Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues Between Literature and Cognition ed. by Michael Burke, Emily T. Troscianko (review)

Cognitive Literary Studies is gradually making its mark on the publishing world with a growing number of theoretical works that blend scientific approaches with the practice of literary theory. To some extent, this slowly emerging current could even be construed as the missing link, if not the ideal interface, between science and the humanities. At the crossroads of these two areas of study, Cognitive Literary Studies offers an extraordinary opportunity to bridge the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between literary intellectuals and scientists, one that C.P. Snow famously identified in the wake of World War II.¹ Perhaps, along the way, this polymorphous field could even share “the excitement of connecting scientific principles with a love of literature” (Stockwell 11).

The earliest book-length theoretical work in Cognitive Literary Studies seems to be Reuven Tsur’s brief treatise entitled What is Cognitive Poetics? which was published as early as 1983 (Bizup and Kintgen 843).² Thirty-odd years later, Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues Between Literature and Cognition added its modest contribution to this emerging field by mapping the rise of the cognitive paradigm in Literary Studies. Along with expanding the zone of contact between literary studies and brain science, this volume redefined the boundaries between literary and scientific knowledge. As literary concerns are paramount in this venture, it goes without saying that in this work, emotion researchers are outnumbered by scholars with purely literary backgrounds, though some contributors like Patrick Colm Hogan and Keith Oatley straddle both fields.

In an uncanny way, Cognitive Literary Studies (my emphasis) is strikingly reminiscent of countless methods of critical analysis that more or less involved a desire to establish a literary science.³ Some scholars like Terence Cave posit, though, that academic criticism might itself derive from science. He writes:

[The field of Cognitive Literary Studies] aims at precision, whether in its way of accounting for the detail of literary works, in its procedures for establishing those texts as objects of understanding, or in its recourse to historical and cultural contexts of all kinds. It aims at rigour of argument based on verifiable textual and other evidence, and if its arguments are probabilistic rather than apodeictic, that feature distinguishes it only in relative terms from the procedures of other disciplines.”

(21)⁴

However, Cognitive Literary Science (my emphasis) takes things one step further, as it purports to be “a form of cognitive literary studies that takes its place assertively beneath the capacious cognitive-science umbrella, giving and receiving in equal measure […]” (Burke and Troscianko 4). This edited collection, like all new contributions to this field, attests to the ever-increasing popularity of cognitivism and to its influence on various disciplines, including those in the humanities. The book’s tripartite division (“Literature Through a Cognitive Lens”; “Cognition Through a Literary Lens”; and “Literature and Cognition in Cognitive Science”) fosters crossover concepts, interdisciplinary debates and pooled findings while also foregrounding the need for a two-way exchange between literature and cognitive science. Most importantly, this volume’s innovative third section suggests that this sort of exchange is fruitful because it enables cognitive literary scholars to “offer benefits back to the cognitive sciences that inform [Cognitive Literary Studies]” (1), thus forming genuine Dialogues Between Literature and Cognition, as the book’s subtitle indicates. All of the authors who have contributed to this volume build on the massive scaffolding that cognitive studies have developed over fifty years of research while also opening new avenues of inquiry.

In their introductory chapter, Michael Burke and Emily T. Troscianko provide a useful survey of “the cognitive-literary dialogue” (2), a discussion that might have benefited from a clearer definition of Cognitive Literary Studies, an area of investigation that, as Marcus Hartner details in Chapter 1, still encounters forms of ingrained resistance. According to him, “the [field’s] lack of an identifiable conceptual core has its downside, making it difficult, for instance, to design introductory courses...