The Futures of the Present: New Directions in (American) Literature

Danuta Fjellestad, David Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134857524
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

It has become a critical commonplace that postmodernism no longer serves as an adequate designation for contemporary literature. But what comes after postmodernism? What are the tendencies and directions within contemporary American literature that promise to shape its future?

The contributions to this book are written in the shadows of 'new media', a turn towards the nonhuman in critical thinking, and a surge in environmental and apocalyptic thought. Engaging with such contemporary debates, the authors map the rapidly changing ecosystem of contemporary literary genres and forms and attend to transformations in the production, reception, and circulation of books. This book takes for granted that American literature does have a future, although whatever this future holds, it is unlikely to be what we expect. At this historical juncture, the American novel seems to carve its future though an engagement with issues at the forefront of our present, thereby ensuring its own ongoing contemporaneity. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studia Neophilologica.

Minds, Messages, and the Moral Imagination in the Media of Fiction: Inanimate Alice between Cognitive and Rhetorical Paradigms

JOHN DAVID ZUERN

1. Introduction

For scholars and teachers of literature in the United States, disturbing trends within the American education system are instilling a new urgency into old critical debates about the value of fiction, poetry, drama, and other forms of creative writing for the intellectual and moral development of their audiences. At American public universities, and at many private schools across the country as well, institutional support for the humanities has been shrinking over the past several decades as increasingly scarce resources are routed toward disciplines that appear to have more immediate economic and social benefits. Seeking justifications for downsizing and eliminating programs focusing on literature, culture, and the arts, upper-level university administrators turn to the results of assessment protocols that typically apply the same criteria to research and teaching in all disciplines, putting the humanities at a disadvantage in comparison with the more “productive” social and natural sciences.¹ Although the study of literature may appear to have a more secure position in American primary and secondary public schools, where it remains a key component of the language-arts curriculum, the same narrow pragmatism and the emphasis on quantifiable outcomes are reflected in a new set of curriculum recommendations, the Common Core State Standards, which were introduced in 2010 and have been adopted by public school systems in an overwhelming majority of the states.² The Common Core prescribes an approach to literary analysis that relies heavily on a text-immanent orientation to literary analysis reminiscent of the American New Criticism, encourages the absorption and measurably “correct” application of critical terminology, and privileges “informational” non-fiction over novels, short stories, poems, and dramas. Critics allege that a pedagogy founded on Common Core recommendations reduces the encounter with intellectually, emotionally, and ethically challenging texts to one among many learning routines designed to prepare students for the tightly circumscribed demands of state-mandated standardized testing rather than for the complex challenges of social life.³

One especially trenchant and theoretically sophisticated critique of the Common Core has recently emerged within the field of narrative studies, framed by Peter Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft’s essay “Euclid at the Core: Recentering Literary Education,” which serves as the anchor text for a 2014 issue of the journal Style devoted to a forum discussion of the Common Core’s language-arts recommendations. In “Euclid at the Core,” Rabinowitz and Bancroft propose an alternative pedagogy grounded in a model of the relationship between works of literature and their readers that elegantly combines components from both rhetorically oriented and cognitively oriented approaches to the study of narrative, bringing together – though not necessarily harmonizing – two positions in a critical dialogue that has been animating scholarship in narrative studies since the “cognitive turn” of the 1990s. Given their focus on the Common Core, Rabinowitz and Bancroft’s arguments are most immediately relevant to language-arts teachers in primary and secondary schools, but they have broad implications for teachers of literature at all levels and, moreover, for all critics and theorists of narrative forms.

