natural’ narratology 48 Cattell, James M. 303
Bozena, J.-D. 76 caudate nucleus 308–309, 313
Brain and Poetry (Schrott & Jacobs) 304 Cavanagh, P. 153–156
brain imaging 27n10 Cazotte, Jacques 11, 156–166
brains 24–25, 152, 154 Cenis, Mont 58–59
Braun, M. 309 Central Park 241–242, 244
Brennan, J. 294 Chabon, Michael 80
Brink, T.T. 312 characterisation 8, 74, 82, 131, 137
Brisch, R. 191 characters, fictional 38, 117, 187
Broca’s area (BA) 294, 297–298, 299 engagement with 181
Brock, Timothy 137, 247, 251–252, 274 Chatterjee, J.S. 252
Brodman’s area. See Broca’s area (BA) Chekhov, Anton 272
Brown, C.M. 295 Chesters, T. 170
Brown, P. 84 Chiang, Ted 78
Bruehlman-Senecal, E. 76 Chiesi, H.L. 241
Bruner, J. 165, 261 Children’s Friendships: The Beginnings of
Bühler, Karl 303, 306 Intimacy (Dunn) 267
bulimia nervosa 174 Choi, A. 294
Burke, Edmund 57, 77 Chung, J. 264
Burke, Michael 3, 17, 35–36, 84, 222, Churchland, P.S. 171
304, 310, 318–320 Citron, F.M. 306, 308
on cognitive and affective narratology 36 City and the Stars, The (Clarke) 79
Burroughs, John 212 City at the End of Time, The (Bear) 79
Busch, Wilhelm 309 Clark, Andy 6, 152, 188, 191
Busselle, R. 251 Clarke, Arthur C. 77, 79
Buswell, B.N. 84 Clore, Gerald 253
Butler, Octavia E. 79 closure 222, 280, 320
Buzsaki, Gyorgy 148 Codispoti, M. 67
Byatt, A.S. 143 coercion 7, 10. See also type-shifting
‘By His Bootstraps’ (Heinlein) 78 complement 290
formal approaches to 286–287
Cacciari, C. 308 in linguistics 281–286
Cantwell Smith, B. 47 in literature 289–293
Caracciolo, M. 47, 140, 169–170, 265 as metaphor and metonymy 287–289
Caramazza, A. 225 in neuroscience 294–299
Card, Orson Scott 79 pragmatic approaches to 287
Index [ 329 ]
cognition 35, 139, 169 altered state of 60–61, 71
4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, another’s 49
extended) 13, 139, 169 embodied 46
abstract modes of 85 experiencing, collective 49n5
action-related 138 landscape of 204
Bayesian 151 Consciousness Explained (Dennett) 198
broad 36, 40, 46 Constanzo, M. 269
contentless 141n3 construal level theory (CLT) 5, 8
and context 75 and science fiction 73–92
embodied 288 constructionism 41–42
enactive 135 construction process in reading
fantastic 10, 151–167 240–241
interpersonal 138, 163 context 7, 13, 39, 75, 153, 311
models of 86 contextualization, narrative 162
narrow 36, 38–40, 44, 46 contextual pressure 287
and patterns 94 continuity, law of 280
situated 47, 50 conversation 114, 269
social. see social cognition Cook, A.E. 240n1
cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) 174 Copeland, D. 305
cognitive literary science 4, 13, 136, 192 Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 66
appeal of 30 Corvus (Woolfson) 202
heterogeneous foundations 19–20 counterfactual thinking 76, 80
and mind-body problem 27–28 Cowan, D.E. 82
and ‘reality’ of reading and writing 21 Cowperthwaite, Gabriela 214
cognitive neuropsychology 140 Cox, J. 267
cognitive neuroscience 1, 293 Craighero, L. 225
cognitive science 47, 115 Crane, M.T. 155
and fiction 135–150 Crano, W.D. 247
and literature 17–34 Crist, E. 200–201
and science fiction 73–92 critical period 120, 125–129
Cohen, J. 252–253 criticism, literary. See literary criticism
Cohen, P. 18 Cromwell, Howard Casey 148
Cohen, R. 175–176 Csicsery-Ronay, I., Jr. 146
coherence 18, 25–29 cues for beauty of words 306
Cohn, N. 294 culture 29, 266
Coleridge, S.T. 142 curiosity 314n1
collaboration 4, 26 Currie, Gregory 25, 86, 260–261
Collingwood, R.G. 273 Cushman, G.C. 270
Collins, Allan 253
Colston, H. 223, 225, 227 Dainton, B. 60
comedy, romantic 95–96 Damasio, Antonio R. 36–37, 39, 41
communication, indirect 272, 274 on cognitive patterns 95
‘competing timeline’ theme 80 on literary emotions 45, 120
composition, enriched 283, 286 on ‘natural’ narratology 50
comprehension 95, 242 Dambacher, M. 309
computational model of mind 136, 139 Danta, C. 136
Conant, L. 226 d’Aquili, E.G. 69
conceptual expansion 307 Darwin, Charles 75, 200
Conrad, M. 304, 306, 308, 312, 316 Davies, J. 169
consciousness 1, 27, 50, 171–172, 200n2 Davis, J.I. 84
[ 330 ] Index
Davis, Mark H. 138 dogs, companion 199–200
Davis, Philip 66–67, 309 Doherty, M. 114, 118
deactivation 69–71 Dohn, A. 316
de Almeida, R.G. 281, 287 Doicaru, M.M. 251
Debek, M. 76 dopamine system 191
Decety, J. 121n7 Dorleijn, G. 311
decision-making processes 36–37 Dorsch, T.S. 61–62
deconstruction 19 Dovidio, J.F. 76, 83
defamiliarization 65–66, 308 Dressler, S. 308
defamiliarization-reconceptualization Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson) 147
cycle 318 dualism, mind-body 47, 200
dehabituation 67 dual vision of fiction 135–150, 141
deictic centre 66 Du Maurier, Daphne 205–206
dela Paz, J. 269 Dunbar, Robin 261, 264, 269
Denis, M. 135 Dunn, Judy 267
Dennett, Dan 172, 196–198, 200n2 Dutton, D. 48
density, heterophenomenological 211
Desai, R. 226 eating disorders 9, 169–194
