Table Of ContentTHE WORK OF FICTION
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The Work of Fiction
Cognition, Culture, and Complexity
Edited by
ALAN RICHARDSON
Boston College, USA
ELLEN SPOLSKY
Bar-Han University, Israel
O Routledge
S Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © Edited by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky 2004
The editors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the editors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
The work of fiction : cognition, culture, and complexity
1. Literature - Philosophy 2. English literature - History and criticism 3. Philiosophy of
mind 4. Cognitive science I. Richardson, Alan, 1955- II. Spolsky, Ellen 1943-
801.9'2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The work of fiction: cognition, culture, and complexity / edited by Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Fiction-History and criticism. 2. Cognition in literature. I. Richardson, Alan, 1955- II.
Spolsky, Ellen, 1943-
PN3321.W67 2004
809.3-<lc22
2003063688
ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3849-0 (hbk)
Contents
List of Figures vi
Preface (by Ellen Spolsky) vii
Acknowledgments xiv
List of Contributors xv
1 Studies in Literature and Cognition: A Field Map
(Introduction)
Alan Richardson 1
2 Stories and Morals: Emotion, Cognitive Exempla, and the Arabic
Aristotelians
Patrick Colm Hogan 31
3 Women's Work is Chastity: Lucretia, Cymbeline, and Cognitive
Impenetrability
Ellen Spolsky 51
4 Embodied Literature: A Cognitive-Poststructuralist Approach
to Genre
F. Elizabeth Han 85
5 'Fair is Foul': Macbeth and Binary Logic
Mary Thomas Crane 107
6 Richardson's Clarissa and a Theory of Mind
Lisa Zunshine 127
7 God Novels
Blakey Vermeule 147
8 Matter into Imagination: The Cognitive Realism of Gilbert
Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
Joseph Tabbi 167
Index 187
List of Figures
3.1 Lucas Cranach, the Elder, Lucretia, 1530, the Royal Collection,
© 2003, reproduced with permission of Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II 53
3.2 Titian, Tarquin and Lucretia, 1570, in the National Gallery,
London. Reproduced with permission of the Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge 54
3.3 Rembrandt van Rijn, Lucretia, 1664, from the Andrew W.
Mellon Collection. Photograph © Board of Trustees, National
Gallery of Art, Washington 55
Preface
Ellen Spolsky
The Work of Fiction presents a set of original essays united in their attempt to set a
new agenda for the rapidly developing field of cognitive literary and cultural
studies. Beginning from a variety of historical settings, these essays collectively
offer a powerful and provocative statement about the interrelationships among
cognition, culture, and complexity, linked by a shared respect for the challenges
and nuances of literary discourse and an insistence on reinvigorating cultural
analysis through dialogue with the sciences of brain and mind. The convergence
the essays here propose, and indeed demonstrate, between historical/cultural and
evolutionary/biological models of knowledge emerges from the theoretically fertile
arguments of the last half of the twentieth century in several contingent fields of
study. Cognitive studies, itself a loose coalition of scientific and social scientific
disciplines, stretching from evolutionary biology to philosophical epistemology,
and comfortable with both empirical and rationalist models of argument, here
combine with more than one variety of cultural studies. These in turn have
developed out of a mix of humanist and social science disciplines, as cultural
critics have drawn their methodologies mainly from philosophers, historians, and
social scientists, showing comparatively little interest in what they might term the
'hard' sciences.
The fundamental characteristic shared by the best of these emergent
interdisciplinary studies, however, is a willingness to engage potentially conflicting
aims and methodologies, when such matches are attempted. Neither the
practitioners of the most interesting of the cognitive sciences, nor of the most
rewarding products of cultural studies, have shrunk from the richness and
complexity of the information available from the context of an event or artifact.
Even the understanding of an 'event' itself has been investigated and argued.
Crucially, scholars in both fields acknowledge that the daunting amount
of information available must neither be reduced too quickly, nor be allowed to
overwhelm the goals of study. Model makers or theorists (by definition
reductionists) are always needed, minimally, to keep the focus on what kind of
information carries what kind of weight. In the last thirty years, for example, both
the historiographer, Hayden White, and the zoologist, Richard Dawkins, have each
grappled with the theoretical issue of what counts as a determiner, and what as the
determinant context in which an event or a change takes place. It is the deeper
understanding of the meaning of context that grounds the possibility of a unified
approach to understanding structure and change in both culture and biology, an
approach that aims to avoid the reduction to predictability on the one hand, and the
chaos of the Borgesian Chinese encyclopedia on the other. Here is how the
viii The Work of Fiction
dilemma and its resolution are described by the psychologist and developmental
systems theorist, Susan Oyama:
Development involves the repeated arising and transformation of complexes of
interacting processes and entities. These occur not because of preordained
necessity, and not, obviously, by 'mere chance,' if this means an absence of
regularity or causal relation. Rather, they come about through systems of
contingencies whose organization may itself be contingent, and in any case, must
be accounted for.... [One way] to explain such reliably repeated sequences of
events is by invoking heterogeneous, complexly interacting, and mutually
constraining entities and processes, in which 'control' is distributed and fluid
rather than centralized and fixed. (117-18)
The claim here is that all kinds of development and change - from
evolutionary change over long stretches of time, to the biological development of
an individual human baby, to the development or change within the English family
after the Protestant Reformation - will be explained by the kind of feedback
networks that have been described as 'heterogeneous, complexly interacting, and
mutually constraining.' In these interactions, conventional differences between
biological (or 'natural') and cultural phenomena often lose their significance.
