Cognition, Literature, and History

Mark J. Bruhn, Donald R. Wehrs

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138547957
• eBook ISBN: 9781317936855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.

Part I
Kinds of (Literary) Cognition

1 Melodies of Mind

Poetic Forms as Cognitive Structures

David Duff

In poesys spells some all their raptures find

And revel in the melodies of mind

—John Clare, “Shadows of Taste”

Researchers in the field of cognitive poetics seeking historical endorsement of their work can turn with satisfaction to the statement by the poet-critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge that “Poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes” has “a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes” (Biographia 1: 9). Writing in 1815, not only does Coleridge affirm the fundamental premise of cognitive poetics—that poetry is a distinctive form of cognition, amenable to rational investigation—but also he does so in the strongest possible terms, claiming for poetry, even of the “wildest” kind, a logical rigor analogous to that of science. By “logic” we can understand here a system of thought governed by strict principles of validity. Coleridge was to write a major treatise on philosophical logic; his extension of the term here to poetry overturns a commonplace dating back to Plato that denies poetry the status of rational discourse and finds its distinguishing feature to lie in its breach of, or deviation from, the rules of thought and expression normally defined as “logical.” The grounds on which Coleridge offers this revaluation of poetry are not specified, but his statement echoes others in his writings that speak of poetry adhering to the “logic of passion” as distinct from the “logic of grammar” (Lectures 2: 427) or that claim (more cautiously) that verses, without being logic in themselves, “are, or ought to be, the envoys or representatives of that vital passion which is the practical cement of logic, and without which logic must remain inert” (Miscellaneous Criticism 277; cf. Table Talk 1: 126). For Coleridge, the cognitive power of poetry is not that of ratiocination, or abstract reasoning; what distinguishes poetic logic is its union of “thought” and “passion,” the “head” and the “heart” (Biographia 1: 25).¹ In modern parlance, the “cognitive” in poetry is inseparable from the “affective,” and we have here a definition of poetry as a product of the “embodied” mind—a type of thinking that exposes the material texture of thought, its biological substratum or “cement.”

No student of cognitive poetics can fail to recognize this striking anticipation of contemporary theory, nor to relish the challenge of trying to discover the multiple and “fugitive” causes that give poetic cognition its distinctive complexity. It is hardly coincidental that Coleridgean ideas played such a central role in what was arguably the first venture into empirical literary research along cognitive lines, I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929), ² or that the pioneer of modern cognitive poetics, Reuven Tsur, has devoted a book-length study—the most detailed cognitive analysis of a single text yet undertaken—to a poem by Coleridge, his self-styled “psychological curiosity” “Kubla Khan.” Cognitive literary historians like Alan Richardson have provided a context for Coleridge’s ideas, connecting his fascination with the “corporeality of thought”³ and “psycho-somatic” (an adjective Coleridge himself coined⁴) aspects of literary creation and response with the new biological psychology of his time, and contemporary developments in brain science and neurology. Rejecting the false impression of Romantic poetry derived from misinterpreted phrases like “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and Wordsworth’s tendentious opposition of the “the Poet” to “the Man of Science” (98, 106–7), recent scholarship has found a clearer indication of the intellectual character of the Romantic movement in Coleridge’s plans to set up a chemical laboratory in Keswick (Holmes 303) and in Wordsworth’s description of poetry, in a footnote to “The Thorn,” as “the history or science of feelings” (200; see Richardson, British 66–92; Hamilton; Jackson). For Wordsworth, as for Coleridge and other exponents of their avowedly “experimental” poetics, poetry is an art form that offers genuine insight into the workings of the human mind. Whether through self-experiment or observation of others, its purpose is not simply to express powerful emotions but also to analyze them as cognitive phenomena: “to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement” and “to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature” (98).

