Volume 11, Issue 2

The topic of this essay is the concept of experience which, in the field of literary studies, is often used as if it were divided into an objective and a subjective aspect. Advocates of so-called ›empirical‹ approaches to the study of texts and minds tend to proceed from experience only to abstract impersonal (or objective) ›data‹ from it. By contrast, phenomenological and hermeneutic methods are frequently said to work through more immediately personal (or subjective) responses to, and engagements with, literary works. Thus experience, it seems, must either be read in terms of statistical diagrams and brain images, or else remain caught up in an activity of reading that, being characterised as singular and eventful, is believed to resist most attempts to convert it into such allegedly objective forms. Drawing on the radical empiricism of William James, this essay seeks to reintegrate the experience of reading and the reading of experience, both of which are ambiguously condensed in my title. The main argument of the piece therefore hinges on James’s and John Dewey’s claim that experience is »double-barrelled« (James 1977, 172), which is to say that it refers to »the entire process of phenomena«, to quote James’s own definition, »before reflective thought has analysed them into subjective and objective aspects or ingredients« (James 1978, 95). Made up of both perceptions and conceptions, experience, as James views it, is the medium through which everything must have passed before it can be named, and without (or outside of) which nothing, therefore, can be said to exist. With this radical account of empiricism in mind, I revisit some of the assumptions underpinning cognitive literary criticism, before turning to an interpretation of the dramatic poetry of Robert Browning, which has been described as a version of »empiricism in literature« because it is concerned with »the pursuit of experience in all its remotest extensions« (Langbaum 1963, 96). More specifically, my article engages with »Fra Lippo Lippi« and »An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician« in order to show that Browning’s dramatic monologues make experience legible as an activity by means of which perceptions come to be turned into conceptions while conceptions, conversely, are continuously reaffirmed, altered, or enriched by whatever perceptions are added to them as life goes on. As I argue, Browning’s personae speak from the inside of an experience in the making, rather than about a series of events that has already been brought to an end. Readers of these poems are therefore invited to read along with, as well as to reflect upon, the creative activity through which characters and circumstances come into existence and through which they are sustained and transformed. It follows that Browning’s writings offer their readers nothing to be processed from a mental vantage point above, or outside of, them. Instead, they involve the act of reading in the generative action through which experience comes to be made into meaningful text. Ultimately, the purpose of this essay is not only to indicate commonalities between James’s radical empiricism and Browning’s dramatic poetry. More importantly, I wish, by way of this endeavour, also to propose a process- or performance-based corrective, inspired by James and Dewey as much as by contemporary scholars (Ingold, Massumi), to what I regard as a rationalist or intellectualist bias in some representative work in the field of cognitive literary studies (Turner, Zunshine).

For the past two decades, the scholarly discussion about the merits of neuroscience and cognitive science for literary studies has been, in Germany at least, a rather heated affair. This debate, however, has been much less interdisciplinary than the subject matter would suggest and has mainly taken place within literary and cultural studies, often merely adapting scientific theories of the mind, the nervous system, and the brain, in order to make statements about either empathy within literary texts or the processes underlying their reception. The debate is, moreover, closely linked to a crisis of literary theory in general, especially regarding the demise of the postmodern deconstructionist paradigm and the call for a more scientific and factual approach to the object of study – literature. Since the 1990s at least, deconstruction has frequently been dismissed as a mere stance of scepticism and relativism verging on randomness. Ever since, Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) has promised to provide a way out of the impasse by offering a more objective approach to literary artefacts based on scientific knowledge and therefore on hard scientific facts. In this paper I will argue that it is necessary not only to rely on present-day cognitive science but to historicise the relationship between literature and science as well. The need to historicise this relationship is part of a more encompassing claim. I believe it is necessary to focus on theory not as something external to, but as a self-reflexive aspect of, literature itself. This implies the need to investigate the mind and cognition only if it is part of the literary work’s self-reflexive scope within a given historical context. Historically, this reflexion presupposes a network in which scientific theories of the mind play a key role. My main example is the imagination. In this context, I will also focus on the rejection of dualism, or rather: the way that René Descartes’s philosophy, especially his distinction between res cogitans and res extensa , has been treated. One key argument in favour of CLS has been the stern denunciation of Cartesian Dualism – most famously described as Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio in his influential 1994 book. Diametrically opposed to this traditional dualist approach is embodied cognition, which Gerhard Lauer describes as the bedrock of the new interdisciplinary approach: »To put it bluntly, cognitive literary studies are ›against Cartesian interpretation‹« (Lauer 2009, 150). CLS is therefore constructed in strict opposition to a mind-and-body dualism dominant in Western thought ever since the first half of the seventeenth century – a dualism first of soul and body, and then, since the middle of the nineteenth century, of mind or cognition, on the one hand, and the brain on the other. Taking these developments into account, this paper takes its cue from another stance, however: the need to historicise the scientific and philosophical approaches to cognition instead. Recognising the historical importance of a dualist position, I argue, is essential for an understanding of the impact of scientific insights on literary artefacts at the time they were developed. One key problem within CLS has