Volume 42, Issue 2 - Explorations in Cognitive Literary Science

Research on neural models for cognition suggests that thought is far from a simply serial process. Nonetheless, there has been relatively little work on which parameters govern just what aspects of thought are parallel and what are serial. Clearly, speech as such is serial. In consequence, interior monologue (understood as subvocalised speech) is serial. Moreover, stream of consciousness – mental experience not confined to subvocalised speech – must be articulated in serial form in a novel. Due to this constraint on representation, it seems that novelists commonly imagine that stream of consciousness itself really is serial. Joyce, however, developed a sense of parallel cognitive processing in the course of Ulysses . Specifically, in the “Wandering Rocks” episode, he explored spatiotemporally parallel events in complex social systems. In the following chapter, “Sirens,” he in effect transferred this treatment of external parallelism to the human mind, systematically developing cognitive parallelism in his representation of Leopold Bloom. This development was perhaps reinforced by ideas of harmony and counterpoint associated with the episode's musical model. Understanding Joyce's exploration of parallel and serial processes in thought is important not only for what it tells us about Ulysses . It is also important for what it contributes to our understanding of cognitive parallelism.

This essay suggests that separating emotionally immersed and reflectively rational ways of experiencing fiction on the basis of ontological structures and spatio-temporal metaphors is hampering our understanding of the experience of fiction. Beginning in a rhetorical approach, I argue for a model where engagement with fiction is seen in terms of joint attention. Using joint attention rather than knowledge of ontological realms as a reference point has two distinct benefits: it refocuses attention on literature as a rhetorical mode, and it takes mental action to be a system of parallel processes, thus giving an alternative to the back-and-forth movement between the interior and exterior of imagined worlds. My focus is on Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a memoir that embeds an autobiographical narrative within self-reflective commentary, and which explicitly calls attention to the issues of emotional sincerity and rational distance.

I argue that literary studies can contribute to the “imagery debate” (between pictorialist, propositionalist, and enactivist accounts of mental imagery). While imagery questionnaires are pictorially configured and conflate imagining and seeing with pictorial representation, literary texts can exploit language's capacity for indeterminacy and therefore elicit very different imaginative experiences, thus illuminating the non-pictorial qualities of mental imagery.

Much work has been conducted in the social psychological sciences both modelling and predicting how the storage and retrieval of images and words in the mind operate (e.g. Baddeley 1974, 2000, Damasio 1999, Barsalou 1999). The focus has largely been on the interactions between short-term and long-term regions of memory. Such studies have also on occasion been complemented by behavioural experiments. More recently, a growing body of work has started to emerge from the biological cognitive neurosciences which looks at these same processes with the aid of scanning technologies (e.g. Dehaene 2003, 2009, Ledoux 1998, Eichenbaum 2011). The questions that will be considered in this paper are can these scientific findings be extended to aesthetic objects that are studied in the humanities, and in particular to the style of literary texts, and also can the way literary style figures operate shed light on how the mind and brain might function.