Descola, P. 213 Eco, Umberto 80
‘Des Morgens’ (Hölderlin) 316 Écrits (Lacan) 127n10
De Soussa, R. 37 Edelman, Gerald 93–94
Desperate Housewives 252 Edler, M. 304
Dhar, R. 76 ‘effort after meaning’ principle 299
Diable Amoureux, Le (Cazotte) 156–166 Egan, Greg 78, 81
diagnosticity principle 248 Ekman, P. 36, 39, 41
dialogue, cognitive-literary 2 electrodermal activity 317
Diamond Age, The (Stephenson) 78 electroencephalography 295
Dias, M. 266 elevation (emotion) 62–63
Dick, Philip K. 80 elision 287
Dietrich, A. 24n7, 28 Elizabethan sonnets 102
Different Flesh, A (Turtledove) 81 Elster, J. 37, 41
differing emotions problem 40, 49 embodied dynamics 219–237
Dimigen, O. 309 embodiment 5, 36, 46, 47, 63–65, 131,
Di Paolo, E.A. 139 149–140, 169–170, 199, 306, 310,
disambiguation devices 162 320
discourse domains 195–216 and enactive perception 139
disengagement, readers’ 249 Emmott, C. 74
disportation 319–320 Emophon algorithm 316
disquietude, sublime 187 emotionality 83–84
dissociation 187 emotional knowledge 45
distance, psychological 5, 74–75 emotional resonance 99, 101, 105
and construal level theory 81, emotional responses 42, 190
83–84, 86 emotion contagion 120
perceptions of 76 emotionology 41
probabilistic 80, 82 emotion regulation 39–40
in science fiction 77–80, 85 emotions 50, 274
distraction 181 appraisal theory of 191
Divine Invasion, The (Dick) 80 basic 41, 49
Dixon, P. 265, 319 evoked by fiction 260
Djikic, Maja 236, 271–272, 274 literary 5–6, 35–42, 49, 318
Index [ 331 ]
emotions (Cont.) event-related potentials (ERP) 67,
in literary reading 221, 319 294–296, 298, 299
moral 62–63 evolutionary theory 37
and ‘natural’ narratology 47–51 exclamations, palilogical 44
and neurocognitive poetics 313 expansion, conceptual 307
in possible worlds 268 expectations, readers’ 124, 147, 153,
quasi- 40 188, 190, 280
secondary 62 arising from life experiences 244
and self-transformation 272–274 experience
shared 49 fiction-derived 49
shifts of 107 lived 41, 48–50, 118
and simulation 113, 263, 265 personal 11
emotion theories 42, 303 experiments, laboratory 9, 117
empathy 5, 37–38, 42, 46, 83, 120, experiments, thought 116
138–139 expertise, interdisciplinary 25–26
components of 249 expertise, readers’ 241–242, 244, 270
and construal level theory 76 explanation, levels of 22–25, 28, 30, 32
critical period 125–129 explanatory gaps 28, 31
evoked by art 152 expressions, emotional 120
for fictional characters 240, 246–247, Eyal, T. 82–83
250, 253–254 eye movements 310, 311, 318
and neurocognitive poetics 312–313 Eysenck, M. 126
and simulation 264–265
and transportation 270 Fabb, N. 98
and understanding others 269–271 Faber, Jean-Henri 200
enactive paradigm 136, 139–143 Facebook 175–176
Ender’s Game (Card) 79 Fairburn, C.G. 173–174
End of Eternity, The (Asimov) 81 familiarity 252, 308
engagement, readerly 7, 143, 154, 170, families, psychosomatic 175
187–188, 243 family stories 270
and embodied dynamics 221 family therapy 175
emotional 99 fantasies 152, 154, 165
and enactive perception 138–139, 142 Fantastic, The (Todorov) 159
with narrative 251 fantastic genre 5, 7, 86
with reality 147 and cognition 152, 159–160, 164–165
and simulation 262 and double vision of fiction 143, 147
theories of 249 Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer) 78
Engel, P. 315 Fantasy Scale 138
enjoyment, literary 222, 252 fatalism 85
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 316 Fathallah, Judith 179
equilibrium in feedback Fauconnier, Gilles 21, 288
systems 171–172, 174 Fayn, K. 69
erotectic force 105 fear 315
Eskine, K.J. 69 feedback 5, 9, 38, 139–140, 151–152,
Esrock, E.J. 140 158, 160, 169–194
ethology 6, 201, 208 Feeling Beauty (Starr) 155
evaluation, aesthetic 308 Feeling of What Happens: Body and
Evans, Dylan 37, 41 Emotion in the Making of
Evans, J. 75 Consciousness (Damasio) 50
‘Eveline’ (Joyce) 36, 42–46 Fekete, J. 85
[ 332 ] Index
Fiasco (Lem) 79 Friston, K. 151–152, 154, 160
fiction 7, 76, 135–150, 165, 188–189 Frith, Chris 151–152, 154–155, 164
distrust of 259–261 frontal cortex 69, 71
eating-disorders genre 186 Frost, Robert 227, 229
formulaic 317 Fujita, K. 82
historical 203 functional magnetic resonance imaging
horror 206 (fMRI) 294, 296–298, 299
paradox of 40, 260 data 9, 64, 138, 316
patterns of 96 functional shift 6, 66–67, 308
psychology of 274
reading 176–186 Gadamer, H.-G. 158n3
and truth 259–278 Gadet, F. 283
fictionality 39, 135–141 Gadji Beri Bimba (Ball) 293
and The Prestige 143–148 Galactic Center (Benford) 77
fiction feeling hypothesis 312, 315 Gallagher, S. 139, 199
fiction–nonfiction divide 196, 202, Gallese, V. 136n1
205, 207 Gapenne, O. 139
Filik, R. 244 Gaussian distribution 45n2
Fincher-Kiefer, R. 241 Gavins, J. 261
Finnegan’s Wake (Joyce) 293 Gebauer, G. 304
Fischer, M.H. 311 Generative Lexicon, The (Pustejovsky) 286
Fisher, C.A. 175 Genet, Jean 315