been the focus on the reception of literature to achieve universally valid insights into its nature. This universalising approach mainly has the aim »to release literary studies from its bourgeois conventions« (ibid., 152) in order to focus on ordinary reading experiences. The downside of this approach has been the prioritisation of rather simple fiction instead of more challenging works of literature – arguably representative of a more bourgeois tradition. A way out of this bias is to focus less on the reception – the reading process – rather than on the production of the text – and the way it is reflected within the text itself. This is only possible by means of an historicist agenda, as literature, consciously or not, always echoes and negotiates scientific insights of the day. An historicist approach also involves a focus on more demanding works of literature – poetry or avant-garde works of art –, as they challenge the boundaries of what literature is and can be. In essence, I put forward the conviction that this historicising approach to cognition within literature also implies a return to theory – as a self-reflexive part of literature itself and not something to be applied to it from without. This historicist approach to cognition as a self-reflexive aspect of literature, on the one hand, and a reflection on science, on the other, necessarily implies a rejection of any universalising approach to literary works of art. The theoretical historicism proposed in this paper presupposes a turn towards the time-bound and the particular, and respective conceptualisations of authorship, literary production, and the text itself. In order to make my point, I will focus on one key concept and cognitive faculty in the history of the humanities: the creative imagination. A historical approach to the imagination in the light of cognitive science – such as championed by Alan Richardson and Mark J. Bruhn in the field of Romantic Studies – thus serves as my starting point. To make my argument, I will focus on three historically crucial phases as they are periods of transition both within literary history and the history of science: the early seventeenth century as the beginning of the scientific revolution, the Romantic period as a second scientific revolution, and literary Modernism as the formative phase of our contemporary scientific worldview. All three literary examples – Shakespeare, Coleridge, Joyce – can and must be seen as paradigmatic of their age as well as instrumental in bringing about literary change. At the same time, these examples will serve as flashlights to highlight a general trend.

Over the past two decades cognitive literary studies (CLS) has emerged as a new subfield of literary studies. Despite the success of cognitive theories in some areas of research such as in narratology, however, the impact of CLS on the academic discipline of literary and cultural studies as a whole has not been as profound as predicted. Major schools of research, e.g. postcolonial studies or gender studies, remain virtually untouched, and the vast majority of literary scholars are still sceptical or indifferent towards this area of research. Reasons for this scepticism include, for example, epistemological and methodological uncertainties concerning the interdisciplinary intersection of science and literature. But scholars have also begun to address another lacuna in contemporary research that may prove to be of equal or even more profound consequence: the lack of a solid and widely accepted conceptual and analytical bridge between cognitive approaches and the wide field of cultural studies. It is a well-known fact that the study of culture in its many theoretical guises has taken a lead role in philology departments around the globe. Though not every scholar welcomes this development, it would certainly be unwise to ignore the general impact of cultural studies on philology. For this reason, my paper argues that CLS not only needs to engage in a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between literary scholars and cognitive scientists but it also needs to incorporate cultural studies into this dialogue. In other words, an important challenge lies in making cognitive approaches relevant for cultural analysis. This paper engages with current attempts to face this challenge. It provides a survey of approaches that aim to build a conceptual bridge between culture and cognition and thus take a step towards extending cognitive approaches into the field of cultural studies. For this purpose, I adopt the distinction between so-called ›first‹ and ›second generation‹ approaches in order to group this research heuristically into two academic camps: (1) approaches that emphatically foreground so-called second generation cognitive science as their prime source of inspiration, i.e. approaches that engage with enactive, embedded, extended, and embodied aspects of cognition; and (2) studies which do not explicitly situate themselves within this paradigm and rather seek innovation by turning to more ›classical‹, foundational ›first generation‹ concepts of mental representation, information- and text processing. By discussing examples from both lines of research, including work by Kukkonen/Caracciolo (2014), Strasen (2013), Sommer (2013), and Hartner/Schneider (2015), my survey attempts to provide an impression of the wealth of creative thinking currently at work in CLS. In this context, the paper discusses some of the major challenges cognitive approaches are facing today; it traces a selection of current developments in the field, including work on the concept of ›cultural models‹, the notion of the ›intercultural mind‹, and the attempt to programmatically ground conceptualizations of cognition in our bodily interactions with culture and the environment. All in all, I argue that despite the efforts towards a systematic cognitive investigation of culture sketched in this survey, the project of cognitive cultural studies in general is still in its infancy. Its work is conducted by a comparatively small group of enthusiasts and constitutes a highly-specialized academic niche within a multitude of postclassical approaches to literature. Whether it will be possible to interest the much larger body of ›traditional‹ literary and cultural scholars in cognitive approaches, in my opinion, will to no small degree hinge on the field’s ability to move beyond abstract theoretical reflection. While there is obviously nothing intrinsically wrong with specialized fields of research beyond the mainstream, I believe that cognitive approaches have the potential to reach a wider audience. However, this may depend on the ability of CLS to develop concepts and methods capable of analysing concrete cultural phenomena in their social and historical context.

