In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Social Minds in the Novel by Alan Palmer, and: Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy by Kay Young
  • Anne Stiles (bio)
Social Minds in the Novel, by Alan Palmer; pp. viii + 220. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010, $49.95.
Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy, by Kay Young; pp. x + 218. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010, $59.95, $26.95 paper.

Since the so-called cognitive turn of the 1990s, literary critics have increasingly applied the insights of psychologists, philosophers of mind, and cognitive scientists to the study of literary works. Scholars such as Alan Richardson, Lisa Zunshine, and Patrick Colm Hogan have demonstrated the ways in which narrative structures reflect the functioning of the human brain. They have helped to explain why certain types of stories prove consistently appealing, why narrative plays a crucial role in comprehension, and why our storytelling abilities evolved in the first place. But for all its interdisciplinary promise, cognitive literary criticism remains a polarizing field. Cognitive literary critics are sometimes accused of biological determinism and anachronism, especially when they apply twenty-first-century cognitive theories to literature of earlier periods.

Alan Palmer’s Social Minds in the Novel and Kay Young’s Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy make strong cases for the usefulness of cognitive literary approaches to the study of the nineteenth-century novel. Palmer and Young view the nineteenth-century novel as a social art form that elucidates group dynamics and the embodied character of individual minds. Curiously, the authors focus on many of the same works, such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) and Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818). They have chosen such canonical works, I suspect, in order to demonstrate that cognitive approaches can illuminate even the most frequently analyzed texts.

While they address similar topics, Palmer and Young bring to their subject matter vastly different abilities and convictions. Palmer is a systematic thinker whose strength lies in his theoretical opening chapters rather than in his readings of individual literary works, which sometimes feel repetitive and flat-footed. By contrast, Young is an adept interpreter of novels by Austen, Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. She is less committed to a particular theory than to teasing out every nuance of a given literary work.

In Social Minds, Palmer argues that “the cognitive approach is the basis of all” other types of literary criticism, whether Marxist, feminist, historicist, or so on, because all rely on a basic understanding of the human mind (7). Social Minds is the sequel to Palmer’s earlier book on cognitive approaches to literature, Fictional Minds (2004), which won the MLA prize for independent scholars in 2005. That book draws on neuroscience, psycholinguistics, psychology, and philosophy of mind to show the ways in which characters’ minds work similarly to real minds. Readers understand the plots of novels, Palmer argues, because we share with the characters certain basic mental functions and structures.

While Fictional Minds provides a framework for understanding characters’ mental functions, the purpose of Social Minds is to “put that framework into practice” [End Page 107] via sustained close readings of several novels (16). Palmer focuses on nineteenth-century novels because of their “externalist” perspective that emphasizes “active, public, social” behaviors rather than introspective or solitary behaviors (39). He argues that individual characters can only be fully understood as elements in complex social networks. By attending to social context, Social Minds paints a different picture than traditional narratological approaches, which typically focus on soliloquies, free indirect discourse, and other literary forms that privilege individuality and introspection. Palmer’s two opening chapters present these ideas in a clear and engaging style, so that even the less theoretically inclined will enjoy reading them.

In chapter 3, Palmer examines “intermental” thinking: that is, collective or shared thinking that takes place within groups, often at a nonverbal or subconscious level. He presents the town of Middlemarch as an intermental unit that behaves like a character in its own right. The collective mind of the town influences each individual in Eliot’s novel, particularly those whose behavior challenges the status quo. Lydgate, for...

pdf

Share