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 222 Genette, G. 208
Fleischer, Richard 78 genres 7, 95, 209
flexibility ratio 317 Georgiadis, J.R. 70
Fludernik, Monika 30, 35–36, 46–47 Gerger, G. 308
on coercion 288 Gerrig, Richard 6–8, 11, 48, 191
on construal level theory (CLT) 84 on readers’ lives and narrative
on ‘natural’ narratology 48–51 experiences 239–257
on readers’ lives and narrative on simulation in fiction 262
experiences 251 Gestalt psychology 279, 280, 289
Fong, Katrina 270 Gibbs, Raymond 7, 9, 11, 219–237, 288
foregrounding 65–67, 77, 308, 318–319 Gibson, J.J. 153
Forever War, The (Haldeman) 78 Gilligan, J. 127
Forgács, Bálint 306–307 Gilmore, P. 86
Förster, J. 81 Glenberg, A. 224
Forsyth, A. 115n3 Göellner, K.J. 309
‘found science’ 154, 156, 162–163, Goldberg, A.E. 281, 283, 308
165–166 Golding, William 79
Fowler, R. 202n3 Goldman, Alvin 265
Foy, J.E. 244 Golem and the Jinni, The (Wecker) 241,
frames, cognitive 8, 13, 48 244–245
Francis, E.J. 283 Gombrich, Ernst 153–156, 158, 164
Frank., G.K.W. 191 Gomel, Elana 82
Frank, L.B. 252 Gonzalez, A.L. 175
Frankenstein (Shelley) 147 Gonzalez-Diaz, V. 66, 309
free indirect discourse 43, 204 Gonzálvez-Garcia, F. 288–289, 291
Freeland, C. 86 Goodwin, K. 305
Freud, Sigmund 267, 314 Goren, A. 76
Frijda, Nico 37, 62, 191 Gothic style 156n1
Index [ 333 ]
Gottschall, J. 18n2, 20, 28, 29n13 Hemingway, Ernest 208
Gould, J. 226 Hendriks, P. 311
Grabe, S. 175 Herbert, C. 67
Grainger, J. 306 Herman, David 6–10, 12, 251
grammar 114, 284 on animal minds 195–216
Gravity (2013 film) 56 on construal level theory (CLT) 84
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald) 222, 320 on literary emotions 41, 46
Green, Melanie 137, 251–252, 262, 274 on ‘natural’ narratology 47–48
Greene, T.R. 241 on transdisciplinary research 31
Greenman, B. 239, 243 hermeneutic circle 156, 158n3
Grethlein, Jonas 50 heroic characters 82
Grice, H.P. 287 heterophenomenology 6, 9, 196, 209, 213
Griffin, T.D. 241 rethought 197–201
Groisman, E.A. 171 Hetrick, S.E. 175
Gropius, W. 86 Hickok, G. 225
Gross, J.J. 84 Hill, J. 269
Gross, Sabine 20, 22, 29 Hirsh, J. 269
Grosso, M. 69 His Master’s Voice (Lem) 79
Groth, H. 136 Hitchcock, Alfred 205
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 317 Hodges, S. 267
Hodgson, William Hope 78
Hagoort, P. 295 Hoeks, J. 311
Haidt, Jonathan 62–63 Hoffman, A. 121
Hakemulder, F. 251 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 313–314
Haldeman, Joe 78 Hofmann, M.J. 306, 309
Halliwell, Stephen 142, 263 Hofstadter, Douglas 23
Hamburger, Käte 47n3 Hogan, Patrick 6–7, 9, 18, 32
Hamilton, C.A. 74 on cognitive and affective
Hamm, A.O. 67 narratology 35
Hancock, J.T. 175 on cognitive patterns 98
Handbook of Affective Sciences (Haidt) 62 on collaboration 26
Harder, Peter 288, 291 on construal level theory (CLT) 73
Harris, P.L. 264, 266, 268 on embodied reading 310
Harrison, Harry 81 on levels of explanation 23–24, 30n14
Harrison, M.R. 269 on literary emotions 36–37, 39–42
Harry Potter (Rowling) 312 on Miller’s After the Fall 113–133
Hart, F.E. 47 on ‘natural’ narratology 51
Hart, P.S. 84 on readers’ lives and narrative
Hartfeld, K. 306 experiences 247, 249–250
Hartner, Marcus 6–7, 10, 12, 195 Hogg, M.A. 247
on literature and cognitive Hohlfeld, A. 309
science 17–34 Hohwy, Jacob 152, 155,
Hauk, O. 225 157–159, 159n5
heart rate variability 316–317 Holden, M. 265
‘He Built a Crooked House’ (Heinlein) 78 Hölderlin, Friedrich 316
Heilmann, A. 143n5 Holford, Castello 80
Heinlein, Robert 78–79 Hollinger, V. 73
Helkama, K. 40 Holloway, John 86
Hellman, L. 272 Holstege, G. 70
von Helmholtz, Hermann 152 Homer 259
[ 334 ] Index
Horace 290 and suspense 315
Horn, L.R. 287 unconscious 9, 118, 152, 154,
Horwood, William 202–203, 206 159–162, 166
How Authors’ Minds Make Stories inferior frontal sulcis 315
(Hogan) 115, 120 information, paratextual 137
How Literature Plays with the Brain information, textual 240
(Armstrong) 156 information chunks 104
How to Do Things with Fictions information compression 98
(Landy) 141 information pathways 95
Hsu, C.-T. 312, 320 Ingarden, Roman 158n3
Huch, Ricarda 310, 311 Inheritors, The (Golding) 79
Huddleston, R. 284 innovation, mobile tech 13
Huizinga, J. 267 Inohara, K. 250
human-animal relationships 195, 200, insight in reading 187
209, 214 insight value 20
humanities 30n14, 136 integration, conceptual 288
Husband, Edward 281, 294–295, integration process in reading 240–241
297–298 intentional stance 37, 199
Hutto, D.D. 141n3, 142, 199 interdisciplinarity 4, 8, 10, 19–20, 22,
Huynh, H.K. 70 26, 26n9, 30, 31, 320
Hyltenstam, K. 120n5 Interpersonal Perception test 269–270
Hyman, Steven 191–192 Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) 138
‘hyper-priors’ 160, 162–163, 165 interpretation 170, 187, 190
intersequencing 314n1
Ibsch, Eldrud 17 Interstellar (film) 77