The present article addresses the question whether the wide and disparate field of Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) has met the goal set by its representatives: to provide more authentic, intelligible and meaningful work than the traditional literary scholarship against which it positions itself. When »cognition« entered literary studies in around the 1990s, this was seen to announce the dawning of a new era, characterised by a rejuvenation of the field with the aid of interdisciplinary input, which simultaneously promised a return to its fundamental interest in literary texts. These objectives were accompanied by a growing disaffection with dominant theoretical paradigms (e.g. post-structuralism) and a forthright commitment to bridging the Cartesian dualism purportedly dominating the humanities. From the outset, however, CLS was greeted with criticism both regarding the reliability of its methodological basis and the usefulness of its results. These weaknesses have on the whole not been remedied and their continuing presence is highlighted by the field’s location at the margins of literary scholarship a quarter of a century after the »cognitive turn«. My taking up the longstanding debate surrounding CLS and returning to issues that may appear dated to some is not only indicated per se , but especially with view to its projected revitalisation of the fields on which it has had a bearing, which – all ambitious self-promotion by representatives of CLS notwithstanding – has not taken place. I begin by considering the methodological flaws that critics of CLS identified already at its inception, focusing on the one hand on the unsubstantiated foundations of its claims and on the other on its resistance to providing a precise definition of its key concept »embodiment«. As many other critics have already pointed out, the field’s most problematic assertion is that the products of the human mind, be they mental schemata or figurative language (especially metaphors), are indicative of how human cognition works generally. While this naturalisation of literary form as the structuring principle of human cognition may entail a reassuring revaluation of literary scholarship, it is based on rather simplistic and often unsupported assumptions about the nature of cognitive processes. At the same time, this conflation of literary language and cognitive structure has prevented scholars from asking questions of genuinely literary import. Instead, CLS tends to take literature as a repository of natural language to be scanned for evidence of whatever cognitive phenomena are at stake. Furthermore, CLS’s attention to the text is also indicative of insufficient attention within the field to all that literature does not say in so many words and, by implication, of a general indifference to readers’ cognitive and affective contribution to the construction of textual meaning – something of a paradox given that reader reception and emotion are avowed areas of interest of the field. This manifests itself not least in the unswerving hermeneutic impulse that underpins much cognitive literary scholarship, suggesting that many of its representatives may be less committed to understanding the cognitive abilities of readers in general , than to pursuing their own expert interpretations. Ultimately, the focus on the text in CLS, and the concomitant avoidance of the reader are coupled with the insufficiently substantiated claim that persists throughout CLS that cognition is »bound« to the body and our biological realities. This argument is made to distinguish the field both from traditional literary scholarship and (increasingly) earlier forms of cognitive science; in practice, however, the biological underpinnings of cognition are rarely specified and defined, in fact they seem to be taken for granted. The unease surrounding biological matters in CLS persists in recent reconceptualisations of its premises developed with the aim of responding to these criticisms, to which I then turn. Rather than resolving its questionable claims, CLS has branched out into ever new areas, for instance by contextualising cognitive processes, investigating larger, more complex textual phenomena (blends) and studying social or extended cognition rather than individual minds. These reconceptualisations, productive though they may have been within the field of CLS, have merely replicated its fundamental problems and are thus subject to the same charges as earlier forms of cognitive literary scholarship. In conclusion, I argue that to comprehend the embodied responses that CLS currently mainly assumes as givens these would have to be identified and pried apart from the multifarious manifestations by which literary art appeals to the human mind. For that, however, scholars would have to accept the existence of a certain cognitive »norm«, i.e. a »human nature«, without which the most radical theory of embodiment leads to the very impressionism against which CLS initially positioned itself. This would require, above all, that cognitive literary scholars establish clarity about their key term »embodiment« and, in order to do so, embrace research from disciplines they typically eschew: notably the »hard« neurosciences and psychology (both cognitive and evolutionary); furthermore, it would require them to limit their expectations about the explanatory scope of CLS and its innovative force within traditional scholarship.

