The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (review)

Rather than resisting the research and social power of the sciences, the field of literary studies has new opportunities to leverage scientific discoveries, particularly in psychology and neuroscience, to argue for its own enduring relevance. Scholars can draw on the intellectual freedom and breadth that have always been part of literary studies and that allowed literary scholars (Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, for instance) to make such inroads across the disciplines during the turn to theory in the 1980s. A similar openness to interdisciplinarity places literary scholars at the forefront of reconfiguring visual studies in the 1990s, through the work of W. T. J. Mitchell, Mieke Bal, and others.

The Neural Sublime begins with precisely this question: namely, “What do literary studies stand to gain from greater engagement with recent work in neuroscience and … the sciences of brain and mind?” (ix). Richardson does not claim to provide a single answer but delivers six essays in which he experiments with different clusters of research in the cognitive sciences as starting points or interpretive Gestalten for readings of Romantic texts. Richardson claims to take the iconoclasm of the New Historicism further “by making more pronounced and extensive use of models, theories, and findings arising from recent work in neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology” (xi). He suggests that what he develops might be called a kind of “neural historicism.” By this, he intends a reading of literary texts in their cultural and intellectual contexts but guided by interpretive questions which derive from the cognitive sciences.

As Richardson notes, the “mind’s embodiment” or materialist conceptions of mind have certainly been “thinkable” at various points in history, including during the Romantic period (13). One question for scholars then is how to think through the coincidence of patterns in Romantic-era texts in relation to “what we are currently learning about the brain and mind” (12). Richardson wisely chooses to adopt discoveries in cognitive science as a rubric for seeing patterns in, or new avenues into, a series of issues which have not been resolved in Romantic literary studies: the problem of delineating a specifically Romantic version of the sublime (chapter 2); the relationship between Romantic concepts of the imagination, the genre of apostrophe and the primacy of the visual (chapters 3 and 4); the persistence of the representation of sibling incest in Romantic writing (chapter 5). As Richardson argues, “noting a coincidence between current representations of mind and mental behaviors and the literary representations of the past represents the beginning not the end, of a process of literary interrogation” (15).

Richardson outlines some of the theoretical stakes involved in the new disciplinary configuration known as cognitive literary studies. In his introduction, “Cognitive Historicism,” he points out for instance that literary analyses informed by the cognitive sciences have tended to produce “synchronic” literary readings. These have focused on more abstract sets of issues in areas ranging from narrative and narrative theory, literary poetics (imagery, metaphor), “discourse theory, pragmatics, and even acoustics” (2). He sees less attention paid to the diachronic: to matters of literary history including the contextual richness of New Historicist literary approaches. He therefore argues for “a middle course between objectivist realism on one side and cultural relativism on the other” (3–4). Evolutionary literary theorists stand too close to the “objectivist realist” perspective, tending to treat literary texts ahistorically. Cognitive approaches of the middle ground, such as those of Mary Thomas Crane, Ellen Spolsky, or Elizabeth Hart, include the materiality of the brain in their understanding of texts and their production, acknowledging “the profound effect of cultural and other environmental factors in shaping perception and representation,” yet resisting the relativism of poststructuralist theory (4). When the biological or material is taken as an aspect of literary and historical context, critics like Crane are able to describe an “author,” as opposed to an “author function,” and can address other lacunae among historicist approaches: for instance, “the question of why the works of one author differ appreciably...