Some Thoughts on the Discipline [Literary Criticism]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue on general principle – and – to remind myself that, to the extent that I have a home discipline, it is the study of literature. I originally published this in October of 2015. I've written considerably more about literary study since then.

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It appears that I’ll be publishing a working paper on the profession of academic literary criticism sometime in the next week or three, depending on what other projects I’m working on. This is a topic I’ve written quite a bit on, so much that it seemed to me that there should be a section in that working paper that serves as a guide to much, if not quite all, of that work.

This is a trial run on that section. As such it is a lightly annotated bibliography, where the annotations mostly consist of the abstracts I prepared for each working paper. I’ve divided them into four sections: Bridges, Description, Psychology, and Computational Criticism.

Bridges

How you get from here to there. The first one is how you get (how I got) from Lévi-Strauss’s practical work on myth to cognitive science. The second one seeks to justify the ways of literature and of humanists to Steven Pinker. The third places my conception of (the potentialities of) literary criticism in the context of Bruno Latour’s actor networks and his modes of being.

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Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition (2015) 30 pp.

https://www.academia.edu/10541585/Beyond_Lévi-Strauss_on_Myth_Objectification_Computation_and_Cognition

Abstract: This is a series of informal notes on the structuralist method Lévi-Strauss used in Mythologiques. What’s essential to the method is to treat narratives in comparison with one another rather than in isolation. By analyzing and describing ensembles of narratives, Lévi-Strauss was able to indicate mental “deep structures.” In this comparing Lévi-Strauss was able to see more than he could explain. I extend the method to Robert Greene’s Pandosto, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I discuss how Lévi-Strauss was looking for a way to objectify mental structures, but failed; and I suggest that the notion of computation will be central to any effort that goes beyond what Lévi-Strauss did. I conclude by showing how work on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” finally led me beyond the limitations of structuralism and into cognitive science.

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An Open Letter to Steven Pinker: The Importance of Stories and the Nature of Literary Criticism (2015) 20 pp.

https://www.academia.edu/11411553/An_Open_Letter_to_Steven_Pinker_The_Importance_of_Stories_and_the_Nature_of_Literary_Criticism

Abstract: People in oral cultures tell stories as a source of mutual knowledge in the game theory sense (think: “The Emperor Has No Clothes”) on matters they cannot talk about either because they resist explicit expository formulation or because they are embarrassing and anxiety provoking. The communal story is thus a source of shared value and mutual affirmation. And the academic profession of literary criticism came to see itself as a repository of that shared value. Accordingly, in the middle of the 20th century it turned toward interpretation as its central activity. But critics could not agree on interpretations and that precipitated a crisis that led to Theory. The crisis has quited down, but is not resolved.

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Literary Criticism 21: Academic Literary Study in a Pluralist World, Revised September 2014 (2014) 42 pp.

https://www.academia.edu/1970601/Literary_Criticism_21_Academic_Literary_Study_in_a_Pluralist_World

Abstract: At the most abstract philosophical level the cosmos is best conceptualized as containing various Realms of Being interacting with one another. Each Realm contains a broad class of objects sharing the same general body of processes and laws. In such a conception the human world consists of many different Realms of Being, with more emerging as human cultures become more sophisticated and internally differentiated. Common Sense knowledge forms one Realm while Literary experience is another. Being immersed in a literary work is not at all the same as going about one's daily life. Formal Literary Criticism is yet another Realm, distinct from both Common Sense and Literary Experience. Literary Criticism is in the process of differentiating into two different Realms, that of Ethical Criticism, concerned with matters of value, and that of Naturalist Criticism, concerned with the objective study of psychological, social, and historical processes.

Description

The description of literary form is the foundation of a revivified literary criticism. But description as I’ve come to understand it, both from doing and from theorizing about it, is more subtle and difficult that traditional criticism warrants. It is also more important, far more important. Without four centuries of painstaking naturalistic description available to him, Darwin would have had no empirical basis for his work. That’s where literary criticism is now: Lacking careful and detailed descriptions of the texts we’re entrusted with, we lack the basis for objective accounts of textual phenomena. Producing these descriptions should be a prime intellectual priority.

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Description as Intellectual Craft in the Study of Literature (2013) 33 pp. https://www.academia.edu/4262467/Description_as_Intellectual_Craft_in_the_Study_of_Literature

Abstract: This is a series of notes in which I argue that better descriptive methods are a necessary precondition for more sophisticated and objective literary criticism. Description, though it does not give unmediated access to texts, requires methods for objectifying texts, methods which must be discovered in the doing. By way of comparison I discuss the role of description in biology and I discuss the use of images and diagrams as descriptive devices. Lévi-Strauss on myth and Franco Moretti on distant reading, though quite different, are up to the same thing: objectification.

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Description 2: The Primacy of the Text (2013) 41 pp. https://www.academia.edu/4866743/Description_2_The_Primacy_of_the_Text

Abstract: These notes consist of five posts discussing the description of literary texts and films and five appendices containing tables used in describing to manga texts (Lost World, Metropolis) and two films (Sita Sings the Blues, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence). The posts make the point that the point of description is to let the texts speak for themselves. Further, it is through descriptions that the texts enter intellectual discourse.

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Description 3: The Primacy of Visualization (2015) 48 pp. https://www.academia.edu/16835585/Description_3_The_Primacy_of_Visualization

Abstract: Describing literary texts requires a mode of thought distinct from the discursive interpretation of them. It is a mode of thought in which various visual devices are central. These devices include: tables, trees and mental spaces, directed graphs and “sketchpads”. Visualization facilitates the objectification of literary form and objectification is necessary for objectivity. With objectivity comes the possibility of cumulative knowledge.

I don’t give a crap about consilience!

In the spirit of an old post, I don’t give a crap about science.

In his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E. O. Wilson introduced consilience like this (8-9):

The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favored by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences.

Consilience is the key to unification. I prefer this word over "coherence" because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas coherence has several possible meanings, only one of which is consilience. William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He said, “The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.”

What’s not to like? I’m certainly in favor of “the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines.” I’ve been doing it for my entire career. While I filed my 1978 dissertation, Cognitive Science and Literary Theory, with the English Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo, much of it was technical cognitive science, with references from linguistics, psychology, computer science, primate ethology, and neuroscience along with literary criticism. I continue to utilize that range of disciplines – see, for example, my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, which was reviewed in both Science and Nature [1], or my article, Literary Morphology [2], which is a major theoretical and methodological statement.  I’ve got a long track record of linking material across disciplines.

But I’ve not done this out of a desire to “unify” the sciences and humanities. I did it because I wanted to understand how things work. Talk of unity and consilience strikes me as a somewhat more high-minded and less useful enterprise. That’s when I get antsy.

This urge to consilience strikes closest to my own concerns in the form a co-called literary Darwinism, the attempt to ground literary criticism in evolutionary psychology. I have no intention of engaging in further criticism of that dubious enterprise – I’ve done more than a bit of that already [3]. However doubtful I am of the criticism done in the name of literary Darwinism, I would like to think that the critics have undertaken it in the desire to understand how literature works – though I can’t help but thinking that what really interests them is human behavior and they’re using literature as a means of understanding it.

To the extent, however, that they are motivated by a desire for consilience, to that extent are they awarding themselves gold stars prior to undertaking the work needed to earn them – the old cart before the horse. THAT’s the problem with consilience. Its high-mindedness distracts you from hard intellectual labor.

References

[1] Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. Basic Books Inc. 2001.
David Juritz. Notes on a cultural theme. Nature 461, 07 March 2002, p. 19.
Josef P. Rauschecker. Where Science Meets the Arts. Science 296 10 May 2002, p. 1032.