The new significance that such well-known phrasing from the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads acquires in light of recent work in cognitive poetics is undeniable, and the wholesale revaluation of Romantic literature that cognitive approaches are making possible will restore to this period one of its most important cultural features. In recognizing Romanticism’s far-reaching insights into the cognitive dimension of literature, however, literary historians should not overlook the contribution of earlier periods. This is particularly true where genre theory is concerned, for notwithstanding the developments in cognitive (or “psychological,” its preferred term) explanations of genre with which the Romantic period is now credited, this is an approach already well established long before Coleridge and Wordsworth were writing. Indeed, cognitive genre theory, in the broadest sense, dates back to the origins of literary criticism in classical antiquity, and took many different forms before it received its distinctive Romantic articulation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this chapter, I will explore this long historical legacy and show how insights from both classical and Romantic critical traditions can enrich our understanding of poetic genres and the particular kinds of cognition associated with them. My argument will focus on the case of the ode, a type of lyric poetry that poses an especially interesting challenge for cognitive poetics because of its association with extreme states of mind and with the phenomenon of “transport,” a concept widely used in modern theories of narrative but undertheorized in relation to lyric. I will trace the origins of “transportation theory” (as it is now termed) to Longinus, and suggest how the theory can be developed to help explain the workings of lyric and the complex relationship between cognition, affect, and poetic form.

Poetic Logic

A first step to fuller appreciation of the history of cognitive genre theory can be made by considering the provenance of the concept of “poetic logic.” In the opening pages of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge attributes this idea to his former schoolteacher at Christ’s Hospital, James Boyer, but the evidence of his reading shows that it actually derives from the essay “On Lyrick Poetry” (1728) by Edward Young, author of the better-known Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) and the meditative poem Night Thoughts (1742–45). Young’s essay, from which Coleridge took notes in 1795 and which he cites on at least three other occasions,⁵ takes up the question of the poetics of the ode, a vexed topic in eighteenth-century literary theory. Since the invention of Abraham Cowley’s irregular variant of the Pindaric ode in 1656, the genre, while enjoying great popularity, had attracted critical disapproval as a “wild” and “lawless” form, out of step with the poetics of “correctness” promoted by neoclassicism (Jump 14–23). Young challenges this view, developing the argument of William Congreve that this seemingly unruly genre, notorious for its abrupt transitions and digressions, its irregular meters, and its fondness for extravagant imagery, possessed a hidden coherence. Congreve had made this case for Pindar’s original odes, pointing out that English translators and imitators such as Cowley had misunderstood Pindar’s form by treating its stanzaic structure and metrical schema as irregular, whereas in fact it is regular but in a complex way, and by failing to notice that there is always some “Secret Connexion” between even the most disparate ideas in Pindar’s poems (“Discourse”).

Young takes this argument one step further, emphasizing even more strongly both the wild energy of the Pindaric ode—its rapid movements and daring leaps of thought and expression—and its underlying coherence. For Young, the copresence of apparent chaos and actual order is a defining feature of the genre and the clue to its artistic power. Invoking traditional faculty psychology and the newly fashionable theory of the sublime, he portrays the ode as a mental battleground in which “Imagination” struggles with “Judgment,” a scenario he captures in a metaphor of erotic seduction: “Imagination, like a very beautiful Mistress, is indulged in the appearance of domineering; tho the Judgment, like an Artful Lover, in reality carries its point; and the less it is suspected of it, it shews the more masterly conduct, and deserves the greater commendation” (21). Varying the metaphor, he then adds that “It holds true in this Province of writing, as in war, ‘The more danger, the more honour’” (21–22), making ode-writing a game of brinkmanship in which the success of a poem can be measured by the extent to which it seems to lose control while subtly retaining it. It is in this context that Young introduces the idea that so much appealed to Coleridge, that lyric poetry, even of the most “rapturous” and (“to a vulgar Eye”) “immethodical” kind, “has as much Logick at the bottom, as Aristotle, or Euclid” (17, 21). The observation is applied to Pindar, the Greek inventor of the genre that bears his name,⁶ but Young extends the idea to the irregular Pindaric ode, Cowley’s modern English variant, which had seemed to its detractors to take further liberties and display even greater incoherence than Pindar’s original.

