When’s the “Revolution” in Literary Studies Going to Happen?

I’ve just looked through the preface to Mark Turner’s Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The coming age will be known and remembered, I believe, as the age in which the human mind was discovered. I can think of no equal intellectual achievement. The purpose of this book is to propose a reframing of the study of English so that it comes to be seen as inseparable from the discovery of mind, participating and even leading the way in that discovery, gaining new analytic instruments for its traditional work and developing new concepts of its role.

That was written over 20 years ago, in 1991. Where do we stand?

That, of course, depends. A few years later the Stanford Humanities Review devoted an issue to cognitive science and literary criticism. Herbert Simon, one of the founders of artificial intelligence and cognitive science and a Nobel Laureate in economics, wrote a target article – which, strangely enough, focused on the cognitive analysis of criticism, not literature – over 30 scholars in various disciplines responded, including Turner. A year later Joseph Carroll launched his broadside against capital tee Theory and in favor of evolutionary psychology, Evolution and Literary Theory.

The game was afoot.

Cognitive criticism and evolutionary criticism are, of course, somewhat different games, in some versions they’re (bitterly) opposed to one another while in other versions they’re kissing cousins. In whatever version, they’ve had progeny in the form of journal articles, conferences and conferences papers and sessions, book series, and even some national and international press here and there.

But what has been achieved? Who outside of literary studies now thinks of “the study of English ... as inseparable from the discovery of mind”? Other than a stray psychologist or three, perhaps a semiotician – strange beasts that they are, no one.

The Poverty of Conceptual Blending for Literary Analysis

Not so long ago I critiqued Lakoff and Turner’s analysis of “To a Solitary Disciple” in terms of conceptual metaphor. I now want to do the same for conceptual metaphor’s intellectual descendent, conceptual blending. My basic problem is one that Tony Jackson voiced over a decade ago, “Issues and Problems in the Blending of Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Literary Study”, Poetics Today (23:1 Spring 2002 pp. 161-179).

Thus (p. 173): “Too often it seems that the vocabulary of cognitive rhetoric is simply being plugged into the interpretation.” And later (p. 174)”

But the key consideration must be whether or not the new perspective actually causes specifiable elements to show up differently than before. I would argue that so far blending theory has failed to do this. Again, the cognitive understanding of blending may have led to a useful method of unpacking metaphor, but it does not really reveal much that would not be revealed by a fine-tuned rhetorical analysis.

In a word, old wine in new bottles.

And that, I fear, is much of its appeal. Critics who long for pre-structuralist innocence can have it while at the same time appearing to take a Great Critical Leap Forward through the simple expedient of adopting some new terms under which to practice good old New Critical close reading.

But enough snark. Before looking at a relatively recent article by Turner, however, I want to present a simple example of blending.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129

Here’s Shakespeare’s well known Sonnet 129, “Th expence of Spirit.”

Th' expence of Spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action, and till action, lust

Is perjurd, murdrous, blouddy full of blame,

Savage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust,

Injoy'd no sooner but dispised straight,

Past reason hunted, and no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swollowed bayt,

On purpose layd to make the taker mad.

Made In pursut and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest, to have extreame,

A blisse in proofe and provd and very wo,

Before a joy proposd behind a dreame,

       All this the world well knowes yet none knowes well,

       To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

One might well see a blend, or is it a metaphor? in the opening lines where there is a play on faculty psychology and sexual intercourse. In this blend the ejaculation of semen during sex runs parallel to the loss of Rational Spirits which, in depriving the individual of reasoned control over one’s actions, is responsible for the headlong drive toward sexual intercourse by any means necessary. But that’s not what interests me.

The Jasmine Papers: Notes on the Study of Poetry in the Age of Cognitive Science

I have now collected my posts on "To a Solitary Disciple" and associated discussions into a single working paper having the above title. You may download it from my SSRN page.

The abstract is immediately below, followed by the introduction and then the table of contents.

Abstract: In More Than Cool Reason Lakoff and Turner offer a global reading of “To a Solitary Disciple” (by William Carlos Williams) in terms of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). The reading itself is independent of CMT; any competent literary critic could have done it. Their attempt to explain the relationship between that reading and the poem using CMT is at best problematic and does not seem to be metaphoric as specified by the terms of CMT. Rather, their reading takes the form of little narrative that has the same form as one they attribute to the poem. Beyond the critique of Lakoff and Turner, this paper makes some observations about the poem and suggests that it has a ring form: A, B, C, D, C’, B’, A’. Two sentences by Hemingway and a poem by Dylan Thomas are discussed in counterpoint with “To a Solitary Disciple.” Two appendices discuss ontological cognition in relation to Williams’ Paterson, Book V and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

Introduction: The Poverty of Cognitivism for Literary Criticism

This working paper consists of things and stuff. I drafted some drafted over a decade ago and wrote others on the day or on the day before I posted them.

Several things are going on, but the central thread is an examination of the third chapter of George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason, which is an analysis of “To a Solitary Disciple” by William Carlos Williams. That book is certainly one of the founding texts of cognitive poetics, which is a major school of thought within a broader engagement between literary criticism and cognitive science. As such, that Lakoff and Turner on Williams is a paradigmatic example in this engagement: If you want to use cognitive metaphor theory in the analysis of literary texts, this is how you do it.