iconography 155 intersubjective experience 170
idioms 308–309 introspection 4, 114
idiosyncrasies, readers’ 40 Inverted World, The (Priest) 78
illusion 9, 148, 154, 157 ‘I-Origo’ 47n3
imagery 63–65, 98, 100, 176 irony 295
imagination 1, 9, 55, 60, 118–119, 140 Iser, Wolfgang 20, 29, 38, 142n4, 158n3
embodied 220
and the fantastic 165 Jackendoff, R. 283, 294
and fiction 135–136, 274 Jackson, M.P. 104
‘picture in the head’ type 140 Jackson, Tony 17, 26–27, 29–30
and play 266–267 Jacobs, Arthur 6–7, 11, 191, 236
and simulation 121, 260 on neurocognitive poetics 303–325
immersion 5–6, 138, 191, 319 Jacovina, Matthew 245–246, 250
and fear 315 Jajdelska, E. 140
in fictional world 137 Jakobson, Roman 303, 309, 316
neural correlates of 312–313 James, Henry 30, 290
in novel reading 320 James, S.P. 199
indirection 233 James, William 153
individual differences 252 Jameson, Frederic 78, 83, 85
inferences 158, 266, 287 jargons 84
explicit 249 Jee, B.D. 241
intellectual 190 Jenkins, J.M. 41, 119
readers’ 242–244 Jensen, M.S. 159
relational 138 Jeschke, Wolfgang 79
and simulation 264 Johnson, D.R. 270
Index [ 335 ]
Johnson, M. 36, 165, 227 Komeda, H. 250
Jones, E.E. 264 Koops van ‘t Jagt, R. 311
Jones, Gwyneth 82 Kotovych, M. 265
Journal of Literary Semantics 1 Kotz, S.A. 308
Journey to the Centre of the Earth Krakowiak, K.M. 253
(Verne) 77 Kraxenberger, M. 316
Joyce, James 11, 36, 42–46, 293 Kreuziger, F.A. 82
Junghofer, M. 67 Kubrick, Stanley 77
Kucharski, M. 308
Kacinik, N.A. 69 Kuchinke, L. 306, 308
Kagan, J. 196 Kuhlmann, Marco 307
Kahneman, Daniel 36–37, 39, 75, 243 Kuhn, Thomas 19
on science fiction 80 Kuijpers, M.M. 251
Kandel, Eric 152, 154–155 Kuiken, Don 187, 318
Kant, Immanuel 55–58, 60 Kukkonen, Karin 5, 7–12
Kanwisher, N. 64 on enactive perception 141
Kaschak, M. 224 on fantastic cognition 151–167
Katz, R. 175 on ‘natural’ narratology 47
Kaufman, G.F. 252 on reading and eating
Kaye, W.H. 191 disorders 169–170, 190
Keen, S. 247, 249–250, 264 Kuperberg, G.R. 281, 294–296
Kehler, A. 187–188 Kurzweil, R. 93
Keidal, J.L. 309 Kusumi, T. 250
Kelly, E.F. 69 Kuzmicova, A. 140, 170
Kelly, L.A. 281, 294
Keltner, D. 41, 84, 119 Lac, A. 247
Kenny, R. 121n7 Lacan, Jacques 127, 131
Kerry, S. 185 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) 232
Kesner, Ladislaw 155 Lakoff, G. 36, 165, 227, 229
Keysers, C. 136n1 Land and Overland (Shaw) 81
Kidd, David Comer 137, 271 Landy, Joshua 141–142, 147
Kierkegaard, S. 272, 274 Langacker, R. 289
‘Killers, The’ (Hemingway) 208 language 131
Kim, E.Y. 76 acquisition 120n5
kinaesthetics 13 action-related 225
Kinder, A. 305–306 comprehension 121n7
King Lear (Shakespeare) 66 everyday 288
Kintsch, Walter 240–241, 305 figurative 308
Kirsh, Steven J. 175 games 207–208
Kissler, J. 67 literary 284
Klein, J.T. 26n9 poetic 292
Kliegl, R. 309 processing 229, 236
Knauer, V. 127 vernacular 201
Knight, Eric 209–210, 212 written 157, 225
Knoop, C. 308, 315 language-emotion gap 309
knowledge 188, 242, 244 Lassie, Come Home (Knight) 209, 212
Koelsch, S. 315 Last Day of Creation, The (Jeschke) 79
Koestler, Arthur 307 lateral premotor cortex 315
Kohányi, A. 267 Latzer, Y. 175
Kohn, E. 213 Lauer, G. 264
[ 336 ] Index
Lauwers, P. 283 as cultural or political
Lawrence, A. 127 phenomenon 28
Lawrence, D.H. 232–233 mismatch and coercion in 289–293
Leder, H. 306, 308 value for understanding emotion and
LeDoux, J. 120 simulation 115–119
LeDoux, Joseph 39, 41, 95 Liviatan, I. 82
“Leerstellen’ (empty places, gaps) 158n3 Lodge, D. 84
Left Hand of Darkness, The (Le Guin) 79 London, J. 212
left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) 297, Longinus 7, 61, 65, 67, 70
298, 306–307, 316 Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) 156n1
Le Guin, Ursula K. 79, 82 Lorenz, Konrad 200–201
Lehne, M. 314–316 love stories 270
Lehrer, J. 113 Lubrich, O. 308, 315
Lem, S. 79–80 Luca, C. 76
Léon, J. 283 ‘lucid self-delusion’ 142, 147
Leuthold, H. 244 Lüdtke, J. 236, 309, 315, 317
Leverage, P. 264 Luguri, J.B. 76, 83
Levine, Joseph 28n11 Lund, T.E. 316
Levinson, Jerrold 40 Luria, Alexander 266
Levinson, S.C. 84, 207 lyric 98–99, 108, 188
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 131 lyric–narrative distinction 7–8
Levy, R. 187–188
Lewis, W. 86 M350 effect 295, 298, 299
Lexical Constructional Model 288 Maas, A. 224
Liberman, N. 74, 76, 81–83 MacBeth (Shakespeare) 59, 65
on construal level theory (CLT) 86 MacInnis, C.C. 247
Libet, Benjamin 28 Macrae, C.N. 247
Lilith’s Brood (Butler) 79 Madden, Deirdre 233
Limbach, J. 305 Magliano, J. 240, 242
line length 104 magnetoencephalography (MEG) 294–
linguistic cues 158 295, 298, 299
linguistic register 74, 83 Mahon, B. 225
linguistics, cognitive 6, 48, 287–288 Majkut, P. 190
literacy programmes 266 make-believe 136n1, 265
literal expressions 308 Malevich, K. 86
literariness 316 Mancing, H. 264
literary analysis 117 Manifold (Baxter) 77