[2] Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form. PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608. http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzon-literary_morphology_nine_propositions_in

[3] I’ve collected a number of blog posts critical of literary Darwinism into a working paper, On the Poverty of Literary Darwinism. That includes my long essay review, “Signposts for a Naturalist Criticism,” originally published in Entelechy and my review of Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories. You might also look at a relatively recent blog post in which I take Joseph Carroll to task for his incompetent treatment of cognitive science, Tinker Bell and Fairy Dust: Joseph Carroll Doesn’t Know what He Doesn’t Know. Finally, and by way of contrast, read my review of William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (2007), which makes more interesting use of evolutionary psychology than the Darwinists do.

Ethical Criticism and “Darwinian” Literary Study

Angus Fletcher, Another Literary Darwinism, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winter 2014, 450-469.

It opens (450):

There are, Jonathan Kramnick has remarked, just two problems with literary Darwinism: it isn’t literary and it isn’t Darwinism. By allying itself with Evolutionary Psychology, it has not only eliminated most of the nuance from contemporary neo-Darwinism but reduced all literature to stories, taking so little account of literary form that it equates “Pleistocene campfire” tales with Mrs. Dalloway (“ALD,” p. 327).

Most of the article is intellectual history: Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells and the “New Biographers” in the early 20th century. From my point of view it’s all preliminary throat-clearing until very near the end.

What has caught Fletcher’s attention is the interest in behavior (p. 467):

There are no religious commandments or categorical imperatives or natural rights or anything else to give a spine to human life. This state of absence, as the Victorians discovered (and more recent thinkers such as Thomas Nagel have lamented), is unlivable. Because we are participants in a physical world, we must do something, and rather than surrendering us to the blind impulses of nature or the idols of moral idealism Huxley’s literary Darwinism reminds us of a neglected source of practical ethics: behavior. Over the past fifty years, the traditional place of behavior in ethics has been diminished by new trends in both the biological sciences and literary criticism.

Continuing on (p. 468):

To begin with, behavior is purely physical, and so it survives Darwinism’s metaphysical purge untouched. Moreover, as the New Biography demonstrates, the behaviors (or to use a more literary term, the practices) encouraged by literature can foster a sense of purpose, meaning, and hope that Darwin’s theory cannot. Such practices are not absolute or prescriptive — the more we explore the diversity of our literary traditions, the more we recover a library of different possibilities — but they do allow us to transition from a theoretical existentialism into a practical experimentalism. Where raw Darwinism carries us to a state of general tolerance, literature can help us seek the practices that allow us to thrive in our own particular fashion.

And now we get the payoff, ethical criticism (468):

If Darwinism leads toward a negative approach to ethics, and if literature’s role in this ethics is behavioral, then a major focus of literary Darwinism will be to identify literary forms that increase our ethical range by inhibiting intolerant behaviors. Many such behaviors originate in what seem to be permanent features of our brains: our emotional egoism, for example, or our diminished empathy for people of a different phenotype. Nevertheless, these behaviors can be reined in by other areas of our cortex, and if literature could uniquely facilitate such reining in, then it could be claimed as a Darwinian remedy for some of the antipluralist outcomes of natural selection.

And (469):

Where existing cognitive studies of literature have suggested that literature can exploit or improve our existing mental faculties, this behavioral approach to literary Darwinism thus opens the possibility that literary form might liberate us from certain aspects of our evolved nature. That is, instead of being a biological adaptation, literature could help us adapt our biology. This possibility is, of course, speculative. To test it would require intensive collaboration between literary scholars and biologists, and, as Kramnick points out, recent literary Darwinists have done little to foster the mutual respect necessary for such cooperation to occur. Yet here again, Huxley can offer us hope. Rather than displaying a “literary . . . resistance to biology,”84 his version of literary Darwinism clears away Lamarckism, vitalism, and other forms of pseudoscience. And rather than reducing literature to Pleistocene stories, it shows that works such as Eminent Victorians can encourage original ways to respond to our natural condition. Huxley, in short, makes evolution more Darwinian and life more literary, so, unlike the literary Darwinism that inspires Kramnick’s critique, Huxley’s version does not imply a zero-sum contest between aesthetic and biological value. Instead, it does for Darwinism and literature what it did for the warring subfields of evolutionary biology in the 1940s. Revealing them as partners, it urges them to embrace the comic opportunity of life.

Just what this means in practical detail is not at all obvious to me, nor is it to Fletcher. He seems to have some idea that, yes, evolution has bequeathed us a human nature, but we’re not necessarily stuck with it.

I’m with him. My preferred metaphor for thinking about this is that of board games, such as checkers, chess, or Go. Biology provides the board, the game pieces, and the basic rules of the game. But to play a competitive game you need to know much more than those rules. The rules tell you whether or not a move is legal, but they don’t tell you whether or not a move is a good one. That’s a higher kind of knowledge. Call it culture. Culture is the tactics and strategy of the game.

Literature, among other cultural practices, is a compendium of tactical and strategic practices. But a psychology that is going to tell us how those practices are constituted out of, constructed over, the raw stuff of biology will have to be more robust than any psychology currently being employed either by the Darwinians or the cognitivists. It will need the constructive capacities inherent in computational approaches, a matter which I’ve discussed often enough, see e.g. my working paper On the Poverty of Cognitive Criticism and the Importance of Computation and Form, or these posts.

Weekly Ramble: Miyazaki, Description, Computing, Carroll, Whatever [Ramble 1]

I’m considering writing a weekly post in which I ramble over what I’ve been up to in the past week and perhaps think about the week to come. That’s what I’m doing now. Maybe I’ll make it a regular activity, maybe not. We’ll see.

The screen shots in this post are from the marriage sequence in The Wind Rises.

Daily Routine

First, my daily routine isn’t so stable as it’s once been. On those days when I have two shots of scotch I tend to have them earlier in the day than my usual, which has been after 4 or 5 PM. These days I may have my scotch as early as 1 PM, but more likely 2 or 3 PM. But still, only two, and not every day.

What’s up with that?

I’ve always been a napper, two or three a day, morning and afternoon. These days at least once or twice a week I may sleep 45 minutes to over an hour in the early evening, which is more than a nap, but then I’ll work to 10:30, 11 or even midnight or later. That’s unusual.

Miyazaki

This morning, for the first time in over two years, I spent time taking screen shots of a film, Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. (Why the hiatus? Changed computers and my screen shot software no longer worked.) This is something I like doing. It’s a way of thinking about a film, of observing what goes on. I don’t see how any serious student of film can work without being able to view scenes over and over and to stop the film and take frame grabs.

Anyhow, I took two dozen shots of the opening sequence and I’ll be doing a post on it, maybe later today, maybe not ‘till tomorrow or later. Just as Walter Murch’s opening montage for Apocalypse Now prefigured the whole film and set us up for it, so Miyzaki’s sequence prefigures The Wind Rises. The end is there in the beginning. The sequence also echos Porco Rosso and Howl’s Moving Castle.

If you come to the film knowing that it’s about the aeronautical engineer who designed the (in)famous Zero of World War II, you know that the film will sooner or later arrive at that war. But why does Miyazaki prefigure it in an opening dream sequence? – for that’s what it is, though we’re well into it before we realize that it’s a dream? This, of course, is an aesthetic decision, as is the decision to end in a dream where Horikoshi’s dead wife urges him to live.

