4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet by Karin Kukkonen (review)
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4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition) is the defining feature of second-generation cognitive science, which replaces a computer-like cognitive processing model with one that highlights the interactive dynamism between the mind, the body and the environment. Research on literary reading in light of 4E cognition has piqued scholarly interest in the theoretical and empirical study of embodied reading. Karin Kukkonen’s 4E Cognition and Eighteenth Century Fiction is the first monograph in this field that proposes a historical approach to cognitive literary studies and examines how the novel finds its “feet” as well as its “body” in the process of becoming a mature literary genre in the eighteenth century.
In her introduction, Kukkonen briefly defines 4E cognition and provides an overview of the six chapters that follow. She argues that embodiment goes beyond simple simulation: readers use their body “as a virtual model” to feel characters’ movements and emotions rather than project their mind directly into the fictional narrative. Here, Kukkenon wisely points out the limitations of the theory of embodied simulation (or resonance) widely acknowledged in cognitive literary study. Characters’ actions and emotions do evoke our bodily states through the mirror neurons in our brain, but the responses, which are “rather small-scale, local and preconscious,” haven’t reached the resonant effect (16). She thus urges cognitive literary scholars not to exaggerate the explanatory power of embodied simulation. Kukkonen also explains that the goal of her investigation is to reveal “the literary configurations of embodied language” in eighteenth-century fiction and to highlight their contribution to the novel as a “lifeworld technology” (3). Borrowing the term “lifeworld” from phenomenology, she emphasizes the embodied nature of literary reading and also hints that the philosophical foundation for cognitive poetics can be found in phenomenology. Moreover, the novel functions as a “technology,” like a telescope, which acquaints us with the [End Page 203] information about “the cosmos in science” or, like a notebook, which “extends the cognitive process of memory into the material environment” (4).
In Chapter 1, Kukkonen establishes the theoretical foundation of her study. She challenges the assumption that there is a corresponding relationship between literary texts and the “schemata” of cognitive process in real-life situations, given that the novel in the eighteenth century aims not for realism but for the development of “a broad repertoire of embodied language” (12). Kukkenon calls this practice “the curse of realism,” that is, some literary critics use the criterion of the nineteenth century to make assessments of eighteenth-century fiction, which, to her mind, does not do justice to the literary history of the period. In order to move beyond such cognitive bias, she offers a counter-model based not on a match with cognitive templates but on predictive, probabilistic cognition (the “Bayesian” model of cognition). In this respect, the literary text is regarded as “a designed sensory flow” that leaves readers to make predictions about degrees of embodiment, personal identity and cultural protocol. In a nutshell, literary texts work with readers’ predictions rather than “imitat[ing] natural cognitive processes” (20).
In Chapter 2, Kukkonen takes up Eliza Haywood’s fiction and translations in exploring the formative mechanism of emotional involvement and embodied intensity in eighteenth-century fiction. She first attributes the emotional appeal of Haywood’s works to “a precise management of linguistic devices” (26), that is, to the arrangement of motion verbs, directive adverbs, descriptions of bodily states, etc., to evoke responses in readers’ bodies and to create a certain emotional resonance in the process of reading. Kukkenon categorizes three modes of embodied, imitative reader engagement with the text: an inside perspective (internal bodily states like a “throbbing” heart), an outside perspective (bodily states observed from the outside) and a general perspective (cultural templates like “a princess in tragedy”), which correspond to Michael Tomasello’s three steps of evolutionary development of human communication: individual intentionality, joint intentionality and collective intentionality. For embodied verbs indicating “individual intentionality,” precision is...