literary criticism 221–222, 234–235 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick) 80
literary experience 219–237 manner, maxim of 287
literary fiction 137 Mano, Q. 226
Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion Mansour, J. 27
(Burke) 35 Mar, Raymond 265–266, 269–270
‘literary reading loop’ 222 March-Russell, P. 86
literary theory 264 Marinetti, F.T. 86
literature 25 Markey, P.S. 308
and affective science 113 Martin, C.D. 66, 309
artistic 274 Martin, George R.R. 156n1
as a biological phenomenon 24 marvellous genre 156n1, 159, 164
and cognitive science 17–34 Marxist criticism 85
as cognitive training 8 Massey, I. 222
Index [ 337 ]
mathematics 268 and coercion 287–289, 291–292
Mathewson, K.E. 159 and poetic language 293
Mayer, J.D. 46 Meyer, D.E. 240n1
Mayer-Salovey-Caruso emotional Meyer-Sickendieck, B. 236, 317
intelligence scale 46 Miall, David 5–7, 11–12, 35
McCarthyism 115n3 on defamiliarization 318
McClune, M.S. 270 on literary emotions 38
McComas, K.A. 84 on reading and eating disorders 170
McConachie, B. 47 on sublime experiences 55–72
McConaha, C. 191 Michaelis, L.A. 283
McConkie, G.W. 317 micropoetry 305–306
McElree, B. 294–295 mid-cingulate cortex 312
McHale, B. 86 Midgley, M. 27
McKoon, Gail 242 Mieder, W. 308
McNamara, D.S. 240, 242 Miéville, C. 85
meaning construction 48, 304 Miller, Arthur 113–133
media, thin-ideal 175–176 Miller, C. 290
medial frontal cortex 315 Miller, Dale 243
medial prefrontal cortex 308, 313 Mills, L. 127
memories, accumulated 240, 243, Milner, A. 73
252–253 Milton, John 59, 65
memory 64, 135 mimesis 142, 154, 158, 158n3, 259, 263
autobiographical 2 mind, computational model of 136, 139
emotional 5, 113–133 mind, life of 47
and narrative mind, literary 165
experiences 240–245, 254 mind, philosophy of 201
working 98, 104 mind, theory of 9, 21, 114, 169, 264,
memory-based processing 242 270, 295, 299
Menary, R. 139, 169 and neurocognitive poetics 313
Menninghaus, Winfried 308, 310, 315 and understanding others 269
mental imagery 5, 170 mind-ascribing acts 197, 200,
mentalizing 138, 199 208, 213
mental models 264–265, 268 mind-body continuum 27–28, 46,
mental states 25, 141, 200 169–170, 172
attribution of 12, 204, 207, 209 mind–brain 200n2
paradoxical 142 Mind in the Eyes test 269–271
Méquinion, M. 191 mind–narrative nexus 213
metaphor 106n2, 165, 186–187, 299 minds, animal 195–216
‘career of’ theory 227 minds, non-human 7–8
and coercion 283, 287–289, 291–292 minds, other 118, 137
conceptual 230 minds, social 21
and embodied dynamics 223, 226 minds, species of 196, 208, 214
and imaginative play 267 ‘mind style’ 202n3
in literary criticism 235 Minuchin, Salvador 175
meanings 229 mirror neurons 135, 225, 320
and poetic language 293 misdirection 144
and transformation 268 mismatches, grammatical 281, 299
metarepresentation 21 in linguistics 281–286
meta-theoretical overview 7 in literature 289–293
metonymy 283–284, 289, 299 in neuroscience 294, 296, 298
[ 338 ] Index
Mitchell, J.P. 247 rhythms of 140
Mithen, Steven 267 universals in 314n1
Mitrophanov, A.Y. 171 narratives, animal 205
models, mental. See mental models narratives, emotional 126, 158
moderation 18, 25–29 narrativity 50
Modernism 7, 86 narratology 9, 196, 251
Mohr, S. 311 analysis 214
Moldoveanu, M.C. 271–272 and animal minds 196–197,
Molé, P.A. 172 201–207
Molly Fox’s Birthday (Madden) 233 cognitive 19, 27n10
moments, mental 98 cognitive and affective 35–53
Monkey Taming (Fathallah) 179 natural 8, 36, 47–51
Montague grammars 286 theory formation 46
Montalván, Luis Carlos 209, 211 narrators, intradiegetic 201
Mont Blanc 55, 65, 71 nature 55, 59–60, 63–64
mood 179–180, 184 Nearly Perfect Copy, A
Moore, C. 270 (Amend) 248, 252
morality 40, 82–84 Neisser, U. 279
Moran, M.B. 252 Nell, Victor 303, 317
Moretti, F. 86 Neural Sublime, The (Richardson) 155
Morgan, Lady 57–61, 63–64 neuroaesthetics 19, 308
motivation 38 neurocognitive poetics model
Moylan, Tom 83 (NCPM) 308–309, 312, 315, 319
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 289 neurolinguistic studies 299
Mullin, Justin 270 neuropsychology 57, 139–140
Mumper, Micah 6–8, 11, 191 neuroscience 148, 261
on readers’ lives and narrative cognitive 293
experiences 239–257 computational 135
Murphy, B. 127n10 second-person 13
Murphy, G. 121 ‘Neuroscience Delusion, The’ (Tallis) 22
Murphy, S.T. 252 Newberg, A.B. 69
Murray, P. 61–62 Nicholls, Peter 77
Murray, R.M. 171 Nickerson, R. 264
music 69–70, 289 Nielsen, A.H. 316
Myers, J.L. 240 Nieuwland, M.S. 244
Myin, E. 141n3, 142 Niffeneger, Audrey 78
mysteries, narrative 243 Night Land, The (Hodgson) 78
mystic experiences 69–70 Nisbett, R.E. 121, 264
Myyry, L. 40 Niven, Larry 77
Noë, Alva 139–141, 153
N400 effect 295–296, 298, 299 on animal minds 200–201
Nagel, T. 196–198 Nolan, Christopher 77, 143n5
Nagel–Dennett debate 197, 199, 201 non-fiction 7, 188–189
nanotechnology 78 norm theory 243, 254