In between, the life – college, earthquake, taking a job with Mitsubishi, a trip to Germany to observe their aeronautical engineering, vacation in the mountains, falling in love, designing and testing a new plane, success, wife dies, World War II – it’s all there, interspersed with dream sequences where he chats with a childhood hero, Gianni Caproni, the Italian aeronautical engineer. What aesthetic function, what ethical function, do these dream sequences serve? Why Italy? Yes, it’s European, on the opposite side of the world from Japan. What else is bound up in that opposition?

Dream-Italy-pure flight vs. WakingWorld-Japan-War

What holds them together? Does it go like this?

Gianni Caproni  || Horikoshi's Wife

Why Jiro Hirokoshi? Yes, he’s an aeronautical engineer and Miyazaki’s family was in the airplane business. But, as a designer, and engineer, Horikoshi created things: something from nothing. That, of course, is what Miyazaki does.

Revised Edition: Prospects: The Limits of Discursive Thinking and the Future of Literary Criticism

I've posted a new version of the Prospects working paper in which I've fixed more glitches. More substantially I've added five paragraphs to the introduction, in the section, "Prose-Centricity in Literary Criticism", which starts on page 3. I've placed those paragraphs below the asterisks.

I've also initiated as "session" at Academia.edu where people can comment on and annotate the paper. You can enter the session here: https://www.academia.edu/s/4fd0fe0106?source=link

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Why does someone choose to become a professional literary critic, or, for that matter, a student of film, TV, or other media? Whatever the particular path to the doctorate (and subsequent academic posts) the journey starts in a love for and deep engagement with the primary materials, literary texts, movies, whatever. The experience of a good poem, a wonderful movie, or an astonishing novel calls on us to exercise our intellect, our feelings and desires, our moral and our aesthetic sensibilities, all commingled through instructive delight. Wouldn’t it be a fine thing if I could make a living by sharing this instructive delight with others through teaching and writing?

And so one goes to graduate school to get a doctorate in literature, or film studies, whatever. But how does that work out in practice? What specifically does a literary scholar do; what is it like to conduct literary research? – for it is the research agenda that determines the course of professional literary thinking, not a portfolio of teaching assignments.

Writers of belletristic essays and writers of reviews are free to engage with and express the full range of their engagement with texts. Those activities were tossed out of the academy early in the 20th century, though their attractions keep bouncing back. Until the 1950s academic literary critics wrote history and/or philology; edited texts; and prepared concordances, guides, and bibliographies. None of those activities have much room for expressive engagement with the critic’s inner life. That inner life may have brought the young student to the beginning of his or her studies, but once embarked on those studies, the inner life has had to be cordoned off from them.

That began to change when interpretation became an important focus of critical activity in the 1950s. The twin doctrines of the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy isolated the text from authors actions and reader’s responses, and critics, of course are among the company of readers. But not all critics adhered to those doctrines and, in any event, the practical business of interpretive criticism has always proceeded at some distance from the methodological and theoretical pronouncements about how it should be done. Thus, as the 1960s careened into the 1970s interpretive criticism began to take on an expressive function for critics, who increasingly adopted one or another “liberationist agenda” (see the section, Ethical Criticism: Blakey Vermeule on Theory, Cornel West in the Academy, Now What?, pp. 32-35).

All of this work had been done in prose of one sort or another. Yes, there were and are oral presentations of various kinds – class lectures, conference presentations, speeches before august and not-so-august bodies, and so forth – but it is all discursive in nature. How could it possibly have been done otherwise? What other intellectual vehicles exist for critics?

Tinker Bell and Fairy Dust: Joseph Carroll Doesn’t Know what He Doesn’t Know

Several years ago the journal Style devoted a double issue to evolutionary criticism. It had a target article by Joseph Carroll, responses from over thirty other scholars, and then a final reply by Carroll. One of the respondents was Ellen Spolsky [1].

In her first paragraph she notes that Carroll’s article lays out an evolutionary model of human nature in only 1600 words. She wonders by what authority Carroll presents this summary – does he think of himself as an evolutionary psychologist or an outsider to the field? – and then goes on to note (p. 285):

Beyond my general ability to follow rational argument, how can I evaluate the claims made therein? The most surprising is the claim that he reports finding a “consensus” model. Am I being asked to believe that although my own academic area of literary theory is cross-hatched by contested claims, the field of evolution and evolutionary psychology is blissfully free of conflict and competition? Especially when it comes to a model (of all things!) of human nature? I am being asked to believe in Tinkerbell [sic].

Those of you who know Carroll’s work will not be surprised if I tell you can he manages a superficially plausible response. He’s a skilled rhetorician. For one thing, no, he isn’t claiming that those 1600 words are all there is. There’s more to it, but, alas, you’re going to have to do some reading in the field [2].

Yet for all the apparent plausibility of Carroll’s response, I’ve read enough of his work, and know enough psychology (from reading it as well as using it in my work over the past four decades), to believe that Spolsky’s metaphorical dismissal is apt. Carroll believes in a Tinker Bell version of the newer psychologies and his arguments use generous sprinklings of fairy dust to make them glitter and sparkle.

Cognitive Science in Its Early Phases

In reading through several of Carroll's publications I found an astonishing statement near the end of Graphing Jane Austen [3] – authored with three others. By this point the main argument has concluded and Carroll is simply differentiating his approach from other psychological approaches to literary study. After running through Freud and Jung he comes to the recent interest in cognitive science. It’s in that context that he asserts (p. 167): “In its early phases, research in cognitive science typically operated in the discursive mode of formalistic speculative philosophy, and it was much preoccupied with models of the mind derived from analogies with computers.” If that statement were accurate if would score heavily for literary Darwinism. But it isn’t accurate. Rather, it is extravagantly – dare I say, defensively? – inaccurate.

It’s a bit like saying: “Little is known about Shakespeare. Consequently identifying the man behind the name has been a major project for Shakespeare scholars.” The first statement is true. And, while it is also true that people have worried about whether or not someone other than the man from Avon wrote plays under Shakespeare’s name, this is almost entirely the work of amateurs; it is not a focus of Shakespeare studies.

Another comparison: “For several centuries prior to Darwin biologists took notes, drew pictures, and collected specimens.” That’s true, though they weren’t called biologists then. And the statement completely misses classification and thus gives no sense of the systematic nature of the work. Nor does it indicate that description and taxonomy are major aspects of the foundation on which Darwin built his theory of evolution. Without it he’d have had no way to do the necessary comparative work.

Getting back to Carroll, yes in “its early phases” cognitive science was interested in computational models of mind. But characterizing that work as “formalistic speculative philosophy” is ludicrous, so ludicrous I can’t imagine how that statement got into print. Any time within the last decade a college sophomore could have gotten a more accurate picture in only five or ten minutes online. Carroll is not a sophomore. He’s a senior scholar with two-decades invested in the study of a psychological movement – evolutionary psychology – with substantial roots in cognitive science, including the early phases. How could he be so wrong about that?

By any reasonable account cognitive science in its early phases extends back into the 1950s and 60s. These thinkers, among others, became active and prominent in the 1950s [4]:

Noam Chomsky: The publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957 brought new interest to linguistics and stimulated psychologists to test his syntactic theories by experimental research.

Herbert Simon eventually won a Nobel Prize in economics but he is best known for his wide-ranging work in artificial intelligence, much of it in conjunction with his colleague

Allen Newell. In 1975 the Association for Computing Machinery awarded the Turing Award to Newel and Simon for that work.

Marvin Minsky has spent his career at MIT and is one of the best-known researchers in artificial intelligence and neural networks.

John McCarthy was a Stanford mathematician who organized the first international conference on artificial intelligence in 1956 and later invented the LISP programming language, which became the language of choice for work in artificial intelligence.

