• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 600 0

would conduct herself in a complex social situation as opposed, say, to a "typical" avid reader of TV Guide. I had a friend once who delighted in discussing emotions and multiply embedded mental stances and who was, on the whole, what we call a "sensitive" man. Yet he could not stand reading fiction and generally was not fond of any reading because of a certain visual impairment that made it difficult for him to focus his eyes on the page. What gives? Theory of Mind makes reading fiction possible, but reading fiction does not make us into better mind-readers, at least not in the way that I can theorize confidently at this early stage of our knowledge about cognitive information processing. (I shall return to this point again in Part III, Section 2, entitled "Why Is Reading a Detective Story a Lot like Lifting Weights at the Gym?")

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A "COGNITIVE"

ANALYSIS OF MRS. DALLOWAY

AND THE LARGER FIELD OF LITERARY STUDIES

(T t is now time to return to the imaginary conversation that opened this

JL book. Some versions of that exchange did take place at several scholarly forums, where I have presented my research on ToM and literature. Once, for instance, after I had described the immediate pedagogical payoffs of counting, in one of my undergraduate seminars, the levels of intentionality in Mrs. Dalloway, I was asked if I could foresee the time when such a cognitive reading would supersede and render redundant the majority of other, more traditional approaches to Woolf.1 My immediate answer was no, but since then, I have had the opportunity to consider several implications of that question important for those of us wishing cognitive approaches to literature to thrive.

First of all, counting the levels of intentionality in Mrs. Dalloway does not constitute the cognitive approach to Woolf. It merely begins to explore one particular way—among numerous others—in which Woolf builds on and experiments with our ToM, and—to cast the net more broadly—in which fiction builds on and experiments with our other cognitive propensities.2 Many of these propensities, I feel safe in saying, still remain unknown to us despite remarkable advances in the cognitive sciences during the last two decades.

However, the current state of the field of cognitive approaches to literature already testifies to the spectacular diversity of venues offered by the parent fields of cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive evolutionary anthropology. Literary scholars have begun to investigate the ways in which recent research in these areas opens new avenues in gender studies (F. Elizabeth Hart); feminism (Elizabeth Grosz); cultural historicism (Mary Thomas Crane, Alan Richardson, Blakey Vermeule); narrative theory

8: The Larger Field of Literary Studies

(Alan Palmer, David Herman, Uri Margolin, Monika Fludernik, Porter Abbott); ecocriticism (Nancy Easterlin); literary aesthetics (Elaine Scarry, Gabrielle Starr); deconstruction (Ellen Spolsky); and postcolonial studies (Patrick Colm Hogan, Frederick Luis Aldama).3 What their publications show is that far from displacing or rendering the traditional approaches redundant, a cognitive approach can build on, strengthen, and develop their insights.

Second, the ongoing dialogue with, for instance, cultural historicism or feminism is not simply a matter of choice for scholars of literature interested in cognitive approaches. There is no such thing as a cognitive ability, such as ToM, free-floating "out there" in isolation from its human embodiment and historically and culturally concrete expression. Evolved cognitive predispositions, to borrow Patrick Colm Hogan's characterization of literary universals, "are instantiated variously, particularized in specific circumstances."4 Everything that we learn about Woolf's life and about the literary, cultural, and sociohistorical contexts of Mrs. Dalloway is thus potentially crucial for understanding why this particular woman, at this particular historical juncture,