While I fully concur with Rabinowitz and Bancroft’s critique of the Common Core, my principal aim in this essay is to point out what I see as a limitation – and potentially a risk – in Rabinowitz and Bancroft’s privileging of the cognitive paradigm to promote “mind-reading as the central principle” (2014: 19) of an effective literary pedagogy. I am particularly concerned with the ramifications of associating, as they do, the ethical agency of fiction so closely to the reader’s imaginative capacity to access and evaluate the mental functioning of characters and authors. I am also interested in widening the scope of Rabinowitz and Bancroft’s proposal, which focuses predominantly on literature in print, to encompass fictions in digital formats, including computer games, which are now the primary medium in which many Americans are engaging with stories, and which are increasingly finding their way into the curricula of American schools. Rather than call into question the undoubtedly powerful effects of literary mind-reading, I want to show how the rhetorical configuration of some fictional texts, especially (but by no means exclusively) those employing the affordances of digital media, can activate the moral imagination – appealing to readers, calling them to account, and obligating them – in ways that cannot be readily subsumed under the model of mind-reading. For that reason, the potentially salutary effects of these rhetorical structures might escape the notice of theorists and teachers who, when accounting for a reader’s moral engagements with a text, privilege the role of minds over the ethical impact of the text’s specific function as a message, a message that at times presents itself not only as an invitation but also as a demand, a summons, or a plea.

My investment in identifying an ethical agency in fiction that does not rely on a reader’s telepathic relationships with characters or authors has been prompted by the specific institutional pressures under which I work as a teacher of literature at an American university. In what follows, after an overview of Rabinowitz and Bancroft’s proposal, I offer a brief description of those formative pressures and explain why they have led me to prioritize the rhetorical aspects of fictional texts, in particular their specific strategies for appealing to the reader’s moral imagination, over the texts’ explicit or implicit representations of mental functioning whenever fiction is recruited in the service of an ethics-education agenda – as it has been in most of the literature classes I have been teaching for more than a decade. I sketch a theoretical rationale for this prioritization by way of a comparison of David Herman’s cognitively oriented concept of “joint attentional frames” (or “scenes”) with Richard Walsh’s rhetorically oriented concept of “interpellation,” indicating why I find Walsh’s formulation better able to isolate the kind of ethical experience I am seeking to identify, one that remains relatively autonomous from whatever mind-reading, identification, or empathy the narrative might also solicit. To provide an example of a work of fiction that in my view provides such an experience, I analyze an episode in Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph’s web-based electronic novel Inanimate Alice, a text that allows me to extend the discussion Rabinowitz and Bancroft inaugurate in “Euclid at the Core” to fictions in digital formats. Returning to “Euclid at the Core,” my conclusion reiterates the value of separating at least one component of fiction’s ethical agency from its invitation to read characters’ and authors’ minds, especially in light of the moral quandaries confronting students poised to begin their professional lives in the present-day political and cultural climate of the United States.

2. Mind-reading at the core

As I note above, Rabinowitz and Bancroft’s proposal draws theoretical resources from both the rhetorical and cognitive paradigms for the study of narrative. In place of the Common Core’s under-theorized, reductive program for textual analysis, they “propose starting instead from the rhetorical relationship between author and reader mediated by a text, recognizing that this relationship is both socially conditioned and rule governed” (2014: 8). This aspect of their approach upholds the tenets of a critical paradigm elaborated by theorists like James Phelan (1996; 2005; 2007; Herman et al. 2012), Richard Walsh (2007), and Rabinowitz himself, recently in partnership with Phelan (Herman et al. 2012), which emphasizes the rhetorical function of the fictional narrative as a constructed, mediated message, “somebody telling somebody else on a particular occasion for some purpose that something happened” (Phelan 1996: 219). At the same time, when Rabinowitz and Bancroft assert that “part of the essential design of a literary text is the expectation that the reader or viewer will engage in the act of mind-reading” (2014: 11), they invoke the work of theorists like David Herman (2004; 2013; Herman et al. 2012) Patrick Colm Hogan (2003; 2011), Alan Palmer (2004), and Lisa Zunshine (2006; 2008), who have enlisted what cognitive scientists and philosophers of language call Theory of Mind—our built-in capacity to recognize that other people have thoughts and feelings that resemble our own—to establish a critical paradigm emphasizing the role of the minds of characters, readers, and authors in the experience of fiction.