George A. Miller first became known for the use of information theory in studying language. His 1956 paper, “The magical number seven, plus or minus two”, is one of the best known in modern psychology. In 1960 he published Plans and the Structure of Behavior, in conjunction with another psychologist, Eugene Galanter, and a neuroscientist, Karl Pribram. I’ll return to this book in a minute.

These men were not doing speculative philosophy. There’s no quick and easy way to characterize what they were doing, but “cognitive science” is a good phrase, coined in 1973 by Christopher Longuet-Higgins [5], who was originally trained as a chemist. Just when did cognitive science pass out of its “early phases”? Who knows? And for the purpose of this post it doesn’t make any difference. That list alone makes it clear that Carroll’s characterization of those early phases is wrong.

Authorial Intention in Literary Study, an Informal Note

Why have literary critics been so concerned about authorial intention? I say “have been” because these discussions were most vigorous back in the 1960s and 1970s, but now are not so important – though the issue is central to Joseph Carroll, the Darwinian critic.

One might think it was about how one reasons to an interpretation of a work. That’s certainly how it seemed back in the 60s and 70s. But I don’t believe that any more. For one thing, there are a few important cases where an appeal to the author has little traction. How do you appeal to the author of Iliad or Odyssey? We don’t know who Homer was, if indeed he was a single individual. While we do know who Shakespeare was – I give no credence to the arguments that Shakespeare was someone else – we know so little about him that an appeal to Shakespearean plausibility is little more than an appeal to the Elizabethan world view. And then in one peculiar and particular case where we know a great deal about the author – I’m thinking about Coleridge and “Kubla Khan” – critics feel free to ignore or reason away the one thing he told us about the text, that it is incomplete.

As a practical matter, whatever else we might know about a given author, whatever materials we might have – drafts, correspondence, essays, whatever ¬– the text itself is going to be out best source of evidence. The really tricky problems that arise with interpreting a literary texts – I’m thinking here of de Man’s essay, “Form and in Intent in the American New Criticism” – also exist in dealing with any form of secondary material, whether by the author or others. Something else is going on.

Me, Joseph Carroll, and the Search for Precision in Literary Criticism

I’ve been thinking a lot about Joseph Carroll recently and have been drafting material for posts that I may or may not put online [1]. It’s hard, very hard. And if I post them, it’s likely to be brutal in stretches, long stretches, for we are very different thinkers.

But we do share a motivation. Here’s a passage from Graphing Jane Austen [2], a recent book he co-authored with three other scholars (pp. 61-62):

It is the author who stipulates the features of characters and situations, describes a setting, delineates a sequence of actions, and orchestrates the whole to produce a continuous sequence of recognitions and emotional responses that vary little from reader to reader. If the reader is competent, the reader registers precisely what is in the text, just as an observer; if he or she is alert, registers precisely the physical features and expressive character of some actual person.

Forget about the author. That’s a matter on which we disagree quite a bit. To a first approximation, I think they’re (methodologically) useless; he thinks they’re (theoretically) the whole ball of wax.

It’s the second sentence that interests me. One word in particular: “precisely”. He thinks there is something precise about literary texts and so do I. He thinks it’s meaning that is precise. I think that centering one’s desire for precision on meaning is hopeless, and so I abandoned that quest some time ago. I’m centering my desire for precision on form [3].

To say much more than this would require entering into a conversation that will be long and difficult. I can’t do that now. Still, the conviction that there is something very precise about literary texts and literary phenomena, that is not a trivial matter. On the contrary, it’s at the heart of how literature is central to culture and society, to human life.

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[1] I’ve had a bit to say about Darwinian literary criticism, and have gathered those posts into a working paper: On the Poverty of Literary Darwinism (2015) 45 pp., URL: https://www.academia.edu/15853288/On_the_Poverty_of_Literary_Darwinism

[2] Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John Johnson, Daniel Kruger. Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. FWIW this book is Carroll’s most significant contribution to literary criticism to date. Why? Because it is empirical, though it is by no means the first empirical study of literature. There is a long history of that. Given that it is empirical, it gives us a new kind insight into a significant body of texts. Though I’ve not taken the time to study it carefully, it seems to me that there is solid work here, work that can and should be built upon. FWIW this book is Carroll’s most significant contribution to literary criticism to date. Why? Because it is empirical, though it is by no means the first empirical study of literature. There is a long history of that. Given that it is empirical, it gives us a new kind insight into a significant body of texts. Though I’ve not taken the time to study it carefully, it seems to me that there is solid work here, work that can and should be built upon.

[3] My central, and rather long, statement on the matter: Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form. PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2005, Article 060608. http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzon-literary_morphology_nine_propositions_in

You can download the text here: https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form

Prospects: The Limits of Discursive Thinking and the Future of Literary Criticism

Another working paper. The usual deal, links, abstract, contents, and introduction.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/17168348/Prospects_The_Limits_of_Discursive_Thinking_and_the_Future_of_Literary_Criticism

SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2678293

Abstract: After considering future prospects for literary criticism in terms of conceptual possibilities, and preferred intellectual style, this picture emerges: 1. Ethical criticism is the only criticism we can do that is entirely prose-centric. 2. Naturalist criticism requires considerable intellectual investment outside of literary study and is quite limited if one insists on prose-centric thinking. 3. Description has relatively few extra-literary prerequisites, but requires tables or diagrams. It is not consonant with a prose-centric orientation. 4. Computational criticism is giving us new phenomena to examine, but it is not prose-centric. From this we may conclude that discursivity, prose-centric thinking, is the primary obstacle preventing further development of literary criticism. It stands in the way of computational criticism and description, neither of which is fundamentally discursive, and constrains the development of naturalist criticism.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Beyond Discursive Thought

Meaning, Theory, and the Disciplines of Criticism

Some Notes on Ethical Criticism, with Commentary on J. Hillis Miller and Charlie Altieri

Ethical Criticism: Blakey Vermeule on Theory, Cornel West in the Academy, Now What?

Literary Form, the Mind, and Computation: A Brief Note (Boiling It Down)

Description as a Mode of Literary Criticism

The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age

The Disciplines of Psychology, the Study of Literature, and an Ecology of Cultural Beings

Latour, Language, and Translation

Appendix 1: An Annotated Guide to my Writing about the Profession

Appendix 2: Critical Disciplines, the Short Version

Appendix 3: Critical Method: the Four-Fold Way, from Then to Now

Introduction: Beyond Discursive Thought

Abstractly considered, the future of academic literary criticism has three aspects: 1) intellectual capabilities and methods, 2) institutional arrangements, and 3) the preferences of those seeking to do literary research and publication. Most of my thinking and writing about the matter has focused on the first issue, though I’ve made some scattered remarks here and there on the second. But I’ve mostly neglected the third – well, not quite. It’s complicated.

I’ve written a bit about ethical criticism, a term I’ve taken from Wayne Booth, and that is certainly partially motivated by that third issue. Why do people become professional literary scholars? Because they want to do ethical criticism. They may not call it that, but that’s what most people in the profession do under the guise of interpretation, Certainly that is what critique is about.

Style Matters

But the issue has another aspect, and that has to do with how people think. When, some 40 years ago, I turned toward the cognitive sciences and away from structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, and the rest, the turn was driven as much by intellectual style as by epistemological conviction. No, I didn’t have much affection for the predicate calculus, which I learned in a course in symbolic logic (it fulfilled my math requirement), but I did like the intellectual style I found in linguistics books, the sense of rigor and explicit order. I also liked the diagrams. A lot.