Napier, J.L. 76, 83 Norris, D. 188
Napoleon 59 novel-reading studies 317
narration, scene-setting 204 novels 114, 156n1
narrative 93–109, 123, 159, 165 novelty 289. See also surprise
and eating disorders 188 Nunberg, G. 281
experiences of 239–257 Nusbaum, E.C. 69
Index [ 339 ]
Oatley, Keith 6–9, 11, 227, 236 Patnoe-Woodley, P. 252
on emotion and simulation 119 pattern recognition 8, 279–281, 289
on literary emotions 36–37, 41, patterns, cognitive 48, 93–109
114, 318 patterns, cross-cultural 41
on truth and fiction 259–278 patterns, story 36
O’Brien, E.J. 240, 240n1, 242 Paulson, W. 23
Ochsner, K.N. 84 Pécheux, M. 283
O’Craven, K.M. 64 Pelowski, M. 308
O’Donnell, P.J. 309 penetrability, cognitive 158–159, 165
Oeberst, A. 308 perception 64–65, 119–120
Oliver, M.B. 187, 253 enactive 139–143
Olson, D.R. 264, 266 false 191
Olson, Greta 30 and fantastic cognition 151
online processing 319 illusions 157
On the Origins of Stories (Boyd) 93, 98 shortcuts 154
ontology, cultural 213 visual 135
openness, interpretive 188 of visual art 152–153
openness trait 271 perceptual distortion 185
orbitofrontal cortex 313 Peregrine, The (Baker) 205–206
O’Regan, J.K. 153 personality 69, 114, 272–273, 313
organon model 303 perspective 40, 113, 187
Orthogonal (Egan) 81 persuasion 6, 273
Ortony, Andrew 253, 288 Peterson, Jordan 269–271
O’Sullivan, N. 311 Petrarchan sonnets 102, 188
outcome preference 245–246 Peyk, P. 67
overreaction, emotional 121–125 phenomenology 139, 197–198, 201
Owen, Wilfred 292 Picturesque Tour through the Oberland
oxford-scholarship.com 5 (anon.) 60
Pilkington, A. 84
P600 response 9, 66–67, 296, 298, 299 Piper, H. Beam 81
Paczynski, M. 294 Pirlet, Caroline 5–7, 11–12
Page-Gould, E. 247 on cognitive and affective
Palimpsest (Stross) 81 narratology 35–53
Palmer, Alan 21, 49n5 on reading and eating disorders 170, 191
Panksepp, Jaak 148 Plato 259, 263, 268
Panksepp-Jakobson hypothesis 309, 312 play, imaginative 265–268, 274
Panofsky, Erwin 155 pleasure, aesthetic 290
paradigm shifts 19 plot 50, 95, 186, 190
Paradise Lost (Milton) 59 Plumb, I. 269
paradox of caring 25n8 poetic function 309
paradox of fiction 40, 268 poetic licence 22, 30–31
parallelism 98 Poetics (Aristotle) 263
parallel processing 1 poetics, cognitive 19, 35–36
Paratime (Piper) 81 poetics, neurocognitive 304, 308
parietal lobe 69 poetic texts 170
Parrinder, P. 83 poetry 259–260
Partee, B. 283 micro- 305
participatory responses, reading 311, 320
readers’ 245–251 reception 307
Paterson, Don 94, 105 variants of 316
[ 340 ] Index
poets 98, 104 quantity, maxim of 287
‘point’ in narrativity 50, 104 quasi-emotions 40, 260
point of view 121 Quasimodo, Salvatore 319
politeness 83–84
Polvinen, Merja 6–9, 191 Rachman, S. 185
on cognitive science and Radach, Ralph 317
fiction 135–150 Radford, Colin 260
Ponz, A. 306 Radvansky, G. 305
Possession (Byatt) 143 Rain, M. 270
possible worlds 201, 263, 268 Rama (Clarke) 77
Post, T.A. 241 Ramsey, W. 24n7
Powell, B. 259 Rapp, D.N. 246, 250
praxis 141 Raste, Y. 269
prediction 9, 155, 158, 192 Rast III, D.E. 247
predictive models 162, 190 Ratcliff, Roger 242
predictive processing 151–159, 164–166, ‘rauding’ 317
188, 191 reader parameters, cognitive 49
prefocusing, narrative 98n1 reader personality 313
Prentice, Deborah 250, 262 reader response 12, 36, 86, 311
Prestige, The (Priest) 143–148 readers 7
Priest, Christopher 78, 80, 143–148 blank-slate 4
priming 13, 240n1 changed by literary
Prinz, J.J. 36, 69 engagement 187, 236
probabilistic models 8, 151–152 empathic 45
‘probability design’ of narratives 160 of fiction 136
problem-solving instructions 245 judgements of 274
prose, variants of 316 naïve 9, 222, 236
Proust, Marcel 113 recreational 234
proverbs 308–309 self-reports 137, 252
proximity, law of 280 uniqueness of narrative
psychoanalysis 57, 127, 129n11, 131 experiences 239–257
psycholinguistics 303 reading 7, 10
psychologists, discursive 41 as challenge 182
psychology, cognitive 239, 261, 318 close 234
psychology, developmental 6, 136n1 embodied 46, 221
psychology, personality 45n2 emotion-based 45
psychology, social 6, 73, 264, 274 and feedback systems 186
psychology of art 154 literary 303–325
psychology of fiction 261 and mental health 192
psychotherapy 274 non-scientific aspects of 29
Pulvermüller, F. 225 professional vs. recreational 190
Pupil, The (James) 290 research 303–304, 318
pupil size variation 311 solitary vs. group 190
purposiveness (in science fiction) 74, 81, 84 stages in 221
Pustejovsky, James 286–287 study of 164
Pylkkänen, L. 281, 294–295 subjective 28
Pythagoras’s theorem 259 realism 147
reason, powers of 55–56
qualia features 286n1 reasoning, verbal 270
qualities, emergent 23–24 Reber, R. 308
Index [ 341 ]
reception theory 74 Ruyter, K.D. 252
Reeve-Tucker, A. 83 Ryan, Marie-Laure 19, 21, 27n10, 29
relativity theory 78
relevance theory 227 Salovey, P. 46
