"Literary Interpretation" and Cognitive Literary Studies

In the discussions of cognitive literary studies in this and earlier volumes of Poetics Today, there regularly seems to be at least a fairly broad consensus as to the significant differences between the typical literary-humanistic and the typical scientific approaches to making claims about a given object of study. Even if the object of study is the same—in this case, literature—a humanistic approach nonetheless seems to establish the validity of its claims in ways quite different from those of a scientific approach. Supporters of cognitive literary studies commonly feel that literary study can benefit from theories and practices that are more in line with the methods of science. To these scholars' minds, we can have a reasonable blending of humanistic and scientific discourses as long as we are careful about how we bring the approaches together and about what we can expect their blending to reveal. A cognitivist approach to literary interpretation will try to base its claims on relatively solid scientific fact while not failing to treat the text as literature, which is to say as more than a product of biological processes. On the other side, as with the Hans Adler and Sabine Gross (2002) response to the recent Poetics Today special issue (23, no. 1 [spring 2002]), "Literature and Cognitive Revolution," we have at least the guarded conviction that the two approaches may simply be incommensurably different. We cannot really hope for a blending that will work. The split between the "two cultures" of the sciences and the humanities that bothered C. P. Snow in 1959 remains in place.

I have written on this interdisciplinary situation in earlier issues of Poetics Today (Jackson 2000, 2002). Within the present exchange, I want to elaborate on some issues I have mentioned previously only in passing, and I want to conclude with what I take to be a key question for the possible new field of cognitive literary studies. I must admit at the outset that everything I say will depend upon generalized meanings of key terms that a skeptic (including me) can easily shoot down. Still, I assume that most readers of this periodical will commonly use these terms in more or less the same ways, even if they are aware, as they should be, of how indeterminate these terms can be. Further, it may seem that I am trying to stifle this emerging field just as it begins to flower. But that is not my intention. Actually, I hope to help things along by raising what I think will be unavoidable and difficult questions to answer.

Adler and Gross (2002: 198) have considered at length the term cognitive literary criticism, which, they write, is problematic because it "floats two qualifiers without settling the question of where the cognitive and the literary are situated vis-á-vis each other." But I want to begin a discussion of terms at an even more fundamental level. Let us consider the meanings of literary interpretation. The obvious first meaning of the phrase takes literary to denote the object of interpretation. This understanding stresses the difference between the explanation and that which gets explained. We have an object of study known as literature, and we have a more or less systematic approach to explaining the object that is distinctly different in discursive kind from the object itself. In this most broad sense, literary interpretation bears a similarity to other kinds of argumentation, including scientific explanation. Roughly speaking, in the prevailing models of interpretation at least, you have an introduction in which you lay out some issue or question, you have a body or middle that considers in a systematic way some significant evidence in relation to the issue or question, and you have a conclusion of some kind. The argument moves according to widely accepted notions of logical analysis. As far as I can tell, this remains a nearly universal model of establishing claims. But of course I have spoken...