Referring in particular to Zunshine’s (2006) conviction that the pleasures and benefits of reading fiction lie in its unique capacity to exercise readers’ theory of mind,⁴ Rabinowitz and Bancroft conjoin rhetorical and cognitive orientation in the compelling metaphor of an invitation: “As a speech act, literature is fundamentally an invitation, specifically an invitation, designed for us, to read the mind of the author” (12). The virtue of this formulation, from a pedagogical standpoint, is that in principle the text remains a discrete object of analysis (as a crafted message, the components of which can be identified and described) while at the same time readers are encouraged to enter active intellectual and emotional relationships with it (as an opportunity to read minds). On the whole, this model of fictional discourse as a dynamic invitation is far more amenable to a rich, stimulating, and rigorous pedagogy than the static conception of the literary text promulgated in the Common Core standards.

Rabinowitz and Bancroft also seek to demonstrate how their approach fosters students’ engagement with the ethical dimensions of literature, and it is on this point that I take some exception to their otherwise inspiring vision. They rightly fault the Common Core model for skirting difficult ethical issues; in their view, “recognizing the ethical issues characters and authors raise either intentionally or not is essential to choosing which texts to include in the curriculum — and, even more, how to talk about them” (25). They steer clear of the assumption that fiction achieves ethical, “pro-social” effects by promoting the reader’s empathy with characters, heeding in particular Suzanne Keen’s critique of that position (2007), but insofar as their conception of fiction’s ethical effects remains contained within their model of reading as “mind-reading,” it seems to presuppose the same fluid boundary between real readers and fictional entities that underwrites the fiction-promotes-empathy argument.

In this regard, I concur with Brian Richardson’s response to “Euclid at the Core” in the Style forum. In keeping with his advocacy in Unnatural Voices (2006) for greater critical attention to fiction’s antimimetic elements, Richardson expresses his discomfort with the tendency of Rabinowitz and Bancroft’s model of mind-reading to conflate fictional characters with real people, potentially creating an environment for “the worst kind of conventional moralizing” (2014: 76). Lest we overlook the fact that “poetic justice is not the same thing as legal justice” (2014: 77), Richardson cautions, “the mimetic aspect of fiction must not be overemphasized; its limitations need to be identified and its significance balanced by the work’s other aspects. These include the work’s formal concerns and parallels, its genre status […], and even antimimetic gestures that proclaim the fictional nature of the narrative” (2014: 77). Responding to Richardson in the final essay in the Style issue, Rabinowitz and Bancroft again combine the terminology of the cognitive and rhetorical paradigms to insist on the importance of allowing students to assume moral positions “through their own mind-reading” and of ensuring that discussions “include the individual and particular way each student relates to the constellation of characters and the implied author” (2014: 99). This rejoinder continues to tie the reader’s ethical engagement to relationships among real and imagined minds, and it still risks occluding the ethical potential inhering in fiction’s specific strategies of rhetorical address, which are not limited to the discursive role of the (supposedly mind-like) implied author. As I explain in the next section, this objection to what I, along with Richardson, see as a confining mimeticism in the mind-reading model of ethical engagement emerges from the theoretical and practical challenges I have confronted (and still confront) in my effort to contribute to an ethics-focused curriculum at my home university.

3. Institutional context: Fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Futures of American Literature
• 1. Minds, Messages, and the Moral Imagination in the Media of Fiction: Inanimate Alice between Cognitive and Rhetorical Paradigms
• 2. “Take that you intellectuals!” and “kaPOW!”: Adam Thirlwell and the Metamodernist Future of Style
• 3. The Paradoxes of “Unnatural” Mimesis in Gordon Sheppard’s HA!
• 4. Utopia, Sort of: A Case Study in Metamodernism
• 5. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, the Anthropocene, and the Scales of Literature
• 6. The Space of Genre in the New Green Novel
• 7. A Sociological Imagination
• 8. The Role of Place in the Post-Apocalypse: Contrasting The Road and World War Z
• 9. Walking as a Metaphor for Narrativity
• Index