Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: An Introduction

Literary studies and the cognitive sciences, pursuing common interests in language, mental acts, and linguistic artifacts, have developed markedly different approaches to similar phenomena of reading, imaginative involvement, and textual patterning. Until quite recently, the distance between them has drawn more attention than their possible convergence (Franchi and Güzeldere 1994). A number of literary theorists and critics, however, have steadily been producing work that finds its inspiration, its methodology, and its guiding paradigms through a dialogue with one or more fields within cognitive science: artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, post-Chomskian linguistics, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. Reuven Tsur (1992) has been developing his "cognitive poetics" since the 1980s; the prominent psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland (1988: 6) demonstrated the advantages of attending to the "more powerful psychology" emerging from cognitive neuroscience in 1988; Mark Turner (1991: viii) advanced his far-reaching project of a "cognitive rhetoric" in 1991; and Ellen Spolsky (1993: 4) trenchantly brought a theory of "cognitive instability" to bear on literary interpretation in 1993. These and like-minded critics respond to the limitations (or, in Spolsky's case, missed opportunities) of poststructuralist conceptions of meaning and interpretation by questioning the reigning models in the field, whether in the interest of displacing, reworking, supplementing, or fundamentally regrounding them (Hart 1998). A spreading dissatisfaction with the more bleakly relativistic and antihumanist strands of poststructuralism has given a new urgency to the groundbreaking efforts of these and other literary critics to forge a "new interdisciplinarity" (Crane and Richardson 1999). Scattered attempts to forge links between literary studies and cognitive science, often in isolation from one another, are now being supplemented by more concerted and systematic efforts within an emergent field, broadly defined as cognitive literary criticism.

Cognitive scientists, for their part, have been borrowing freely from literary studies for some time, often adopting their key terms from rhetoric and literary criticism. Metaphor has been extremely important as a topic for research and a central concept for understanding the workings of the mind throughout the "cognitive" disciplines, as Yeshayahu Shen (1992: 567) argued in presenting a pioneering special issue of Poetics Today devoted to metaphor and cognition. Cognitive linguistics in particular has made an increasingly sophisticated model of metaphor production and comprehension central to the mind's meaning-making capacities (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Computer scientists and philosophers of mind have made extensive use of literary concepts in framing their ideas, whether general terms like "scripts" and "stories" (Schank 1995; Schank and Abelson 1977) or more specific ones like Daniel Dennett's (1991: 111–13, 275–80) "stream of consciousness," "multiple drafts," and "Joycean machine." Cognitive psychologists have built research projects around the investigation of such literary topics as reader response to narrative fiction (Gerrig 1993), the role of deixis in narrative (Duchan et al. 1995), and the oral transmission of poetic forms (Rubin 1995). Working from assumptions closely related to those of cognitive linguistics, Raymond Gibbs (1994) has sought experimental validation for a "poetics of mind," arguing that traditional rhetorical figures like metaphor, metonymy, and irony reflect the workings of fundamental cognitive processes. The mind's capacity for figurative thought, creative leaps, and fictional representation is becoming an increasingly important focus both for cognitive scientists and for scholars of literature.

This special issue marks a new phase in the emergence of cognitive literary theory and criticism. Whereas most work at the juncture of literary studies and cognitive science has addressed issues like narrative, figurative language, reader response, prosody, or imagery in synchronic fashion, these essays collectively demonstrate, in theory and in practice, the advantages of rethinking the history of literature and culture from a cognitive standpoint. Their approach aims more to supplement than to supplant the current approaches and methodologies relied upon in historicist and other contextualist studies of the literary past. Contemporary theories of literature and culture, in our view, have made remarkable progress in...