Renaissance Extended Mind, The Sanders, Scott 82
(Anderson) 155 ‘Sandman, The’ (Hoffmann) 314
Republic, The (Plato) 259, 263, 268 Sanford, A.J. 74
research, cognitive-literary 3 Sappho 7, 12, 61, 63, 71
research, empirical 148 sarcasm 295
research, field 116 Schabmann, A. 308
research, transdisciplinary 31 Scheepers, C. 311
Reynolds, K.J. 246 Scheff, T. 127
Rezaie, R. 66 schematization 48, 281
rhetoric 1, 6, 30, 186 schizophrenia 191
Rhetoric of Fictionality (Walsh) 142 Schlesewsky, M. 297
Rhine Falls 67–69, 71 Schlotz, W. 308
rhyme 98, 305 Schmidhuber, J. 290
rhythm 98, 140 Schmidt, S.J. 29
Richardson, Alan 19, 136, 138, 155, 165 Schneider, R. 21, 74
Richter, T. 252 Schrott, Raoul 303–304, 306–307,
Ricoeur, Paul 142n4, 158n3, 208 309–310, 319
Rieger, C.J. 242 Schuerewegen, Franc 165
right posterior cingulate cortex 313 Schupp, H.T. 67
rigour and fidelity 4 Schvaneveldt, R.W. 240n1
Rinaldi, S. 188 Schwartz, N. 308
Ringworld (Niven) 77 Schwarz, N. 80
Riven, L. 281 Schweickert, R. 264
Rizzolatti, G. 136n1, 225 science 19, 221–222
‘Road Not Taken, The’ (Frost) 227, 232 Science and Literary Criticism,
Roazzi, A. 266 symposium (2012) 3
Roberts, Adam 79, 311 science fiction (SF) 5, 73–92, 146, 270
Roberts, N. 66 Scott, G.G. 309
Robinson, Jenefer 38–40 Scott, Ridley 79
Robinson, Kim Stanley 80 scripts 48
Robu, C. 77 Seidenberg, M. 226
Roepstorff, A. 316 self, annihilation of 55–72
Rohde, H. 187–188 self–confidence 172
Rolfs, R. 309 self–esteem 175, 178–180
Romantic Sublime, The (Weiskel) 56 selfhood 268, 271
Rooth, M. 283 self–limiting events 183
Rosman, B.L. 175 self–other dichotomy 69
Ross, A. 169 self–other relationships 196
Ross, L. 121 self-reports, readers’ 137, 252
Rowling, J.K. 312 self–report studies 116
Royal, D. 115n3 self–revelation 247–248
rules, categorization 121 semantic comprehension 187
rules in art, lack of 57 semantic networks 126
Rushford, N. 175 semantic processing 306
Russo, A. 224 semiotic feedback loops 188
Rutter, Barbara 307 sensitivity, emotional 45n2
[ 342 ] Index
sensorimotor perception 140 social cognition 5, 136n1, 295, 298,
sensory properties 119 299, 315
sentences 309 social comparison theory 175
Separation, The (Priest) 80 social descriptions 76
Sereno, S.C. 309 social interaction 247
settings 95, 101 socialisation 39, 264
sexuality 69–70 social norms 117
Shafran, R. 185 social phenomena 24
Shakespeare, William 7, 12, 94, 273, sociolects 84
307–308 sociology of science 201
and coercion 290–291 Socrates 259
and the sublime 59, 66 Södersten, P. 191
and Twelfth Night 95–98 Solaris (Lem) 79–80
Shakespeare’s Brain (Crane) 155 Sommer, W. 309
Shapiro, K.J. 199 Song of Ice and Fire (Martin) 156n1
shared emotions problem 42, 49 Sonnets (Shakespeare) 94, 99, 101–108
Shaw, Bob 81 sound echoes 304–305
Shaw, Philip 65 sound gestalt 307
Sheenan, Paul 18, 20 space, possibility 108
Sheikh, N.A. 309 space, sense of 69
Shelley, Mary 147 spaces, fictional 140
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 65–66, 71 species boundary 214
Shibley Hyde, J. 175 spectroscopy, near-infrared 313
Shkurko, A.V. 246 speech 202, 284
Sign Based Construction Grammar 288 Speer, N.K. 27n10
signifiers 127, 131 Sperry, Roger 24
Silvia, P.J. 69, 290 Spiegel, S. 146
Simenon, Georges 264 Spilich, G.J. 241–242
similarity, judgements of 246–250, Spivak-Lavi, Z. 175
253–254 Spolsky, E. 22
similarity, law of 280 Stabler, J. 311
simile 187 Staddon, J. 75
simplifications 154 Stanfield, R. 223
simulation, embodied 222–227 Stanovich, K.E. 75, 269
and allegorical literature 227–234 Stapledon, Olaf 79, 81
in literary criticism 234–235 Star Maker (Stapledon) 79, 81
simulation in fiction 5, 9, 113–133, Starr, G. Gabrielle 155–156
136n1, 261–265, 269, 271, 274 Starship Troopers (Heinlein) 79
Sitarenios, G. 46 Stearns, C. 41
situation models 305 Stearns, P. 41
situations 95, 106n2, 165 Stedman, R.C. 84
‘skimming’ 317 Stenneken, P. 304
Skinner, B.F. 75 Stephan, E. 83
Skins (TV programme) 183 Stephenson, Neal 78
Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut) 78 Sternberg, M. 35, 314
Slippage, The (Greenman) 239, 243–244, Stevens, J. 121n7
246, 249–251, 253 Stevenson, Robert Louis 147, 268
Smit, D. 115n3 Stewart, J. 139
Smith, J.L. 185 Stockburger, J. 67
Snow, C.P. 20, 196 Stockwell, Peter 35–36, 48, 84
Index [ 343 ]
Stonor Eagles, The (Horwood) 202 thinking 22, 138, 180–181, 185, 268
stories 48, 129, 262 Thompson, Evan 139–140, 198n1
animals in 202 thought, free indirect 204
story comprehension 39 thought presentation 196, 202, 213
‘Story of Your Life’ (Chiang) 78 thoughts, content of 64
storytelling 35, 195, 213–214 ‘thought-shape fusion’ 185
Stross, Charles 81 Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The
structuralism 19 (Dick) 80
structure, emergent 27–28, 32 time, narrative 4, 108
style 84, 152, 155 timeless, sense of 60
stylistics, cognitive 6, 202 Time Machine, The (Wells) 78
