Abstract
In the previous chapters, I introduced and explained application. The picture of application I present will be given more nuances little by little, but I now move on to consider why application is important and how it is related to other operations that readers perform. Nowhere is the significance of the theory of application as great and immediate as when it comes to understanding the cognitive affordances of literature.
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Notes
Jerome Stolnitz, “The Cognitive Triviality of Art”, British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992), pp. 191–200; here, pp. 197–98.
The dominance of concreteness, of the particular and individual, is not really threatened by the simultaneous presence of abstract generalizations or abstract reflections. Such abstraction is of course not uncommon; it is, e.g., frequent in Marías’s book: “No one ever expects that they may some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms, a woman whose face they will never see again, but whose name they will remember. No one ever expects anybody to die at the least opportune of moments”. Javier Marías, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (1994), trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), p. 3.
Cf. Simon Lesser’s remark that fiction “lends itself to analogizing because of the extreme connotativeness of its episodic language”. Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 242.
Andrew Sullivan, “How the Other Half Loves”, review of The Pickup, by Nadine Gordimer, New York Times Book Review, 16 December 2001, p. 10.
Susie Linfield, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”, review of The Pickup, by Nadine Gordimer, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 23 September 2001, p. 2.
Magnus Eriksson, “Trasig själ längtar efter normer”, review of The Pickup, by Nadine Gordimer, Svenska Dagbladet (Stockholm), 23 November 2001, sec. Kultur, p. 6. I do not necessarily subscribe to all the views expressed in the three citations. In my context, however, a discussion of the merits of specific interpretations of the novel would carry us too far.
This is the version that the psychologists Victoria Kurtz and Michael F. Schober used when training subjects in the identification of themes in literature. Victoria Kurtz and Michael F. Schober, “Readers’ Varying Interpretations of Theme in Short Fiction”, Poetics 29 (2001), pp. 139–66; here, p. 152.
A classical text in this connection is Cleanth Brooks’ “The Heresy of Paraphrase” in Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947), pp. 192–214. There is, actually, also empirical evidence that casts doubt on theories like Searle’s. Kurtz and Schober (cf. note 12 above) trained a group of mostly well-educated Americans in the identification of themes — “themes” understood as significant statements implicitly expressed by literature — and then performed an experiment where their subjects were asked to identify the theme or themes of two specific short-short stories. The subjects varied widely in their specifications of themes, which led Kurtz and Schober to conclude that themes do not form objective constituents of literature but are projected onto literature by their readers. Kurtz and Schober’s results must be counted as evidence against a theory like Searle’s: if educated readers cannot agree on what a text implicitly states, not even in simple cases, it does indeed appear likely that no implicit statement is objectively there in the text. (I am less convinced by Kurtz and Schober’s positive ideas about what readers do while reading. The authors seem to overlook that their subjects are just following instructions when they are trying to formulate statements expressed by the texts, so that no conclusions can be drawn about what acts the subjects would have performed with respect to the texts if they had been left entirely to their own devices.)
James O. Young, Art and Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 2. In the rest of the section, page references to Young’s book are given in parentheses in the text.
For instance, Brian Rosebury maintains, in his Art and Desire: A Study in the Aesthetics of Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988), p. 34, that any formulation in a work of fiction which is ostensibly a statement “is debarred by the fictional convention from being properly an assertion that such-and-such is truly the case”. A corresponding scepticism is found in the speech-act theoretical tradition. Austin’s ranging of the use of language in poetry with “aetiolations, … ‘not serious’ and ‘not full normal’ uses” is well known: John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962), 2nd edn, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 104.
R.W. Beardsmore, Art and Morality (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 75.
Jèmeljan Hakemulder, The Moral Laboratory: Experiments Examining the Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-Concept (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000), p. 37. Hakemulder points out that the results are less impressive than they may sound: e.g., we know little about how soon the effects evaporate and how deeply internalized they are, and the reading of non-literary texts appears to have similar effects (ibid., pp. 38–41).
This is so already in Aristotle’s Poetics, briefly commented on in Chapter 1. The key modern intuition is well captured in Hegel’s words that art “sets truth before our minds in the mode of sensuous configuration, a sensuous configuration which in this its appearance has itself a loftier, deeper sense and meaning” or in Friedrich Engels’ more down-to-earth suggestion that literary realism gives us “typical characters in typical circumstances”. In literary studies proper, the tradition is reflected, e.g., in L.I. Timofeev’s definition of the literary image — i.e., the literary representation — as “a concrete and at the same time generalized rendering of human life”. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 101;
Friedrich Engels [Draft letter to Margaret Harkness], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Über Kunst und Literatur: In zwei Bänden, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967), pp. 157–59 (p. 157);
L.I. Timofeev, Osnovy teorii literatury (1940), 4th edn (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Prosveščenie, 1971), p. 48.
See, e.g., Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), p. 340.
See, e.g., Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 1.
See, e.g., Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999), p. 261.
See, e.g., Roland Barthes, “L’Analyse rhètorique”, in Littèrature et Sociètè: Problèmes de mèthodologie en sociologie de la littèrature; Colloque […] (Bruxelles, 1967), pp. 31–35 (at p. 32).
Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 30. In the rest of the paragraph, page references to Gourgouris’s book are given in the text.
Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 28. In the rest of the section, the page references in parentheses are to Attridge’s book.
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© 2012 Anders Pettersson
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Pettersson, A. (2012). Literature and Cognitive Enrichment. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_4
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