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1 Cognitive Australian Literary Studies and the Creation of New Heuristic Constellations1
Jean-François Vernay
Introduction
Australian literary studies started to show the first encouraging signs of influence by cognitive literary studies in the early 2000s, a decade or so after the cognitive turn made its mark on American scholarly publishing. The last, particularly prolific years (2013–2021), have been instrumental in turning cognitive Australian literary studies from an emerging trend into an ever-expanding, ripening discipline which now begs for a timely synoptic survey.
While a much larger number of Australian scholars have been seeking convergence between cognitivism and the humanities at large, this chapter will restrict the scope of discussion to cognitive Australian literary studies, namely writers dealing with Australian literary studies enhanced by cognitive approaches. It will therefore exclude Australian cognitive literary studies – an even more inclusive category which would comprise all Australian scholars taking a vested interest in cognitive literary studies.
After contextualizing cognitive Australian literary studies globally and defining them, this article will survey the field of cognitive-inspired Australian fiction and non-fiction and assess how this new direction in contemporary Australian criticism might create promising overtures in the Australian humanities.
Cognitive Australian Literary Studies: Genesis, Definition, and Context
While the cognitive turn was heralded by a spate of seminal publications released in the United States from the early 1990s, such as Mark Turner’s Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (1991) and Marie-Laure Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (1991), the earliest book-length theoretical work in cognitive literary studies was Reuven Tsur’s short treatise entitled What Is Cognitive Poetics? (1983). Yet the very definition of this cutting-edge field remains elusive: an interdisciplinary approach, no consonance of paradigms, an inspiration from cognitive science research, a concern for issues in literary studies blended with neurological insights, the use of multiple prisms, and a certain overcautiousness seem to be the chief characteristics defining this ever-broadening category. The pervasive overcautiousness in the field is a direct consequence of scant knowledge of the brain and its processes, insufficient research in cognitive science focusing on fiction, the technological limitations in brain-imaging techniques, the difficulty of obtaining cut-and-dried findings, not to mention some form of political correctness due to the fact that very few scholars are at ease with discussing the possibility of brain-related gender differences.
Though all these major traits can easily be discerned, providing an all-encompassing definition of a field known for its sheer heterogeneity may prove difficult, but I may venture one. Cognitive literary studies could be summarized as a cluster of various literary criticism-related disciplines forming a broad-based trend which draws on the findings of cognitive science to sharpen their psychological understanding of literature by exploring the mental processes at work in the creative minds of writers and readers. As a contemporary of postmodernism, this ground-breaking conception of literature is revelatory in its attempt to fine-tune a scientific-cum-anthropological perception of fiction by delving into the complexities of the various mental processes it involves. Although conducive to interdisciplinary convergence, the pollination of two highly interdisciplinary fields like cognitive science and literary studies was bound to proliferate into a great many neighboring disciplines, a complex constellation of subsets which is far from forming a unified research field.
It is however possible to divide cognitive literary studies into five major epistemologically related, though disparate, strains which often feed into one another: cognitive literary history (which this present chapter typifies); evolutionary literary criticism (ranging from biocultural approaches to Darwinian literary studies); neuro lit crit (a neurologizing approach to literature branching out into neuroesthetics which covers mainly art, esthetics, and the brain); cognitively informed preexisting theories (encompassing cognitive poetics, cognitive rhetoric, cognitive narratology, cognitive stylistics, cognitive ecocriticism, cognitive queer studies, cognitive postcolonial studies, inter alia); and affective literary theory.
Following this broader definition, cognitive Australian literary studies could therefore be defined as literary scholarship concerned with the examination of Australian literature from any of the above-mentioned strains, or even from a blend of any of them. To be sure, it may be problematic to identify whether some of the scholarship qualifies for this category or not. Ultimately, this is a matter of personal appreciation, as there is no official way to indicate how much these studies should borrow from cognitive science or discuss Australian literature to be labeled cognitive Australian literary criticism. Having said this, the primary sources listed in these academic discussions should give a fair idea of their ideological orientation and interest in Australian culture. For instance, Anthony Uhlmann’s “Where Literary Studies Is, and What It Does” (2013) is no exegesis of Australian literature per se, yet it discusses cognitive poetics in relation to the teaching of English literatures, which de facto includes Australian literature. However, his very brief discussion of cognitive poetics and his sole reference to cognitive neuroscience (the oft-cited 2013 David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano theory of mind experiment which has been successfully replicated by the same team and two others since 2018) could potentially be seen as too minimal for his article to be listed in the bibliography of cognitive Australian literary studies I have compiled at the end of The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities.
Among the five main strains of cognitive literary studies, affective literary theory is arguably the most dynamic one in Australia as it has benefitted from the multifarious activities of an impressive seven-year collegial project (2011–2018) funded by the Australian Research Council. The generous grant has enabled the establishment of a Center for the History of Emotions through five university nodes in almost all states (South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and Western Australia) along with a half-yearly refereed journal – Emotions: History, Culture, Society (2017–ongoing) – published under the auspices of the Society for the History of Emotions, founded in 2016. However, to date, perhaps because of the journal’s multidisciplinary nature, editors Kartie Barclay, Andrew Lynch, and Giovanni Tarantino have only included one article dealing with Australian literary studies (McAlister) over the release of eight issues. Yet, to be fair, Jody McAlister’s article does not really engage with affect studies per se and takes a more thematic approach to emotions in colonial romances. A quick survey of the bibliography included at the end of this volume should conveniently give a bird’s eye view of progress made in this emergent field, which has been particularly prolific over the past two decades.