The broad contours of the eighteenth-century debate on lyric poetry are well known, and it is tempting to read Young’s contribution as an early instance of the shift in critical sensibility that eventually produced the Romantic movement, with its lyric-centered aesthetic and special investment in the ode.⁷ Young’s use in this essay of the Longinian theory of the sublime and his appeal to notions of genius and originality—which he was later to develop with such force in his Conjectures on Original Composition—lend support to this view. In many respects, however, his analysis of the ode follows a familiar neoclassical pattern, identifying the classical origins of the genre, defining the standard of “perfection” against which modern performances are to be judged, and explaining the “rules” that govern the genre.⁸ “Rules” are to be understood here not as rigid technical requirements (part of the attraction of the ode, in its modern irregular form, was that it was relatively free of these) but as subtle, even hidden, laws of thought and expression that generate odic writing (or “Ode,” as Young calls it, without an article, making this a modal rather than a generic term [21]) and account for its distinctive effects. Neoclassicism, often derided by its opponents as an arid formalism, was as assiduous in its search for these generative laws as any later age that has aspired to a science of criticism, including our own; and if the dominant scientific model in this case was mathematics rather than biology (it is significant that Young’s “logic” analogy is with Euclid as well as Aristotle) the interest in literary genres as distinctive forms of cognition, each with its own laws, was no less strong. The essentialist quality of neoclassical genre theory—the assumption that literary genres are timeless structures, available for use in any period or nation that has understood and followed the rules—was an indication not of a dogmatic adherence to ancient authority (the “blind adoration” of Aristotle of which it was sometimes accused⁹) but of an Enlightenment belief in literary universals, and a confidence in the ability of modern critical science to discover them.

The scientific orientation emerges even more clearly in later phases of neoclassicism where discussion of “the rules” becomes less prescriptive and more descriptive, and where genre criticism is enriched by other strands in Enlightenment thought, notably the rise of philosophical aesthetics and the “new rhetoric.” This development coincided, in the Scottish universities especially, with a growing interest in historical and comparative approaches, the result being that literary genres began to be seen as historically and culturally variable rather than eternally fixed. But the quest for universals remained stronger, and more explicit, than ever: while narrating the “rise and progress” of particular genres, Enlightenment critics were at pains to explain their underlying principles of continuity, and to identify the features that remained invariant even as other elements changed. At the same time, genre theory, like other branches of literary criticism, was couched more and more in psychological terms: as part of an experimental “science of human nature,” one of whose key areas of investigation was the mental processes that underlie aesthetic experience.¹⁰ If some of the most innovative work concerned broader aesthetic categories like the “sublime” and the “beautiful,” the role of empathy (or “sympathy,” the preferred term), and the psychology of language and rhetoric, rather than literary genres per se, its findings were quickly incorporated into definitions of individual genres, profoundly influencing not only critical theory but also creative practice (sublimity, for example, became a standard feature of definitions of the ode, and the “sublime” ode a recognizable subcategory of odes in general). Formal features of literary genres were no longer seen as transcendent givens, or as technical stipulations to be met simply because tradition demanded them, but rather as means to an end, ways of producing specific cognitive effects.

At one level, this constituted a break with the more reductive strain in neoclassical formalism that valued compositional rules in and for themselves; at another, it was a rediscovery of the original rationale of Aristotle’s Poetics, which was to investigate the pragmatic effects of literary genres and analyze the thematic, structural, and linguistic features that produced them. In this sense, there was no tension, as historians of criticism tend to assume, between Aristotelian and Longinian approaches: Aristotle, no less than Longinus, was a reader-response theorist, and his quasi-medical theory of catharsis—a seminal contribution to cognitive poetics whose influence endures to this day—was discussed quite as frequently in this period as his theory of mimesis. The convergence of these three critical trends—a newly focused pragmatic poetics derived from Aristotle, a neo-Longinian stylistics centered on the sublime, and a psychological aesthetics grounded in the new “science of man”—created a versatile conceptual matrix in which cognitive theories of genre thrived, and insights into the link between language, form, and thought proliferated.

The Pindaric Ode

The Pindaric ode was a particular focus of attention because it was a genre with a highly distinctive formal st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Integrating the Study of Cognition, Literature, and History
• PART I Kinds of (Literary) Cognition: Cognitive Genre Theory and History
• PART II The Moral of the Story: Affective Narratology
• PART III Perceiving Others and Narrating Selves: Theories of Mind and Literature
• PART IV A Culture of Science and a Science of Culture: Theory and History of Cognitive (Literary) Studies
• Epilogue: Literary Theory and Cognitive Studies
• Contributors
• Index