It may very well be a good example of the application of cognitive metaphor theory, but it’s an inadequate example of literary analysis. While I have quite a bit to say about their analysis – in A Leak in Cool Reason, Beyond Metaphor: Pattern Matching, and What’s a Global Reading for Anyhow? – my major argument on this point – that it’s inadequate as literary analysis – is presented in The Disciple Revisited and Revived. There I comment on the poem in some detail, but without bringing any particular body of theoretical material to bear on the text, not their theory, not mine, not anyone else’s. To this I would add my discussions of two sentences from Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and of the chiasmus governing Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue”.

Alas, I do not know how to explain what I found in “To a Solitary Disciple”. Nor do I know of any body of theory that can do so. That is to say, I am unaware of any set of principles of mental functioning that explain why poems are LIKE THAT. They just are. Some of them. This one appears to have ring-form – A, B, C, D, C’, B’, A’. No one knows how to explain them. Maybe one day cognitive science will be up to that task. But it isn’t now.

I have come to believe that what a good critic sees in texts is mostly a function of wide experience. That experience may well begin with tutelage by master critics – I learned from Richard Macksey, Donald Howard, Don Cameron Allen, J. Hillis Miller, Earl Wasserman and, in a sense, Lévi-Strauss, though I never studied or even corresponded with him – but it is a craft that must be developed through use. The more you study texts, the more you learn to see in them. Really see in them, not just project your own fancies.

The Disciple Revisited and Revived

Having made some remarks about how Lakoff and Turner have commented on “To a Solitary Disciple” in More than Cool Reason, I would now like to offer some further remarks of my own.

Temporal Structure

Let me take a cue from Lakoff and Turner’s consideration of form. They approach it (by observing that the poem begins with a series of instructions of the form “Rather X than Y” (pp. 155 ff.), where X and Y are things to do. The first three strophes begin with “Rather X” and the first two provide the concluding and contrasting “than Y.” The third does not. What is worse, it overflows (their word, and a good one) and careens into the rather different 4th strophe. Thus:

Rather grasp (12)
how the dark
converging lines
of the steeple (16)
meet at the pinnacle--
perceive how 
its little ornament
tries to stop them-- (20)

See how it fails!
See how the converging lines
of the hexagonal spire (23)
escape upward--
receeding, dividing!
--sepals (26)
that guard and contain
the flower!

They obvserve that the transition from 3rd to 4th strophe is the midpoint of the poem (which is 42 lines long). At this point they go on to offer an iconic reading of these lines, which I’ve already commented on in What’s a Global Reading for, Anyhow?.

I see no need to recapitulate those remarks. Rather, I want to start from Lakoff and Turner's observation each occasion “rather” sets up a syntactic expectation from some contrasting item that may or may not be satisfied. The first strophe is six lines long and begins with “rather.” The contrasting item is cued by “than” opening line five. The second strophe is five lines long and, like the first, begins with “rather.” The contrasting “than” begins the third line (9) of this strophe.

At this point the syntatic expectation cued by “rather” has been joined by another expectation, one about how long it takes to complete a “Rather X than Y” pair: roughly five or six lines (where lines are understood as temporal units). We’ve been through two such strophes and now, so I assert, expect that the third strophe, beginning in line 12, will be in the same ball park.

A Leak in Cool Reason

The cool reason I have in mind is George Lakoff and Mark, More than Cool Reason (1989), one of the founding texts of cognitive poetics. The leak is in the way they reason about their global reading of “To a Solitary Disciple,” by William Carlos Williams.

The poem presents a simple scene, the moon in the sky above the steeple of some building, a church presumably.

Lakoff and Turner set out to discuss the poem on two levels (p. 141). On one level they discuss cognitive metaphors the poem employs laying out that scene. They find a number of cognitive metaphors: SEEING IS TOUCHING, FORM IS MOTION, and EVENTS ARE ACTIONS. They also note that the poem employs “fresh”, metaphor that is novel and has not been precipitated down into the cognitive unconscious as a fragment of mundane working conceptual structure. This much of their analysis corresponds with the work I have done with Sonnet 129 and to the work that has more generally been done in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence on text comprehension and generation. As such these metaphors are directly related to the words in the poem itself and to their underlying meaning.

These metaphors belong to the cognitive base on which the poem is constructed. It is their second level of analysis that interests me here, for it is quite different in character. And its relationship to the poem itself is, if anything, even more problematic than that of a reading in, say, a Freudian, phenomenological, or deconstructive mode.

Of this second level, they assert “the poem as a whole can be given a metaphorical interpretation, in which the disciple to which the poem is addressed is told how to understand the nature of religion in terms of the scene presented to him” (p. 141). They note that the metaphorical global reading they propose is not the only possible global reading. What interests me is not so much the details of how they construct this particular global reading, but the overall relationship they posit between this reading and the poem itself.

So, first they provide an ordinary reading of the poem. It is this reading they are going to analyze, not the poem itself. Hence it is a reading (in the form of cognitive analysis) of a reading of the poem.