When we think of the cognitive sciences and literature, we usually think of bringing expertise from neuroscience to literary texts. However, interdisciplinary projects of this nature usually focus on semantic fields or narrative patterns, marginalizing the literary quality of the texts that are examined. More recently, the opportunities that come with a focus on aesthetics and poetic form have been discussed following Stockwell (2009), who has argued that we need to go beyond semantics in the field of cognitive poetics. Experiments using fMRI scanners have shown that readers’ brains ›fire up‹ holistically but that engaging with poetry and prose activates different regions of the brain (cf. Jacobs 2015). So one task of cognitive poetics is to look more closely at the aesthetic experience of literary texts. The sonnet is arguably a suitable test case for a cognitive poetics that is interested in form. After all, received wisdom has it that the sonnet abides by a rigid formal pattern: »it is a fourteen-line poem with a particular rhyme scheme and a particular mode of organizing and amplifying patterns of image and thought […] usually [rendered in] iambic pentameter« (Levin 2001, xxxvii). Accordingly, matters of form should play a crucial part when sonnets are read. At the same time, due to its »particular mode« of organisation, the sonnet is often thought to be a poetic form that is prone to cognitive processes. Helen Vendler (1997, 168) claims, for example, that Shakespeare’s Sonnets reflect »the fluidity of mental processes (exemplified in lexical and syntactic concatenation)«. And according to Raphael Lyne (2011, 198), Shakespeare’s sonnets are an »ideal place« to investigate »thinking in a cognitive rhetoric«. Following Vendler and Lyne in their focus on cognitive processes when discussing the sonnet, I will challenge simplistic notions of poetic form that – in the case of the sonnet – are limited to structural features like the fourteen-line rule. Aberrations like the sonetus retornellatus , a sixteen-line sonnet, testify that the number of lines is not a decisive formal feature for the sonnet form. The poetic form, I will argue, is indeed brought to the fore when we focus on the particular internal organisation of thought, and I will point to Shakespeare’s »Sonnet 126«, a twelve-line sonnet, in order to highlight cognitive approaches to the sonnet form. Bringing Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) to the sonnet form is thus a promising endeavour. We need to make sure, however, that CLS is mindful of rhetorical strategies and logical patterns that inform and form the sonnet. And CLS needs to take into account that mental processes and poetic form are locked into a dynamic process: form resonates with cognitive skills rooted in rhetoric and logic, and at the same time shapes those mental processes. If we accept that poetic form is not given but evolves while stimuli for cognitive processes and emotional responses are provided, research in cognitive poetics must take aspects of form more seriously. In her comprehensive study of poetic form, On Form. Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word , Angela Leighton (2007, 1) has pointed out that the task for anybody who wishes to conceptualize form in the realm of language is to address its »bent […] towards materialization, towards being the shape or body of something«. As an abstract noun, ›form‹ feigns a static nature while it is, according to Leighton, a process, a cognitive activity. Conceptualizing form as a process, Leighton claims, will »alter the very thing we mean by knowing« (ibid., 27) because it will not allow for distilling knowledge about poetic form as a result of that process. This is very much in line with John G. Bruhn’s and Stewart Wolf’s »The Mind as a Process«, in which they have argued that in the study of the mind a »medical approach« alongside a »laboratory approach« is needed to develop »process-oriented research« (Bruhn/Wolf 2003, 84sq.). Scrutinizing poetic form more systematically with the help of cognitive sciences thus also promises to help us redefine our concept of knowing. Exciting experiments with a focus on affect and emotional responses have brought to the fore the notion that aesthetics plays an important part in the process of reading poetry (cf. Lüdtke 2014). These experiments suggest that schema theory, with its reliance on pre-existing meaningful structures, falls short of grasping the process of reading poetry as an aesthetic process. So while pattern recognition, be it on a narrative plane or a semantic plane, is certainly one facet of the cognitive process of reading poetry, the process involves other facets, too, that CLS has only begun to address. Vaughan-Evans et al. (2016, 6) have perhaps provided »the first tangible evidence that this link [between an aesthetic appreciation of poetry and implicit responses] is permeable«. They argue that the »spontaneous recognition of poetic harmony is a fast, sublexical process« (ibid.) opening up a playing field for CLS at a sublexical level that still warrants investigation. Equally, a recent eye-tracking study of how English haiku are being read, conducted by Hermann J. Müller et al. (2017), has revealed that readers’ individual engagement with poetry becomes more diverse with a second or third round of engaging with the text. This may sound trivial, but it does challenge the notion that CLS will help establish universal patterns of cognition. On the contrary, CLS may corroborate a hermeneutical stance: with every reading of a poem, new questions arise; poems are never fully understood. CLS can thus help to heed Bruhn’s and Wolf’s interjection that »we should pay more attention to the responses of the individual qua individual than averaging individuals into groups« (Bruhn/Wolf 2003, 85).

