From Theory and Criticism to Practice: Cognition in the Classroom

Although “interdisciplinarity” has been a watchword of the many fields arising from poststructuralism, critical approaches influenced by such luminaries as Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault have been in one respect wholeheartedly conventional. Postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and even ecocriticism, for instance, have been loath to abandon the two-cultures assumption, that is, the belief—sometimes tacit, sometimes directly stated—that the sciences and the humanities inhabit incommensurate knowledge domains employing distinct methods and motivated by different epistemological goals. Thus, the predominant trends in critical theory for forty years have largely rejected the notion that the function and meaning of literature might be illuminated by the hard and soft sciences.

In spite of this seemingly constitutional bias against the application of science to literature, a countermovement has kept pace with the traditional attitude that seeks to cordon the humanities off from a present-day psychology. The twin movements of cognitive and evolutionary approaches to literature have demonstrated how findings in the study of human mind and behavior explain many features of literary works, such as the function of narrative and metaphor in textual processing; the capacity to understand characters’ motivations and intentions; the relevance of contemporaneous psychology to work of distant eras; and the correlation between evolved predispositions and literary themes, genres, and forms. Although initiated as separate fields in the 1980s and 1990s, cognitive and evolutionary approaches have continued both to unify and to diversify in the past decade.

The strength and increasing range of cognitive criticism and theory is an encouraging sign. However, the fundamental test of any subdiscipline rests on classroom success—for if the ideas and their application cannot be taught, then they fail to flow into the pragmatic stream of knowledge production, instead festering in some brackish byway. Bringing cognitive approaches into the classroom is an invigorating challenge, since scholars in this area draw not on a single model but on a wealth of theory from cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary social science. To one extent or another, then, pedagogical practices must be revised, altered, and adjusted to suit the interdisciplinary content of a particular course and new learning strategies. The purpose of this issue is to present the course designs of faculty across a range of literary specializations and cognitive approaches, with the hope that these examples will inspire our colleagues to new forms of research and teaching.

The issue offers ten articles divided into three sections. There is, certainly, more than significant overlap among the article groupings but, on the whole, the groupings provide a guide to relative emphases. All the articles in Section 1, “The Evolutionary Challenge,” make some direct use of evolutionary psychology. The operations of mind and their manifestation in literature is the principle focus of Section 2, “Puzzling the Mind,” and a particular emphasis on the impact on pedagogy itself is central to the articles in Section 3, “Pedagogy Re-cognized.”

“The Evolutionary Challenge,” then, highlights the value of an evolutionary framework for understanding literature. Each of the contributors in this section draws to one degree or another on evolutionary psychology to structure and organize the content of his or her course.

Now, the term “evolutionary psychology” admits of two different uses: in a broad sense, it refers to all study of the mind beginning with the premise that humans are evolved organisms. In a much narrower sense, however, the term refers to the view that the mind is composed largely of mechanisms that evolved to solve specific adaptive problems in the Upper Pleistocene, presumably the major period of human evolution. (Often referred to as Santa Barbara, Swiss Army Knife, or High Church EP, this approach to evolved mind is represented by the work of Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Steven Pinker, among others.) Whereas I suspect that all contributors to this issue acknowledge EP in the broad sense, only a handful here have applied Santa Barbara EP to classroom practice.

In “Jane’s Brains: Austen and Cognitive Theory,” William Nelles combines evolutionary and cognitive psychology to have students assess the accuracy of theory and to strive for interpretive legitimacy. After using evolutionary...