There were large sections in my dissertation — Cognitive Science and Literary Theory [1] — where the major burden of the argument was carried by the diagrams. I’d work out the diagrams first and then write prose commentary on them. That modus operandi pleases me a great deal. In the preface to Beethoven’s Anvil (the book had some diagrams, but not many) I refer to my thinking in that book as speculative engineering. I like that term: speculative engineering [2].

There are other intellectual styles, obviously. Some very different from my diagrammatic and speculative engineering style. New historicism, for example, is, or can be, a very writerly style. One gathers stories, vignettes, and passages from various writers, literary and not, and arranges them more according to rhythm, surprise, and repose than for logical progression and finality — though such matters come into play as well. It is a style that can be a bit like literature itself, at least prose fiction, though one can sneak in some lyrical passages here and there, and maybe even a bit of insistent rhythm.

I’ve been told, and have no reason to doubt, that new historicism is the closest thing academic literary criticism currently has to a dominant methodological practice. I can’t help but thinking that this preference is as much about intellectual style as about epistemological conviction. Yes, the varieties of Theory are also prose-centric, but they are more insistently argumentative, if not polemical, and so don’t offer the (often unrealized?) possibilities for lyrical expression that flow from new historicism.

Consequently, I’ve got two suspicions about intellectual style:

• In anyone’s intellectual ecology, style preferences are deeper and have more inertia than explicit epistemological beliefs.

• Some of the pigheadedness that often crops up in discussions about humanities vs. science is grounded in stylistic preference that gets rationalized as epistemological necessity.

I think/suspect/fear that is the case with a lot of literary critics. And that affects the first issue, intellectual capabilities and methods. For many of the most exciting intellectual opportunities require that one think in modes other than discursive prose.

* * * * *

What I would like to do in the rest of this introduction, then, is consider the future possibilities of literary criticism in light of two considerations: intellectual possibilities, and conceptual style. First I offer a sketch of how prose-centricity has affected the evolution of literary criticism over the past half-century or so and then I look at a four-fold division of intellectual possibilities in light of that evolution.

Literary Form, the Mind, and Computation: A Brief Note (Boiling It Down)

They’re intimately related. To a first approximation, the form of a literary work reflects the full economy of mental faculties working together, cooperatively and in conflict, to produce the work. It is NOT the result of some literary module that is but one mental faculty among 10s and 100s even 1000s. That form is to be understood computationally because computation is the only kind of (physical) process that organizes all those resources (‘emergently’, natch).

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking about the deficiencies, the absences, of the newer psychologies for literary study, and the corresponding poverty of abundance (so much to read! so much to do!) that shows up in the literary schools incorporating them (cognitive criticism, literary Darwinism). I’ve used the metaphor of a building, a cathedral to indicate the problem. As literary critics, we have to understanding the design of the whole cathedral and how the components function to support and realize the design. But the newer psychologies study only components, and the materials and processes for understanding them. They give us no ‘purchase’ on the whole.

Hence the paradox of poverty amid abundance. Through these newer psychologies these critics bring a whole lotta’ stuff to the table: abundance. But not what we need: poverty.

And then there’s psychoanalysis, which I’ve defended. It’s been used extensively in literary criticism, and successfully too. Psychoanalysis is, I submit, about the whole mind. And that’s why it’s been useful to literary critics. Psychoanalysis deals in fantasy, dreams, and stories, the stuff of which literature is made. It is thus commensurate with literature/literary criticism.

Psychoanalysis has pleasure and anxiety in opposition (note: anxiety, not pain). In Beethoven’s Anvil I argued that pleasure and anxiety are whole brain processes. Music dispels anxiety. So does literature.

* * * * *

Literary form is about dispelling anxiety by bringing the brain’s capacities into harmony. There can be no grammar of literary forms in the sense that there can be a grammar of language. Language is only a single, albeit complex, capacity. Literature is something else.

We can see literature’s emergent economy by comparing Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” with his “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” “Lime-Tree Bower” is a simple narrative about an afternoon’s experience. Its versification is simple. “Kubla Khan” is not a narrative, and doesn’t cohere in such a straight-forward way. It needs its complex versification – multiple meters, elaborate rhyme – to hold it together in the mind.

That’s the economy of one literary mind. I sketch it out in a working paper: STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind. No grammar. Just the mind.

And its in the form that the mind is most directly manifest. It’s the form the mind regulates. And that form is computational in kind.

But what does that mean, computational? Explain that and we’re home free. Well, not free, as the intellectual expense will have been high. But we’ll be in a position to begin understanding how literature works (in) the mind.

It’s computation that weighs and balances the competing interests imperatives mental faculties. Only a metaphor at this point. But it’s the right metaphor. When the result is right – satisficing? – it feels good (like sugar and spice, now).

Jakobson’s poetic function? Is that it? For his poetic function is one of the most obscure notions that’s every strayed into literary theory: the projection of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination.

What does that mean? Is that what literary form is about? Is that what literary computation is attempting?

Questions, questions.

On the Poverty of Literary Darwinism

Since I've just spent a fair amount of time criticising cognitive criticism, it seemed only fair that I turn my attention to literary Darwinism, or, as Brian Boyd prefers, evocriticism. I've not written any new pieces but have gathered a number of older pieces into a working paper (title above). Links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

* * * * *

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/15853288/On_the_Poverty_of_Literary_Darwinism

SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2662516

Abstract: The central thesis of literary Darwinism is that literary culture is best considered as a biologically adaptive human capacity. Consequently, evolutionary psychology is the central psychology tool kit to be employed in examining literary phenomena. In practice, this has resulted in some interesting theoretical statements, some quite sophisticated. But it has also given us practical criticism that is rather pedestrian. This document has been compiled of six different articles written over a period of years, including one extensive formal essay-review, and a variety of shorter pieces.

CONTENTS

Introduction: What Would Darwin Say? 2

Signposts for a Naturalist Criticism 5

All Hail Our Darwinian Overlords! 23

Paradise Lost: The Faith of Evolutionary Psychology 26

Nature Culture Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories 32

Romantic Love, Conversation, Biology, and Culture 37

Do Literary Texts Count as Strong Evidence about the Human Mind? 43

Introduction: What Would Darwin Say?

Of course I have no way of knowing how the great man would react to Darwinian literary criticism, as Joseph Carroll calls it, though not all practitioners favor this label. He might well approve on the evocritics’ insistence that literature is biologically adaptive. And he would certainly approve of their instance that human psychology is necessarily psychobiology and that we can and should understand that psychology in phylogenetic context.

Yet there is much in Darwin’s intellectual practice that has little or no analog in evocriticism. Darwin was himself a prodigious naturalist, collecting specimens of life forms and describing them. Moreover, by the time he began his work he was the beneficiary of three centuries of such work. Without all this descriptive work available he wouldn’t have been able to observe the patterns which he took as evidence of evolution.

We might think of this descriptive work as analogous to close reading in literary studies, but this close reading rarely involves describing textual morphologies. Yes, we know that sonnets have 14 lines and certain characteristic rhyme schemes and we’ve amassed similar information about other poetic forms. Our sense of prose form is much more diffuse. But attending to such matters, to the analysis and description of form, has not been central to literary criticism. My own work has convinced me, however, that our texts do have identifiable morphologies, but we – the whole profession – have just not been interested in describing and identifying them. Nor have the Darwinians, despite their biological inspiration.

