The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (review)

The field of cognitive literary studies is coming into its own. Alan Richardson’s The Neural Sublime is a welcome contribution to a body of work that includes Ellen Spolsky’s Word vs. Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare’s England (2007), Mary Thomas Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (2001), Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006) and Richardson’s own British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001). Richardson’s new book continues his development of what he playfully terms ‘neural historicism’, and, as his title indicates, Richardson’s particular interest is in the Romantic understanding of the concept of the sublime. In approaching this concept through the lens of cognitive theory Richardson seeks to ‘fundamentally reorient an unresolved issue within Romantic studies […] to indicate new possibilities for cognitive literary criticism, and to introduce readers to a given area in cognitive, neuroscientific, or evolutionary thought’.

The book is orientated around a contrast between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, which ‘claims to produce an intuition of the supersensible’, and the so-called ‘Romantic neural sublime’ which, Richardson claims, ‘offers an intuition of what is ordinarily subsensible’. The crucial difference between the sublime as developed by Longinus, Burke and Kant and the neural sublime thus lies in the way the mind perceives and interprets outside forces. Richardson substantiates his thesis by providing examples of ways to read literature that reach beyond what the aesthetic sublime has to offer to get to the core of what makes Romantic literature unique as Romantic literature.

Richardson’s book is divided into several avenues of critical investigation that ‘diverge wildly at times in their commitment to one or another possible area or mode of interdisciplinary engagement but are held together by a consistent set of theoretical presuppositions’. The first chapter introduces readers to the concept of cognitive historicism and the second chapter explains the neural sublime through a series of optical illusions that illustrate more abstract concepts used later in the book. More than just parlour games, Richardson argues that optical illusions ‘dishabituate our habitual relation to perception and our own thinking process, defamiliarizing ordinary cognition […] and breaking down our resistance to a brain-based notion of mind’. The neural sublime arrives at the intersection between these cognitive exercises and our traditionally understood aesthetic constructions of the sublime. Richardson argues that the sublime relates to the cognitive exercises because the mental slips or gaps these reveal are similar to those identified by traditional theories of the sublime, in which the mind cannot fully comprehend the visual field and so compensates through poetic creativity at the level of linguistic expression.

The third chapter critiques the phrase ‘mind’s eye’ from both a philosophical and historical viewpoint. Richardson argues that words are able to create visual stimuli because they form a part of the imagination. The reason why we are able to apply cognitive theory to literature is precisely because literature transmutes our internal visual field into linguistic signification. Richardson argues that Romantic-period writers were unhappy with their philosophical options regarding the relationship of writing to the visual, and that they incorporate this into their writing by developing an alternative explanation for rhetorical processes of perception. The everyday becomes the basis for their own intellectual and creative development. In making this claim Richardson challenges readings of Romanticism that would privilege notions of an unmediated or intuitionist rendering of the everyday world. Against this view Richardson argues that the reason why Romantic poetry succeeds is precisely because of ‘its distance from concrete imagery and its evocation of complex networks of verbal and conceptual associations’. In sum, rather than revealing the world Romantic poetry reveals the neurological processes by which the poet interprets the world.

The fourth chapter develops a critique of Romantic apostrophe. By addressing apostrophe through the collaborative interactions of Romantic writers, a subject addressed by Susan Wolfson in her recent...