Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism by Terence Cave (review)

The winner of the 2009 Balzan Foundation Prize for “Literature since 1500,” Terence Cave is a specialist in early modern French literature, thought, and culture and formerly the director of the Balzan Interdisciplinary Seminar “Literature as an Object of Knowledge,” based at the St John’s College Oxford Research Centre. A product of Cave’s engagement with the Seminar is his pioneering work Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism that concisely explicates the concepts of cognitive literary criticism. The book is expansive in scope but focuses on certain innovative approaches, some of which, for instance “kinesis,” and “relevance theory (cognitive pragmatics),” (198–99), have so far been understated in literary criticism.

For Terence Cave, literature is perceived as “an object of anthropological and cognitive study, a human phenomenon operating within the constraints of human phylogenetic and cultural evolution” (139). In order to make literary studies cognitively informed, Cave believes that the study of literature should be placed under an interdisciplinary scope, with discussion drawing upon cognitive linguistics and neurological methodology. Cave claims that his book is written for anyone who is interested in reading literature; however, it is “neither an introductory handbook, nor a systematic account of one more cognitive approaches to literature” (vi). Instead, the study renders insightful ideas and fundamental principles or perspectives as it explores theories or arguments of cognitive approaches to literature to renew the understanding of specific texts.

In his initial chapter, appositely titled “Openings” (1–11), Cave examines, in addition to reviewing what he is going to do in subsequent chapters, specific basic issues of cognitive studies and pays particular attention to fresh perspectives for literary studies. These include the study of “the cognitive environment of the reader” (5), and “ecologies of the imagination” (6–7). In his detailed second chapter, “Cognitive Conversations” (12–31), Cave brings to literary study the discourse of linguistics and cognitive science. In this chapter, Cave uses “the notion of ‘mirror neurons’ or ‘motor resonance’ or ‘mind reading’” borrowed from neurological or cognitive psychological science in order to serve as new openings for use in literary study. Sensitive to the ramifications of his borrowings from other fields of inquiry, Cave admits there are dangers in bringing such ideas to literary criticism. He writes that he “can only adopt [them] if one acknowledges that this . . . mode of transfer risks becoming a kind of pirate raid in which one grabs some interesting-sounding ideas and carries them off for consumption on home territory” (17)—cognitive literary criticism.

The idea that literature is, after all, the art of language that allows the possibility of applying linguistic theory to literary studies is deeply rooted in Cave’s ideas. To amplify this, Cave utilizes “cognitive pragmatics” and in particular “Relevance Theory” proposed by Paul Grice “on the logic of conversation” (24) in his Studies in the Way of Words published by Harvard University Press in 1989 and developed by Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber in the second edition of their Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Blackwell, 1995). The engagement with “Relevance Theory” and other cognitive theories enables Cave to create useful fresh terminologies for literary studies. The term “Kinesis, or motor resonance” (28–30) is drawn upon from Kinetics, referring to a neutral readiness to perform similar actions naturally arising when reading words or lines offered by the literary works. In other words, Kinesis is “a faint but distinct echo in the reader’s own motor response system of what it takes in sensorimotor terms to perform a highly specific gesture” (29). It is subsequently applied to illuminate passages from W. B. Yeats’s “The Balloon of the Mind” (38–40). Another useful term is “Cognitive Fluidity,” by which Cave means “the ability to shift between different mental representations, imagine alternative possibilities, [and] predict possible outcomes” (69).

Cave’s third chapter (32–45) is mainly a close reading of Yeats’s poem “The Balloon of the Mind.” In his meticulous analysis of the single-quatrain...