Nor do they have any evident interest in the evolution of literary forms. That might be because there is no off-the-shelf account of cultural evolution that’s adequate for these purposes – memetics, for example, is questionable. But why not take that lack as an intellectual opportunity? Why not undertake the descriptive work on which such a cultural evolutionary account of literary form could be based? [1]

But I’m riding my own hobby horse at this point. The fact that the Darwinian critics haven’t undertaken a certain biologically-inspired intellectual enterprise is no criticism of the one they have undertaken. That’s what makes up most of this document (see descriptions after the asterisks). I wrote most of these pieces several years ago, and they are quite different in character. The descriptions below should give you some sense of what’s in them.

I would, however, like to comment on one issue that’s central to their thinking, the biological adaptive value of literature. I think it’s an important question, and an interesting one, but I wax hot and cold on whether or not we’ve got the means to discuss it in a useful way. The big problem, of course, is that we have so little evidence of behavioral evolution. We don’t know what our ancestors were doing. We’ve got artifacts of various kinds, stone tools, rock art, and so forth, and we’ve got skeletons and skulls. These give us clues, but only clues.

So we’ve got do a lot of constructing and inferencing to arrive at a conclusion. The whole apparatus strikes me as being rather rickety. Still, in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001), I argued that music had an adaptive value, and that was its ability quell anxiety. More recently Michael Austin has argued that anxiety has driven the origins of literature, Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature (2011). I’ve not yet read it, but intend to do so. Obviously I’m disposed in favor of the overall argument.

For the moment, then, THAT’s my suggestion about the adaptive value of literature: it reduces anxiety. More generally, that’s the adaptive value of expressive culture in general, the arts, ritual, and religion. Not only that but I believe that THAT, the role expressive culture plays in reducing human anxiety, gives it causal force in history. But that’s a large argument, well beyond the scope of these notes. I note only that it’s an argument about cultural evolution, not biological evolution.

On the Poverty of Cognitive Criticism and the Importance of Computation and Form

I've gathered my posts on poverty of cognitive criticism into a single working paper (title above). Download here:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/15395772/On_the_Poverty_of_Cognitive_Criticism_and_the_Importance_of_Computation_and_Form
Social Science Research Network: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2656245

Abstract, table of contents, and introduction below.

Abstract: While literary criticism based on cognitive, evolutionary, and neuropsychology has been relatively successful in addressing a wide variety of issues in theory, poetics, and narratology, it has been less successful in accounting for individual literary texts (practical criticism). Moreover it has been unsuccessful in identifying issues where practitioners of those psychological disciplines can benefit from literary criticism. As long as literary criticism remains grounded in discursive thought, where the primary thinking is captured by the prose on the page, it will not be of much value to disciplines where much of the critical thinking takes place in the forms of experimental design, execution, and data analysis, mathematical and formal models, and computer simulation. Furthermore, these newest forms of literary criticism have neglected computation as a model for mental processes, yet that is what precipitated the cognitive revolution. Properly understood, a computational view allows us to treat literary form as the trace of a computational process. It thus follows that literary critics should be producing detailed analytic descriptions of literary texts. Finally, the subjective activity of interpretation should be recognized as a separate intellectual activity and should reincorporate the normative activity (criticism proper) that it has put at arm’s length.

Contents

Introduction: Theory and Practice in a Broken World 2

Alan Richardson Makes a Case 9

What I Learned When I Walked off the Cliff of Cognitivism 14

The key to the treasure IS the (form of the) treasure 25

The ‘Middle Way’, What It Can and Cannot Do 41

It’s Time to Leave the Sandbox 51

Appendix 1: The Disciplines of Literary Criticism 58

Appendix 2: Cog Sci and Lit Theory, a Brief Chronology 61

Appendix 3: A Graduate Syllabus in Naturalist Literary Criticism 66

Consolidated References 70

Introduction, Theory and Practice in a Broken World

In his Preface to Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (1991) Mark Turner declared that the age of cognitive science would put literature at the center of the study of the mind [1]. Over two decades later that future has not yet become the present. Just this year Alan Richardson has written an essay-review of two new books in cognitive literary studies, “Once upon a Mind: Literary and Narrative Studies in the Age of Cognitive Science” [2], in which he laments that the authors of those books, while calling for students of cognition and the brain to adopt methods from literary studies, have themselves failed to make a compelling case for a line of inquiry where investigators of the cognitive sciences place methods and evidence from literary studies on par with their own methods and evidence (see my first post, Alan Richardson Makes a Case).

What we have here is a failure of interdisciplinary reciprocity. The traffic between literary studies and the cognitive sciences is still pretty much one-way. It is that perceived failure that prompted me to start drafting what I thought would be a single longish – 1500 to 3000 words – post.

But it didn’t work out that way. It just grew and grew, so I broke it in two and published the first piece. And the second grew and grew, and I ended up with five long-form posts. Now it’s time to call a halt to this project and move on to the next.

On the Poverty of Literary Cognitivism, Extra: A Graduate Syllabus in Naturalist Literary Criticism

I'd originally posted this at The Valve in July of 2007 under a the title: The Autonomous Aesthetic: A Graduate Syllabus in Literary Theory. I’m reposting it here to give you some idea of what I’d teach in a graduate course on what I’ve come to call naturalist literary theory. If I were to redo this from scratch I might make some changes, but I’d strive to keep the same balance of materials.

Notice that, while I’ve been hard on the literary cognitivists and evolutionists in this series of posts, I’ve included books by David Herman, Brian Boyd, and Reuven Tsur. Finally, if this post at all interests you, I urge you to go over to The Valve (link above) and read the discussion we had there. It's quite good.

John Holbo's recent post on Mark Bauerlein's proposed antidote for leftist politics in the Theory curriculum got me thinking about the question of how, given a free hand, I'd teach literary theory. In the spirit of a thought experiment I've put together a syllabus for a graduate course in literary theory, that is, the theory of literature.

On the one hand, I want to demonstrate that one could teach a course in literary theory that pretty much avoids High Theory and yet is intellectually contemporary rather than an exercise in nostalgia. If I myself have pursued these ideas, however, it has not been out of any desire to avoid Theory as though it were a disease (and, of course, it is very proud of the fact that it is grounded in dis-ease) but simply because these are the ideas that have interested me. They are compelling on their own terms and not simply as an alternative to something else.

As a way of setting an overall objective for such a course, a pole star if you will, I offer a passage from a very political High Theorist, the late Edward Said. This passage is from one of his last essays, “Globalizing Literary Study,” published in 2001 in PMLA. He says:

I myself have no doubt, for instance, that an autonomous aesthetic realm exists, yet how it exists in relation to history, politics, social structures, and the like, is really difficult to specify. Questions and doubts about all these other relations have eroded the formerly perdurable national and aesthetic frameworks, limits, and boundaries almost completely. The notion neither of author, nor of work, nor of nation is as dependable as it once was, and for that matter the role of imagination, which used to be a central one, along with that of identity has undergone a Copernical transformation in the common understanding of it.

I too believe that “an autonomous aesthetic realm exists,” and that one can conceptualize it without having to ignore either the human mind, nor society, nor their joint interaction through and embedding in history. The objective of this course in literary theory, then, is to begin understanding how literature partakes of this aesthetic autonomy while being embedded in the contingencies of history.

First I list the proposed texts, in the order that I would use them, and then I explain why.

David Herman. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Claude Lévi-Strauss. “The Story of Asdiwal,” in Structural Anthropology II. Basic Books, 1976, pp. 146-197.

Reuven Tsur. Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics. North-Holland, 1992.

William Benzon. Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. Basic Books, 2001.

Brian Boyd. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, Harvard 2009.  My review is HERE.

Dan Sperber. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Blackwell, 1996.