The orthodox view in analytical film theory is that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is anchored in communicative practice. Whereas the creator of nonfiction can be seen as asserting something as true, the creator of fiction merely asks of its spectators that they imagine the work’s content. This could be labelled an intention-response theory of the difference between fiction and nonfiction. While watching Supersize Me I am as a spectator very much aware of director Morgan Spurlock making an argument about the state of affairs in the real world, and I assess the truth-value of this argument. While watching Avatar I imagine that there is a population of humanoids, the Na’vi, on the planet Pandora, fighting for survival: I assess what is fictional (true in the fiction). However, when it comes to truth claims the difference between the many varieties of fiction and nonfiction is not as straightforward as this. For example, one may argue that the spectator can and commonly does perceive even a prototypical fiction film such as Avatar as laying claims to truth in the sense that she may read the film allegorically, and search for the filmmaker’s agenda. Is not Avatar a critique of Western imperialism, and our non-environmental lifestyle, for example? It is not fully accurate to claim that fiction film does not make truth claims – there are several ways in which fiction films are taken as asserting something that the spectator is asked to believe. Among the many difficult issues this counterargument raises, I will concentrate on only one here, namely on the case of social realism in fiction. Social realism arguably asserts that something is true in our actual world and asks its spectators to believe this – although works of social realism are also classified as fiction. The solution is not to dismiss the basic theory, but to make finer distinctions. I argue that one difference between prototypical nonfiction and social realist fiction is that nonfiction asserts that its contents (characters and events) are true as tokens, e.g., this person experienced this. As fiction, a work of social realism calls for imagining. However, such a work also asserts that its contents are true as types, e.g., these types of persons experience these types of events. I argue that this can explain what the difference is between the truth claims made in the nonfictional The Corner and The Wire as social realist fiction, respectively. Creator David Simon emphasizes that The Wire ’s portrayal of Baltimore city life is true, and is to be taken as making assertions about American inner city decay. The background for the show is found in Simons and co-author Ed Burns’s nonfiction book The Corner , written after extensive ethnographic observation of a group of drug dealers in Baltimore. Their intention to assert something as true is reflected in the academic reception of the series, in which it is celebrated for its authenticity and realism. Studying the style, narration and content of The Wire carefully further illustrates how these truth-telling intentions are communicated to the spectator. Its documentary-like style mimics observational nonfiction film, and its cyclical narrative structure, focused on an ensemble cast of characters typically marginalized in mainstream popular culture by virtue of status and ethnicity, is typical of works of social realism. The spectator picks up on these clues and expects a certain accuracy and authenticity in the type representations in The Wire , although she is aware that the depictions of these token characters and these token events are not true, but only to be imagined. In conclusion, the theory presented in this paper may not be able to neatly categorize any given film as either fiction or nonfiction, as some nonfiction films make type claims and some fictions make token claims. I do not claim that the difference between type and token claims is sufficient for categorizing any given work as either fiction or nonfiction. More work is needed in order to categorize and describe the various types of fiction and nonfiction, paying special attention to the particular blend of imagining and belief prescribed by each, as evident in what the creators say about their intentions, textual features of the work itself, and critical reception. However, difficult borderline cases such as social realism in fiction do not collapse the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, as demarcated by the intention-response theory. Rather, such difficult cases should compel us to investigate more closely the communicative intentions and conventions at work. In the case of social realism, it is still correct to say that the spectator merely imagines that these fictional characters experience various events; however, she also perceives a double invitation to believe that these events and experiences are typical, and as such representative, of a larger group about which the work intends to assert something as true.