The View of Where We've Been and Where We'd Like to Go

Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. $115.00 hc. $33.95 sc. 176 pp.

Gavins, Joanna, and Gerald Steen, eds. 2003. Cognitive Poetics in Practice. London and New York: Routledge. $125.00 hc. $34.95 sc. 173 pp.

Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. $21.00 sc. 396 pp.

The three studies that are the subject of this discussion bear in common, among other things, an important assumption that touches intimately on the concerns of literary research and pedagogy. They assume that, in a post-Derridean world, not only is the quest to understand the processes of meaning-making still a valid one, but that today, ironically, we may have at our disposal more instruments than ever before with which to explore how human beings communicate. Philosophers and literary scholars on both sides of the great Theory Divide are wondering alike, inevitably: What's next? How might we proceed in the wake of poststructuralism's rearrangement and even discrediting of the formalist and structuralist strategies that once provided our (admittedly foggy) windows onto communicative acts and the texts that encode them?

To the authors and editors of these books, the tools literary scholars need not merely to dispense with the older paradigms but actually to surpass them in their ability to teach us about meaning-making are most readily and sensibly found in the cognitive sciences. These studies culminate (though in a limited way that I will discuss shortly) roughly twenty years of eavesdropping by a small contingent of literary scholars on conversations taking place within fields like cognitive psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, computer science, the cognitive neurosciences, cognitive evolution, evolutionary psychology, and others that fall under the widely interdisciplinary label "cognitive science" (and that generally tend to make those of us in the humanities cringe––with honest intimidation if not distaste). Literary scholars intrigued with recent advances in learning about the human brain/mind (learning spurred on by the invention of imaging technologies such as CAT scan, MRI, and OIS that allow scientists to view live brains in action) have been bringing to their roles as literary theorists and critics a conviction whose time has surely come: Simply put, they believe that our approaches to literary questions can and should be enriched by an acknowledgment of how the enabling and constraining behaviors of brains and minds contribute to literary experience.

The diversity of titles now associated with this belief testifies to the expansion and increasing maturity of cognitive literary studies. To cite some of the major titles from just the past five years, including monographs, essay collections, and theater as well as literary studies: Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (2004), Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (eds.), The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (2004), Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion and Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (both 2003), David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (2003), Bruce McConachie, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947-1962 (2003), Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions (2002), David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (2002), Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare's Brain: Reading With Cognitive Theory (2001), Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (2001), and Blakey Vermeuele, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2000). (Also, forthcoming in 2006 is Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel.)

These works represent literary scholars' efforts to assimilate brain/mind science into a broad range of historical and close-textual readings; and as such, they risk being accused by colleagues in the humanities of being epistemologically naive, even parasitical, feeding off the...