Franco Moretti. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. Verso, 2005.

Alistair Fowler. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Harvard University Press, 1982.

On the Poverty of Literary Cognitivism 5: It’s Time to Leave the Sandbox

Note, Sept 1, 2015: I've added three paragraphs about theory to a section, Characteristics of the Critical Sandbox.

* * * * * 

The child is father to the man.

– William Wordsworth

Despite the wide range of literary study that has taken place under the rubric of the newer psychologies – cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience – these initiatives remain impoverished by their instance on functioning as a form of hermeneutic literary study. Since World War II academic literary criticism has used literature as a vehicle for the investigation of the human condition as seen across half the departments of the modern university [1]. All the cognitivists and evolutionists are doing is inviting more disciplines to the party. But it really is the same old party, not the new ones the evolutionists, on the one hand, and the cognitivists, on the other, are proclaiming.

Text as Sandbox

After World War II all academic literary criticism, at least in the American academy, came to agree on one basic modus operandi: The literary text is a mental sandbox in which the critic plays with his or her favorite conceptual toys. The New Critics used the idea of form to isolate the text from external influences, authorial intention, reader affect, and history. Because their conceptual toys – the ideas of ambiguity and paradox coupled with humanism (secular or Christian) – were invisible as such, they could present this as an act of austere purification in which messy value judgments and textual entanglements could be left behind.

Once the New Critics had thus transformed the text into an intellectual testing ground, a sandbox, other critics brought in more obtrusive toys: psychoanalysis, phenomenology, Marxism, structuralism, deconstruction, feminism and the other isms, and now cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. The new historicists have been fighting a highly successful rear-guard action by bracketing all theory toys and privileging a somewhat different set of toys, non-literary texts roughly contemporaneous with the texts under examination. At various points along the way the new set of toys would be brought online through a rhetoric of revolution and renewal, but the basic procedure remained the same: declare the sandbox to be liberated, toss out the old toys and bring in the new. Same sandbox, new toys.

This modus operandi was underwritten by a tacit agreement that any reading of a text was legitimate as long as it was supported by a suitable rationale, of which there are now many kinds. This professional courtesy inevitably led not merely to a multiplicity of readings, but to divergent and contradictory readings. Some critics saw this as evidence of the richness of canonical literary texts while others saw it as evidence of epistemological and methodological inadequacy. The latter have argued their case from time to time, but have yet been able to inspire a discipline-wide austerity program that has narrowed the range of legitimate readings to one per text. They’ve had little choice but to agree to the same old unwritten tacit agreement: Let 10,000 flowers bloom.

Thus much of the practical criticism produced by these most recent revisionists reads like 1950s humanist criticism but with a different set of tropes, motifs, and themes. Thus, in a review of an anthology of Darwinist literary criticism [2] Steven Pinker offered this observation about Joseph Carroll’s analysis of Pride and Prejudice [pp. 166-167]:

Carroll dissects the novel with skill and verve, and will make many readers wish that they had had him as their college English prof. Nonetheless, one is left wondering how essential the evolutionary biology is to his insights. The mating criteria that obsess the Bennett women may reflect universal impulses, but the specifics of the novel depends on the way that these impulses were exaggerated and codified in their time and culture. Today, a depiction of a contemporary middle-class family that worried aloud about finding wealthy husbands for the daughters, and about their being disgraced by a daughter running off with the son of a steward, would elicit guffaws, not a flash of recognition. In Pride and Prejudice, to be sure, these worries are set in tension with other concerns, but a skeptic could say that the tension is between individual and cultural demands, not individual and evolutionary ones.

That certainly accords with my own impression of Carroll’s work, and that of others as well, such as Brian Boyd’s treat of Iliad and Horton Hears a Who in The Origin of Stories [3].

On the Poverty of Literary Cognitivism 2: What I Learned When I Walked off the Cliff of Cognitivism

In the first post in this series I took a look at an essay-review Alan Richardson wrote about two recent books in literary cognitivism and asserted, in effect, that you can’t get there from here [1]. By “there” I mean a reciprocal relationship between literary study and “the mind and brain sciences” in which “methods, finds, or evidence from a literary field” (Richardson, p. 368) is important. And by “here” I meant cognitive literary criticism as it has developed over the last two decades or so. It’s not that I don’t think that such literary finds or evidence exist but that current literary methods enable scholars to find them and present them in a convincing way.

The problem, I asserted, is that the cognitive revolution was driven by the idea of computation and that neither the literary cognitivists, nor their twin, the literary Darwinists, have faced up to computation in a deep way. Until they do so, their efforts will be still born. No matter how widely they read in the newer psychologies, no matter how many findings, ideas, and models they incorporate into their theorizing, they won’t produce results that are compelling to thinkers in the mind and brain sciences.

The purpose of this post is to explain how I arrived at my belief computation must be dealt with. But the argument will be a strange one because it will tell the story of how my own journey computation semantics led to a satisfying failure and thereby forced me to reconceptualize what it means for a literary scholar to come to terms with computation. But I’ll save that reconceptualization for a later post.

From “Kubla Khan” to Computation

I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins when the French landed back in the Jurassic era of academic literary criticism. Though I didn’t attend the sessions of the famous 1966 structuralism conference, I fell into the orbit of one of its organizers, Dick Macksey. But I also studied with Earl Wasserman, Don Howard, and Don Cameron Allen, all of whom were more traditionally minded, each in his own way, and with J. Hillis Miller, who was a fellow traveler and who, as you know, went on to become one of our premier deconstructive critics. I was thus versed in New Criticism on the way to phenomenology, phenomenology giving way to structuralism and semiotics, and deconstruction bubbling up underneath it all. During my senior year I became interested in “Kubla Khan” and stuck around to do a master’s thesis on it. I read everything the Hopkins library had on the poem, threw all my critical tools into the fray and found myself walking in circles, getting nowhere.

And then, on a hunch, I decided to break the poem into pieces using the obvious markers, stanza divisions and line-end punctuation. Here’s one of my work sheets for the first part of the poem, 36 lines.

The tree structure to the left visualizes the result. Notice that we’ve got three sections at the topmost level; the middle of those is in turn divided into three; and the middle of that is again divided into three. All other divisions are binary.

It turns out that the poem’s second part, only 18 lines, has a similar structure. And now it gets really interesting. For the last line of the poem’s first part – “A sunny pleasure-done with caves of ice!” – is the middle, of the middle, of the middle of the poem’s second part – “That sunny dome! Those caves of ice” And that’s just a fragment of the elaborate patterning that exists in “Kubla Khan,” all there on the “surface” just waiting to be seen, analyzed, and described. But where did those patterns come from, what were they doing? [2]

And yet the literature I’d reviewed about “Kubla Khan,” one of the best-known and most-examined poems in English, knew nothing of this. And the body of literary and critical theory I’d absorbed, from New Criticism through structuralism and (a bit) beyond, had little to say about this kind of phenomenon. If I was going to figure out what that patterning was about, I was going to have to find the tools elsewhere or somehow create them myself.

On the Poverty of Literary Cognitivism 1: Alan Richardson Makes a Case

I’m pretty sure that Richardson would be somewhere between puzzled and shocked at the idea that he believes literary cognitivism to be an impoverished enterprise. In making that odd statement I’m thinking about his current essay-review, "Once upon a Mind: Literary and Narrative Studies in the Age of Cognitive Science," in MFS Modern Fiction Studies [1]. That article ends by asserting, “The current richness, diversity, and sheer amount of work in the new field, along with the pronounced interest evident among younger scholars in particular, augers a period of further growth and institutional consolidation still to come. […] Let a thousand flowers bloom” (p. 368). That certainly doesn’t seem like an argument for poverty. On the contrary, it is an explicit affirmation of riches to come.

