"[Don't] Leave the Science Out": An Argument for the Necessary Pairing of Cognition and Culture

This article arises from the experience of having presented research from my literature PhD and being told, by an eminent critic at a literature conference, that he liked my paper but it would be better if I were to "leave the science out." My thesis was interdisciplinary with experimental psychology, reading research on the cognitive workings of memory alongside the poetic engagements with memory offered by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. Though not formally cosupervised, I was often found bending the ears of those in the psychology department or questioning them by email. In the conference paper, I was drawing from the field of social cognition for two reasons: scientific studies demonstrate that people remember others by reducing them to stereotypical features related to their profession; and Thomas Hardy had a career-long habit of individuating characters who might otherwise be consumed into an undifferentiated category, such as "labourers."¹ For the literary critic in question, these two modes of thinking through the same questions bore no relation to one another.

It was no mistake that this scholar used the catchall term "science," rather than the more precise "psychology," in the construction "leave the science out." As a Literature and Science PhD student, and now as an Early Career Researcher (ECR), I have been told many times that English does not need to be "propped up" by the sciences, but that is never what I have suggested. As we are all aware, allowing a cooperative rather than competitive relation between literature and science leads to insightful and provocative research; no one is asking that literature be treated as nothing more than data, but instead signaling that results provided by psychological experimentation bear interestingly on literary texts. Only pockets of literary scholarship have taken what might be called a cognitive turn, where the use of psychological sources is an accepted methodology.² Yet psychology is fundamental to the writing (and reading) of texts, since they are the products of the same human minds that psychology seeks to understand. The many shared disciplinary concerns between literature and psychology include patterns of thought, perception, and affect.³

I have thought a lot about how I would (should) have replied to my senior. In what follows, I offer three ways of thinking about why, in this case, cognitive psychology should be left in discussions of literary texts and culture.

Do Not Fear Anachronism: Contemporary Science Is Relevant

One thing I have noticed within Literature and Science circles is that outside certain specific fields (such as medical humanities), scholars are quite coy about including contemporary scientific thinking in their research. By "contemporary," I mean those advances in scientific knowledge that occurred after a writer has published his or her work. Admittedly, this phenomenon is in part due to the fact that many Literature and Science scholars might self-describe as history of science specialists. However, there seems to be an anxiety around reading older literature alongside contemporary scientific discoveries—a New Historicist anxiety that being anachronistic might taint one's reading of literature in all kinds of unforgivable ways.

While there are many points to be made about what could and could not be known at the time of the production of a given literary work, scholars should feel more relaxed about responding to the wealth of information gained in the intervening years. In my own work, I have primarily looked at cognitive psychology (which has historical ties to literary criticism, thanks to William James and, later, I. A. Richards), discovering the ways in which humans are inclined to think has implications for how they write and how they read.

As a recent PhD student, I am well aware of the oft-touted test of one's research: does it constitute "an original contribution to knowledge?" One way to ensure that it does is to apply what is now known about the mind, and its cognitive predispositions to what was known by a given author. To do so is not to claim, for example, that Hardy knew...