subjectivities, non-human 207, 213 Time Traveller’s Wife, The
subjectivity, ascriptions of 199, 202 (Niffeneger) 78
subject-transitive construction 288 Tinbergen, Nikolaas 200
sublime, literature of the 61 Titone, D.A. 309
sublime, spatial 77 Todorov, Tzvetan 76, 151–152, 156,
sublime experiences 5–7, 9–10 159–160
cognitive challenge of 55–72 Tolkien, J.R.R. 156n1
in science fiction 77 Tomasello, M. 279
subvocalization 113–114 topologies of space 78
Such Stuff as Dreams (Oatley) 268 Tourmalin’s Time Cheques (Anstey) 78
suffering and empathy 249 Trabasso, T. 264
‘super-priors’ 161 transcendence 69, 82
surprise 62, 290, 314n1 transdisciplinarity 10, 195, 197, 214
suspense 253, 314–316 transference, psychoanalytic 131
Suvin, Darko 73, 83 transformation of selfhood 271
syllogisms 266–267 transformation sets 131
sympathy 37–38, 42, 45–46, 126 transforming experiences 69
syntactic anomalies 66 transportation 191, 251–253
syntactic processing 188 and empathy 270
measures of 8, 137–138
Tackett, J.L. 270 to narrative worlds 240
Taft, C. 127 Trapp, S. 306
Tallis, R. 22 Trevarthen, C. 199
Talmy, L. 283 Trope, Y. 74, 76, 81–83
Tal-Or, N. 252–253 on construal level theory (CLT) 86
Tan, E.S. 251 Troscianko, Emily 3, 5–7, 9, 12,
Tau Zero (Anderson) 77 17, 73
Taylor, L. 224 on enactive perception 140, 148
Taylor, M. 267 on narrative and metaphor 106n2
Teachman, B. 185 on ‘natural’ narratology 47
templates 108 on reading and eating
tenses 68 disorders 169–194
terror 60, 71 truth and fiction 259–278
text comprehension 187, 240 Tsunemi, K. 250
text information 305 Tsur, R. 70
textual analysis 21 Turner, J.C. 246
textual cues 35 Turner, Mark 21, 47, 165, 229, 288
‘thick descriptions’ 47 Turtledove, Harry 81
Thierry, G. 66, 309 Tversky, Amos 80, 247–248
[ 344 ] Index
Twelfth Night Vô, M.L.-H. 306
(Shakespeare) 66–67, 94–98 von Helmholtz, Hermann 154, 159, 161
type-shifting 281, 283, 286. See also von Kleist, Heinrich 315
coercion Vonnegut, Kurt 78
von Uexküll, Jacob 198
Ullrich, S. 316 Voss, J.F. 241
Umwelt 198 Vuust, P. 316
‘Unbestimmtheitsstellen’ (spots of
indeterminacy) 158n3 Waddell, N. 83
‘Uncanny, The’ (Freud) 314 Wakslak, C.J. 82
uncanny genre 159 Walker, J. 127
unconscious, cognitive 4, 152 Wallace, B. 169
understanding, linguistic 222–227 Wallentin, M. 316
understanding others 268–271 Wallot, Sebastian 318
unity of self and universe 70 Walsh, Richard 142, 188
unreality, expectation of 147 Walton, Kendall 40, 136n1,
Until Tuesday (Montalván) 209 260, 265
utopianism 83 Wänke, M. 80
Ward, L.M. 175
vacillation 8 War of the Worlds (Wells) 79
Valéry, Paul 305 Watson, J. B. 75
validity, representational 116–117 Watts, Peter 80
VALIS (Dick) 80 Waugh, Evelyn 208
van Berkum, J.J.A. 244 Waugh, Patricia 18–19, 31
van den Hende, E.A. 253 Wecker, H. 241, 244
van Dijk, T.A. 305 Wegner, P.E. 86
van Laer, T. 252 Weike, A.I. 67
van Peer, W. 308, 318 Weiskel, Thomas 56–57
variability, interpersonal 4 Wells, H.G. 78–79
variation, individual 12 Wenzel, W.G. 243
Varieties of Presence (Noë) 140 Wernicke’s area 294
Vendler, Helen 100, 104, 220–221, 230, West, R.F. 269
234, 273 West, Tessa 247–248
ventromedial prefrontal cortex West of Eden (Harrison) 81
(vmPFC) 295, 298, 299 Wetzels, M. 252
verb phrase, future-directed 43 ‘What Is It Like to be a Bat?’
verisimilitude 84, 141 (Nagel) 197
Vermeer, Johannes 290 What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion
Verne, Jules 77 (Hogan) 113, 115, 119
verse 93–109 Wheelwright, S. 269
Vesonder, G.T. 241 Why Lyrics Last (Boyd) 93, 98–100
Viconti, L.M. 252 Wilden, A. 24
View from Nowhere, The (Nagel) 198 Wiley, J. 241
Vile Bodies (Waugh) 208 Wille, K. 309
violations, grammatical 298 Willems, D. 283
visual art 8 William, J.M. 264
visualization, reader’s 113–114 Williams, Helen Maria 63, 67–69, 71
visual processing 64 Wilson, E.O. 75
Viveiros de Castro, E. 213 Wilson, N. 225
vividness 140 Winkielman, P. 308
Index [ 345 ]
Winnicott, Donald 268 Xeelee (Baxter) 79
Wirag, Andreas 5–7, 11–12
on cognitive and affective Yarley, R. 223
narratology 35–53 Yarmolinsky, A. 272
on reading and eating Years of Rice and Salt, The (Robinson) 80
disorders 170, 191 Yiddish Policeman’s Union, The (Chabon) 80
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 141, 207 Young, R. 84
Wolf, W. 139
Woltin, K.A. 76, 83 Zacks, J.M. 27n10, 305
wonder 62, 63, 65, 68 Zahavi, D. 139
Wood, James 235 Zaki, Jamil 249–250
Woolf, Virginia 59, 235 Zatorre, R.J. 70
Woolfson, Esther 202–203 Zeeman, E.C. 174
word pairs 305, 307 Zeki, Semir 152
word processing, affective 306 Zeman, Adam 316, 320
word recognition 304, 306 Zhu, D.C. 281, 294
Wordsworth, William 56, 70 Ziegler, D. 281, 283, 288
working memory 98, 104 Ziegler, J.C. 304
world-creation 201, 263 Zillmann, Dolf 40
worlds, nested 202 Zoeterman, Sara 271
worlds, possible 268 Zunshine, Lisa 21, 73, 264
writers, professional 267 Zwaan, R. 223–224
[ 346 ] Index