'Nature and nurture are not alternative sources of form and causal power. Rather,
nature is the product of the processes that are the developmental interactions we
call nurture' (Oyama 48).
If it is the case, as it indeed seems to be, that human cultures can neither
be reduced to their biological roots, nor described without reference to them, then
the cognitively and biologically aware perspectives exemplified in the essays
collected here will supplement rather than supplant current work in literary and
cultural studies. The goal of this new interdisciplinary project, then, is to advance
the project of understanding cultures - both the ones we live in now, and the ones
distant from us in time and space - by investigating simultaneously the biology of
human bodies, including, of course, the embodiment of the mind-brain, and the
biologically grounded necessity of constructing cultures.
Cognitive literary theory, these essays argue, is thus well positioned to
provide insight into a question that has been occluded by the well-deserved
successes of the reemergent historical and multifaceted cultural studies that
proliferated after the New Criticism in the twentieth century. That question is this:
how does the evolved architecture that grounds human cognitive processing,
especially as it manifests itself in the universality of storytelling and the production
of visual art, interact with the apparently open-ended set of cultural and historical
contexts in which humans find themselves, so as to produce the variety of social
constructions that are historically distinctive, yet also often translatable across the
boundaries of time and place? It is the job of these innovative studies to begin to
chart the emergence, manifestation, and readability of these only temporarily stable
relationships between the humanly universal and the culturally and individually
specific, as coded and recorded in cultural artifacts.
Preface ix
Descriptions of this process, in any given time or place, will only
incidentally produce new interpretations of literary works. Although, as in any
historical study, they may make clear why some possible interpretations are
unlikely to have been available to audiences in the originating context of the work,
the production of new readings is not the primary goal of these essays. But if it
isn't, it is perhaps fair to ask why literary scholars should be particularly well
situated to answer questions about the cognitive and historical processes that
produce meaning. Isn't the account of the work of fiction perhaps something
better puzzled out by experimental psychologists, linguists, or neurologists? Is the
new field of cognitive literary studies truly interdisciplinary, or does it merely ask
literary scholars to turn themselves into something they are not, so as to
accomplish something their original training did not prepare them for, namely the
descriptions of cognitive processes? What is the specifically literary job to be done
here?
One answer to this question is that while cognitive scientists, linguists,
and even neurologists have already contributed foundationally to the emerging
understanding of how story-telling and the visual arts work within human life and
human cultures, they have rarely even noticed, much less found any way of
considering, the extraordinary complexity and creativity of the historical,
philosophical, and artistic texts with which historians, philosophers, and critics of
the visual and verbal arts are trained to work. Since it is, however, precisely this
complexity that is the most interesting and the most mysterious characteristic of
literary texts and of visual works of art for the question at hand, the habitual and
indeed necessary reductionism of these more empirically oriented disciplines has
made them unfit to pursue this task unaided. What is generally considered the
'scientific approach,' precisely that methodological keystone that has supported the
construction of our current understanding of human cognition, has also prevented
scientific researchers from dealing with the issues that cultural historians spend
years learning to respond to, namely the utter uniqueness of the most highly valued
texts and works of art.
Another way to understand or conceptualize the barrier that needs to be
overcome is to consider the source of the resistance to theory in so much humanist
study. Ideally, an elegant theory in any field is bi-directional: it seeks to make the
outcome of a process more or less predictable, and the outcome is thus considered
to be 'explained' by the hypothesized algorithm or process that produced it. But
no one, not even the social historians of art and literature, has ever devised a theory
- has ever even tried to devise a theory - that would predict the emergence of a
Shakespearean soliloquy or a Madonna of Raphael. And this is how it should be.
We are certainly not proposing that the standard for cognitive literary theory might
be the ability to predict this or that poem or picture. That is both an undesirable
over-reduction and in any case impossible. As Chomsky made clear in the case of
the study of human language, the theory needs to account for a closed set of
generative rules and an infinite set of items to which the rules apply. We are
pursuing something both less and more grandiose: we are proposing to describe the
systems that allow specific examples of human representational complexity and