I take responsibility for the judgement of poverty, but the judgement is based on a criterion Richardson advances in this essay. The purpose of this post is to examine that essay and identify the fatal criterion. I will then offer a blunt preview of a different, non-fatal, way to go about things which I will explicate in future posts.

Two Books and Eleventy Reference Points

Richardson’s essay focuses on two recent books, Paul B. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain (2013) and David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind (2013). Richardson begins with three or so pages of preliminary orientation in which he outlines his own engagement with literary cognitivism going back to the late 1990s, mentions fourteen other important books that came out in 2013, tips his hat to Patricia Cohen’s 2011 coverage in The New York Times, and offers some observations about institutional weakness. He then begins to steer the ship toward the two books under review, noting that “a great deal of disagreement, including on fundamental issues, persists both within and among the various disciplines making up the cognitive sciences […] and when one adds neuroscience to this already factious mix, still more differences emerge” (p. 316). As he’s piloting the boat through the harbor Richardson pulls a rabbit out of that sow's ear by noting that the field nevertheless has common reference points – he lists about eleventy of them – and then ties the reins to the hitching post (p. 362):

A final gesture made by many cognitive literary scholars, again including both Paul Armstrong […] and David Herman […], concerns the status of the interdisciplinary project itself. As do most of us Armstong and Herman both want to see the relationship between literary and narrative studies, on the one side, and the mind and brain sciences, on the other, as a genuinely two-way exchange. The scientific side does not provide a master discipline for literary scholars to study and incorporate into their own work; the literary side does not simply provide a field for application, but procedures, methods, and special kinds of data that, so the argument goes, scientists would do well to study and profit from.

This “final gesture” is the criterion I have in mind.

Richardson spins out the guts of his essay and then, six pages later, delivers a crushing verdict in his penultimate paragraph (p. 368):

Neither [of the books under review], to my mind, makes a single clear and convincing case for a problem in the mind and brain sciences that can only be successfully addressed through partial adaptation of methods, finds, or evidence from a literary field. I believe that there are such problems – such as the current limitations of recent scientific work on the imagination – and I would like to see many more such issues identified and examined in detail.

I have no reason to doubt Richardson’s judgment on that issue, though I’ve not read the two books myself, and I assume it applies to the field as he knows it, otherwise he surely would have mentioned the exceptions to that pessimistic verdict.

Vicarious Experience, or How to Think Biologically about Literature

A couple of years ago I reviewed William Flesch, Comeuppance, for Twentieth Century Literature. I've now put that review online at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/15076187/Altruism_Gossip_and_the_Vicarious_Apprehension_of_Human_Living

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Benzon, William. Altruism, Gossip, and the Vicarious Apprehension of Human Living. Twentieth Century Literature. Vol. 55, No. 4, Darwin and Literary Studies (winter 2009), pp. 629-633.

Abstract: William Flesch devotes the first half of Comuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and other Biological Components of Fiction to reviewing the relevant biological and evolutionary literature on cooperation, signalling, and altruistic punishment. His central point is that, when we experience fiction, we monitor the lives of fictional characters using the same bio-behavioral “equipment” we use in monitoring our fellows as we keep “score” of their “credits” and “debits” in the “group account.” The need to monitor our fellows gives us a vicarious interest in their actions, and that vicarious interest is emotionally charged. Flesch develops this notion of vicarious experience through reference to David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in particular, and Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The anger we feel upon witnessing transgression comes not through some identification with the victim or victims of the transgression, but belongs to the affective component of our social monitoring system. This anger is, in effect, a sentiment on behalf of the group. The pleasure we feel in just punishment or just reward, Flesh argues, is similarly vicarious and on behalf of the group, not some particular individual or individuals. Literature provides us with an invented form of such vicarious experience.

All Hail Our Darwinian Overlords!

This piece was originally published in The Valve, 30 May 2009. I'm republishing it now because it stands in thematic counterpoint to a major essay I'm currently slogging my way though, Computational Linguistics and Literary Studies in Search of Love (working title). As the reach of the title suggests, I'm taking stock of where literary studies is and where it might go in view of a very different discipline. Well, Joseph Carroll has his ideas on those matters as well. Color me skeptical.

Joseph Carroll has been the chief theorist and proselytizer of literary Darwinism. David DiSalvo has a long interview with him at Neuronarrative.

DiSalvo first asks what literary Darwinism is:

Literary Darwinists integrate literary concepts with a modern evolutionary understanding of the evolved and adapted characteristics of human nature. They aim not just at being one more “school” or movement in literary theory. They aim at fundamentally transforming the framework for all literary study. They think that all knowledge about human behavior, including the products of the human imagination, can and should be subsumed within the evolutionary perspective.

An ambitious program, to say the least. But let's leave it alone for a bit – I'll offer an alternative view a bit later – and allow Carroll continue. He talks broadly about reductionism, culture, literacy, the adaptive value of literature, an empirical study of characters in canonical 19th C. British novels, the brain, human emergence and interaction between scientists and humanists.

The conversation then returns to the future of literary studies. Here's the downside scenario:

Literary study could continue to insist on disconnecting itself from empirically discernible facts about human nature and human cognition, or it could realize that science is not a threat and a competitor but an ally in the quest for human understanding. If it takes the former course, I think it will continue to decline catastrophically in prestige, enrollments, and funding. Its practitioners will either continue to invent arcane verbal systems designed for the superficial reprocessing of canonical literary texts, or they will resign themselves to the ever more tenuous elaboration of the sophistical quibbles at the heart of postmodern literary theory.

Unless the humanities in general come to grips with the last three or four decades of work in psychology, biology, and neurosciences, and so forth, Carroll believes "they are doomed to irrelevance and triviality."

If, however, the humanities, and literary studies in particular, undertakes to assimilate this work, here's the possible upside:

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that literary study manages to get past its own blockages. What then? All the world is before them: large-scale explanatory principles to hash out, a whole taxonomy to found on underlying principles of human nature, whole cultural epochs to analyze from a bio-cultural perspective, multitudes of texts to locate, with all their specific meaning structures and imaginative forms, in these yet-to-be-established bio-cultural contexts. We have before us the macro-world of human evolutionary history and the micro-world of the brain, cultural history to incorporate with human universals; neuroimaging and neurochemical analysis to integrate with tonal and stylistic analysis.

The kind of work I’m describing here would not merely offer new lenses through which to view existing knowledge. It would provide a starting point for a continuous, progressive program in creating new knowledge. Literary Darwinists have to assimilate the best insights of previous theory and criticism, but they have to reformulate those insights within a completely new framework located within the larger, total field of the human sciences. They cannot merely take concepts ready-made from existing evolutionary theories of culture. They have to absorb evolutionary theories, examine them critically, push back when the theories are inadequate to the realities of literary experience, and formulate new fundamental concepts in literary study-formal, generic, and historical. They have to participate in fashioning the linkages between their own specific fields of endeavor and the broader field of the evolutionary human sciences. They have to make the world anew.

We've got two decades to prepare ourselves for the new dispensation:

Five years ago, literary Darwinism was just a mild sensation on the margins of literary study. It is now a swelling tide. In five years, ten, maybe fifteen, possibly even twenty, I think it will have fundamentally altered the framework within which literary study is conducted.

I have no objections, in principle, to a new framework. I just don't see that literary Darwinism is deep enough to be such a framework. That's a bit much to take on here and now (more griping here).