In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Entranced by Story: Brain, Tale and Teller from Infancy to Old Age by Hugh Crago, and: Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading by Marek C. Oziewicz
  • Maria Nikolajeva (bio)
Entranced by Story: Brain, Tale and Teller from Infancy to Old Age, by Hugh Crago. New York, Routledge, 2014.
Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading, by Marek C. Oziewicz. New York, Routledge, 2015.

Two recent volumes in the Routledge series “Children’s Literature and Culture” employ ideas from the rapidly expanding field of cognitive poetics, both finding inspiration in Iain McGilchrist’s ground-breaking study The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2008) in which he connects the history of Western civilization, arts and culture with brain laterality. One of his many observations points at the tangible trend toward the dominance of the left cerebral hemisphere over the right one, beginning in the fifteenth century in the Western world, when written language gradually gained supremacy over oral and visual communication. While brain laterality is not a new idea, recent brain research shows that it is a much more complex phenomenon than previously believed. Yet McGilchrist’s argument is seductive in its elegant simplicity, and it is no surprise that several scholars have embraced it.

Hugh Crago’s Entranced by Story: Brain, Tale and Teller from Infancy to Old Age endeavors to connect individual brain development with preference for certain kinds of narratives, both in consuming and in creating them. Marek Oziewicz’s Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading, leaning heavily on Crago, explores a wide range of texts marketed for young audiences and representing speculative fiction, that is, fantasy, dystopia and science fiction. Oziewicz’s purpose is to demonstrate how the toolkit of cognitive poetics contributes to understanding the ethical potential of nonmimetic genres. Both scholars emphasize storytelling as an inherent human activity evolutionarily beneficial for our survival as species and individuals.

Hugh Crago’s book refers extensively to McGilchrist, although it is not always clear exactly which ideas of McGilchrist’s are developed. To complement McGilchrist’s historical approach, Crago connects readers’ engagement with fiction to individual development, in particular the varying dominance of right or left cerebral hemispheres at different ages. Unlike McGilchrist, Crago is not primarily a psychologist; his most famous study, coauthored with his wife, psychotherapist Maureen Crago, is Prelude to Literacy: A Preschool Child’s Encounter with Picture and Story (1983) [End Page 271] that follows the couple’s daughter from birth up to the age of five, noting her responses to stories read to her, her own creative storytelling and imaginative play, and finally her particular engagement with visual texts. Written before the emergence of cognitive poetics and at the very start of serious empirical research of young readers, the study is nevertheless still highly relevant and frequently cited in empirical work with young children. The child informant of the study must be in her mid-forties now, and while Crago does not suggest that he continued to observe her reading behavior, some of the stances in Entranced by Story must at the very least be his reflections on his daughter’s further evolution as a reader. By bringing in cognitive poetics, Crago provides a more solid, scientific foundation for his observations, for better and for worse. In following human cognitive-affective development, Crago’s point of departure is the problematic distinction between the “Old Brain” (subdivided into “reptile brain,” the brain stem, and the “mammal brain,” the limbic system) and the “New Brain,” the cerebral cortex, that purportedly is only characteristic of the species of homo sapiens. The New Brain is, in this model, further divided in two cerebral hemispheres, and it is here that Crago finds inspiration in McGilchrist, albeit in a simplified way, which may or may not be intentional. The hierarchy seems slightly confusing, since the reptile brain and the mammal brain supposedly respond to external stimuli more immediately (in terms of fractions of a second) and more directly, which is evolutionarily conditioned, as both reptiles and mammals follow instinct in deciding whether to flee or fight. The Old Brain, thus, is...

pdf

Share