As Emmett Stinson has it, “The state of literary criticism in Australia resists any easy summary, because it has far too many fields and subfields to present a unified object” (125). Yet, we could argue that cognitive Australian literary studies shares the interdisciplinarity and methodological methods of cultural studies to a certain degree. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, clusters of Australian cognitive literary studies began to emerge loosely within a few Australian universities – such as Macquarie University in Sydney, or Deakin University and Swinburne University in Melbourne – without setting up a proper Center for NeuroHumanities such as the kind you will find at Purdue University, in the United States, or without founding an Association of Cognitive Poetics similar to the Chinese one which came into existence in 2013. As a result, one might argue that because of this lack of structuring into a close-knit community of scholars aiming at concerted effort, cognitive Australian literary studies has had a slow emergence and is still making progress toward becoming a strong and consolidated field to be reckoned with.
Surveying the Field of Cognitive-Inspired Fiction and Non-Fiction
In comparison with American and British writers, a cluster of whom have been credited for contributing to the rise of the “neuronovel,” precious few Australian authors have been credited with their works under this label, even though a few of them are fascinated by the neuroscience of creative writing. To some extent, Sue Woolfe and Colleen McCullough might be the only Australian authors who could be associated with this group of neuronovelists chiefly composed of American writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Nancy Huston, Siri Hustvedt, Richard Powers, and John Wray, and British representatives such as Ned Beauman, Ian McEwan, and Mark Haddon. A few Australian authors have even had the privilege of a professional background in neuroscience, which has fed into their creative writings. The two most prominent examples that come to mind are bestselling novelist Colleen McCullough, who taught in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in Connecticut before publishing On, Off (2005) some three decades later, and poet Ian Gibbins, professor of anatomy at Flinders University (Adelaide), also a neuroscientist until he retired in 2014. Some of his poetry, often inspired by Dadaism and Surrealism, is substantially informed by neuroscience such as “Lessons in neuroscience.” The six mini lessons, respectively, deal with phantom limbs, the vestibular system of balance in the inner ear, the solitary tract known for processing visceral sensations, the trigeminal nerve chiefly responsible for sensation in the face, gate control theory that accounts for pain sensation not being able to access the central nervous system, and the almond-shaped amygdala that plays a central role in the processing of emotions such as fear and pleasure. The “Entorhinal” poem focuses on spatial memory and path finding, while “Cataplexy” is an esthetic interpretation of the eponymous neurological condition. “No Glutamate” is based on one of Ian Gibbins’s scholarly papers about nerve fibers that transmit painful stimuli (Morris).
Although their subject matter cannot be labeled as neurofiction, many contemporary Australian novels, as say, in crime fiction (see Newton), are highly conducive to research in cognitive Australian literary studies. The study of what I call neurodivergence fiction also falls squarely in the remit of this innovative field. For instance, Sue Woolfe’s The Secret Cure (2003) and Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project (2013) and its sequels are prime material for cognitive criticism, not to mention Toni Jordan’s Addition (2008), which has already been discussed in terms of cognitive disability for its attention to obsessive-compulsive disorder (Robertson). It should be added that these cultural representations of characters afflicted by mental disorders are instrumental in helping empathizing neurotypical readers come to a better understanding of cognitive difference. Some genres whose narratives involve the (sometimes dysfunctional) workings of the mind, such as Philip Salom’s second novel entitled Toccata and Rain (2004), seem to be particularly suited to the cognitivist study of literature. At the core of the narrator’s account lie the complexities of a pathology known as fugue amnesia or dissociative fugue. To resist split, Brian (also known as Simon) has to overwrite himself like a “human palimpsest,” with one story superseding another. Salom has pursued the interrelated themes of eccentricities and vulnerabilities in The Returns (2019) with Elizabeth, one of the main characters, who suffers from prosopagnosia — face blindness. Peter Kocan’s total institution novellas, The Treatment (1980) and The Cure (1983), also address neurodivergence as a central theme. Total institution fiction is defined as literature concerned with characters confined to reclusion in total institutions and living in very close quarters with other inmates, all of whom are placed under one supervising and all-powerful authority that is the keystone to an administratively structured organization (see Vernay, “The Art of Penning The March Hare In”).
Other genres conducive to the cognitivist study of literature include books in which the main action is set in a neuroscientific environment or based on neural technology, as exemplified by Colleen McCullough’s On, Off and Angela Meyer’s A Superior Spectre (2018). Psychological narratives like Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night (2003) and virtually any of Patrick White’s novels, as well as narratives underpinned by or dealing with emotions (such as romance novels or works by John M. Coetzee, Christos Tsiolkas, Peter Carey, to mention a few), science and speculative fiction tapping into the unexploited possibilities of the mind typified by Greg Egan’s Quarantine (1992) and Teranesia (1999) should all be included here.
True accounts of neurological damage and neuroplastic recovery as in the consequences of David Roland’s stroke in How I Rescued My Brain (2014) are choice material for cognitive Australian literary studies. Whether caused by a car accident, as recounted in Christine Bryden’s Unlocking My Brain: Through the Labyrinth of Acquired Brain Injury (2014) and Sarah Brooker’s My Lucky Stroke (2020), or by a horse riding fall (see Sarah Vallance), traumatic brain injuries often prompt the victims to process their ghastly life-changing event into restorative memoirs through a preliminary phase of lucid introspective journaling that is later edited into a book. In a similar vein, trauma accounts such as Meer Atkinson’s Traumata (2018) and mental health memoirs like Nicola Redhouse’s Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind (2019) on postpartum anxiety disorder are indicative of the strong cultural influence neuroscience has ...
