Abstract
Sowon Park offers a concise introduction to the field of cognitive literary criticism, how it emerged, how it is defined and how it interrelates with existing criticism. Placing the development of cognitive literary criticism in a historical context, Park identifies a key issue that runs through interdisciplinary research across the divide between the ‘two cultures’ and across time. On the one hand, attempts to integrate scientific and literary knowledge are fraught with scientific reductions of the literary; on the other, attempts to preserve literary knowledge as a different-but-equal field of inquiry risks the complete exclusion from the hegemonic scientific discourse and a further marginalization. What constructive possibilities there are in the future in the face of such a dilemma are presented and reviewed.
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Notes
See Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Science and Culture’ in Science and Education, London, Macmillan, 1893, pp. 134–59, and
Matthew Arnold, ‘Literature and Science’ in Robert H. Super (ed.) Philistinism in England and America, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1974, pp. 53–73, p. 70. T. S. Eliot famously argued that thinking and feeling became separated around the seventeenth century, in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 October 1921.
See Patricia Waugh, ‘Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value’, in David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (eds), The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 33–59, p. 34.
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 11.
David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Collected Essays, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 10.
Alan Richardson and Francis F. Steen, ‘Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: An Introduction, Poetics Today, 23:1, Spring 2002, pp. 1–8, pp. 2–3.
Tony E. Jackson, ‘Issues and Problems in the Blending of Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Literary Study’, Poetics Today, 23:1, Spring 2002, pp. 161–79, p.167.
See for example, Gordon M. Shepherd and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, ‘Madeleines and Neuromodernism: Reassessing Mechanisms of Autobiographical Memory in Proust’, Auto/Biographical Studies 13:1, Spring 1998, pp. 39–60;
Russell Epstein, ‘Consciousness, Art and the Brain: Lessons from Marcel Proust’, Consciousness and Cognition, 13, 2004, pp. 213–40 and
Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘Narration, Navigation and Non-Conscious Thought: Neuroscientific and Literary Approaches to the Thinking Body’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 79:2, Spring 2010, pp. 680–701.
Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: the Origins of Thought and Language, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, is a landmark study in the field of cognitive literary criticism.
Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (eds), The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 2005, p. xvii.
Steven Pinker, ‘Toward a Consilient Study of Literature’, Philosophy and Literature, 31:1, April 2007, pp. 161–77, p. 169.
E. O. Wilson, ‘Foreword from the Scientific Side’, in Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (eds) The Literary Animal, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 2005, pp. vii–xi, p.vii.
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, New York, Norton, 1997, p. 539.
See Paul Hernadi, ‘Why Is Literature: A Coevolutionary Perspective on Imaginative Worldmaking’, Poetics Today, 23:1, Spring 2002, pp. 21–42.
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1980.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow’ in Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope, London, Chatto and Windus, 1972, pp. 41–74, pp. 42–3.
See Peter B. Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, London, Methuen, 1969, pp. 14–21.
Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1989, p. 3.
Suzanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form, London, Routledge, 1953, p. 374.
In a 1927 essay, Virginia Woolf described ‘truth as something of granite-like solidity’ and ‘personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility’; for Woolf the aim of biography was ‘to weld these two into one seamless whole’, to achieve the ‘perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow’. Virginia Woolf, ‘The New Biography’, in David Bradshaw (ed.), Selected Essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 95–100, p. 93, p. 98.
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© 2015 Sowon S. Park
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Park, S.S. (2015). The Dilemma of Cognitive Literary Studies. In: Gildea, N., Goodwyn, H., Kitching, M., Tyson, H. (eds) English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478054_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478054_6
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