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  • The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts
  • John Bruni
Alan Richardson . The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 200 pp.

In the title chapter, Richardson describes his personal experiences of the neural sublime, featuring a presentation he attended by Mahzarin Banaji, a cognitive social psychologist. Banaji screened a film of a "simple ball game," asking the audience members to follow the ball's trajectory. Their focus on the ball, they did not notice (even when asked if everything seemed normal) "a female figure, dressed in white, walking directly through the group of players across the center of the picture plane" (22). She became visible only after Banaji slowed down the film and pointed her out, to the audience's amazement.

Banaji's presentation prefaces the larger aim of the chapter: to portray the instability of human thought/perception as a cognitive outcome. That we align what is beyond the realm of our conscious experience with (rather than against) cognition leads to redefining the sublime, an idea well established through the British Romantics and often connected, via Immanuel Kant, with the transcendental. As Richardson puts it, the "sublime rhetoric of illusion in recent neuroscience" brings out the neural sublime in Romantic poetry, which discloses "a disturbing but compulsive glimpse into the ordinarily secret workings of the brain" and helps to connect Romantic poetry to the thinking of Edmund Burke, who gives us the "most considerable account of the sublime widely current at the time" (25). In Richardson's concise analysis, a line such as Shelley's "And suddenly my brain became as sand" (from Triumph of Life [1822]), rather than describing a transcendental departure, better fits Burke's sense of the sublime as a "corporeal experience" produced through "changes in the central nervous system" (26), the image of "a mind stretched to and even past the breaking point" (28). While, for Kant, the sublime presents the "power of Reason," for Romantics like Shelley, it depicts "a brain temporarily void of thought" (29), a moment where cognition is revealed, paradoxically, by its erasure.

The book's central motif is that the disruption of consciousness, glimpsed through literature, furnishes us with a better understanding of how the brain works, the act of dis-orientation challenging traditional assumptions about the brain as a given thing. In Richardson's reading of Romantic literature through cognitive theory, the operation of the brain is not regarded as a solely "natural" process, but instead embedded within cultural values and beliefs. This distinction is important because Richardson is highly critical of those whose literary readings conflate the biological and the cultural. For instance, Joseph Carroll's insistence that all literary narratives are modeled on Darwinian principles: Carroll takes recent evidence of a biological basis for incest avoidance and applies it, through anthropologist Edward Westermarck's 1891 study, History of Marriage, to Wuthering Heights (1847), whose relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, as Richardson remarks, has "distinct similarities to Romantic depictions of sibling incest" (106). Richardson notes that the [End Page 405] current climate favors Darwin over Freud, a rival of Westermarck's, which has regenerated interest in Westermarck's argument that the social taboo of incest has biological origins. While, interestingly, Carroll's methodology is rather similar to Richardson's application of past and present science to literary texts, Carroll is on far shakier ground. As Richardson argues, Carroll's claim that no grounds for incest exist in the novel only holds if the imagination is ruled out, which, in a literary narrative, borders on the absurd: "If Emily Brontë is at liberty to people the Yorkshire moors with ghosts, why not incestuous foster siblings as well?" (106). Carroll's enterprise, moreover, rests heavily on evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' "selfish gene" theory but reduces Dawkins' ideas to biological essentialism. In Carroll's interpretation of Dawkins, the selfish gene supports the idea that human behavior is biologically hard-wired (the misreading of Dawkins is disseminated, as Richardson explains, by popularizers, such as Steven Pinker, of evolutionary psychological explanations for human behavior). But as Richardson illustrates, Dawkins suggests otherwise: human behavior is not guided by "'instinctive' programs (as in some other...

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