Brain area specialized for visual recognition of words

No child is born able to read. The brain ships with no reading region at all. It builds one, and the construction runs on the exact effort AI removes.

Learning to read physically repurposes a patch of visual cortex. A spot in the left fusiform gyrus starts out tuned to objects… https://t.co/3sOTaLSR2Z

— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) June 21, 2026

Chinese top 100 books

If anyone else is interested in literary polls - these are the top 100 highest-rated books on Douban Books (basically Chinese Goodreads) w/ number of ratings. I have translated some titles, indicated w ?. All books pretty much sit within a point of each other on a 10-point scale pic.twitter.com/k63LEcqMGo

— Ella Dorn 唐棠 (@elladorn_) May 17, 2026

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

Reading as both a passion and a pose

“Reading was a passion in early modern Italy,…but it was also a pose, an emblem of ‘aristocratic detachment’ from the pursuits of wealth, power, and social connections, on which access to and ownership of books practically depended.” —Catherine Nicholson https://t.co/KyrlZ9rWeo

— The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) June 5, 2024

The opening of the linked article:

“I daily listen to your words with more attention than one would believe, and perhaps I shall not be thought impertinent in wishing to be heard by you,” wrote the Italian poet Petrarch in 1348. His addressee was the Roman philosopher Seneca, who had died nearly thirteen centuries before. Petrarch’s practice of writing to long-dead authors epitomizes—and helped to initiate—the essential double movement of humanist imitatio, the exchange by which schoolboys and scholars across late medieval and early modern Europe formed their ideas, values, images, tastes, and turns of phrase along the lines of an antiquity they were just beginning to regard (but had not yet begun to speak of) as “classical.”

The American scholar Thomas Greene in The Light in Troy, his 1982 study of humanism’s intimate relation to and sense of estrangement from the ancient world, called imitatio “a literary technique that was also a pedagogic method and a critical battleground.” Whom to take as one’s exemplars and how closely to follow them, which models to embrace and which to avoid or improve upon, were subjects of fervent debate. In theory, emulating the best of what had been written fostered expressiveness; “in practice,” Greene allows, “it led not infrequently to sterility.” But as Petrarch’s letter to Seneca suggests, the rewards of imitatio were perhaps primarily emotional: a communion with other minds that fortified readers against the disappointments of the present.

From Mere Reading to Intepretive Reading

My recent posts about Harold Bloom have forced me, once more, to grapple with the strange problems faced by a discipline that seeks to construct knowledge about texts regarded as having, if not transcendent, at least foundational value. Where do you stand when launching such and enterprise? In that context I'm looking back at a post from 2013 that deals with one aspect of the problem, the difference from reading a (literary) text in the ordinary way and the task of writing explicit commentary of what such texts mean.

* * * * *

The point of this post is simple: The interpretation of literary texts is something we must be taught. It is not "natural." Though, by convention, it is often referred to as "reading", it is quite different from plain old reading. That simple, and seeminly obvious, point kicked up more conversation than I had anticipated when I posted it in The Valve in mid-December, 2005. You might want to check that out. I've made a few revisions for this re-posting.

One must learn to read. It doesn't come “naturally”; it requires explicit instruction. In this context - that is, of this blog devoted to literary criticism and its vicissitudes - “reading” has a special sense beyond simply, well, reading a text. In its acquired sense, “to read” means something like “to provide commentary and analysis of a text in which its meaning is explicitly stated.” The assumption seems to be that there is a meaning - or many meanings - that are there, but not present in the “surface” of the text. They are “hidden” somewhere “deep inside” the text. Reading in this sense too must be learned; it is not “natural.” Let us call these reading1, mere reading, and reading2, interpretive reading, respectively.

Much of literary theory has to do with the relationship between reading1 and reading2. Typically reading1 leaves no traces of itself in the primary text. By contrast, reading2, by definition, must leave traces, not in the primary text, but in one or more secondary texts framed as commentary on one or more primary texts. Practitioners of reading2 sometimes think of their activity as one of “enriching” (a somewhat quaint-sounding notion) or providing a “deeper understanding of” the primary text, perhaps for the benefit of those who engage only in reading1, but certainly for the benefit of other practitioners of reading2. Some practitioners of reading2 even assert that, though the words are different, the meanings they elaborate in their secondary texts really are in the primary texts, in some form. Other practitioners no longer believe that, suspecting that reading2 is, in part, a way of smuggling meanings into texts that come from “somewhere else.” These critics frame their readings2 in different ways.

It is worth noting that reading2, that is, written interpretive discussion, is a relatively recent activity. To be sure, it has been common for religious texts since ancient times. The central texts of Judiasm, Islam, Buddhism, and so forth, are encrusted with layers of commentary, and commentary on commentary–an activity that continues to this day. But interpretive commentary on secular texts that is routine and extensive, that is institutionalized (in colleges and universities), is a product of the 20th Century. And yet somehow literary culture managed to survive and thrive without it. 

 

For myself, I do not believe that interpretive reading ever recovers what one encounters in reading1. I do not quite know what the relationship between the two types of reading is beyond the fact that one cannot do reading2 without doing reading1. In the long term, I am seeking a way of thinking about literature that dispenses with reading2 while being fully engaged with the importance that literature has for individuals and societies. That is to say, I am seeking what I have come to call a naturalist criticism.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself. That's only where I'm headed. That's not where I am now, in this post.

What interests me at the moment is simply to activate a sense of what is involved in learning to perform reading2 and correlatively to remind us that it is an accessory. One of the occupational hazards of the lit crit business is that you are constantly tempted to be a critic while reading any and all texts, seeing any and all plays or movies. You thus begin to lose any sense of simply reading1. Any act of reading1 is potentially an occasion for reading2, leading some critics even to suspect that reading2 is necessary to reading1.

Let me recall a time when reading1 was all I could do. That's when I came to love reading.

When I was in my middle teens, for example, I picked up a copy of Howard Fast's historical novel, Spartacus (I don't remember whether this was before or after I had seen the movie). It was a rather long book, but, as I recall, I read it in a single session that took me through the night. No doubt my mind was making all sorts of inferences while I was reading. When I was done I no doubt had some recollection of the story and could recount it, or fragments of it, and could answer questions about it. But I could not have done anything approaching an acceptable "reading" or "interpretation" of the book. I simply didn't know how to do that.

It took me two or three years of hard work in college to become fluent in writing 10-page papers containing acceptable readings of individual texts. And it wasn't until my fourth year that I felt comfortable engaging with a text on my own terms.

When I first studied literature in college I was pretty much at the mercy of the last interpretation I had read (or had heard in lecture). I simply didn't have a conceptual “space” in which I could arrange and compare two or three readings and make judgments about their relative merits regardless of the order in which I read them. Even when I had internalized enough concepts and strategies to furnish an intepretive space I found it easier to have someone else "break open" the text for me by providing a reading (which I consumed either through lecture or reading). Once I had encountered one or two interpretations I could then head out on my own, applying my knowledge of psychology, philosophy, and whatever else to the job.

Thus, I learning to read2 I began by imitating the strategies of my teachers and of the critics I read. I assume, though perhaps I am mistaken in this, that most critics have had to learn their craft in much the same way. We learn a large collection of critical moves, which we then apply to the texts. Some of these moves may be uninformed by any explicit theory while others are explicitly derived from some philosophical, psychological, or social scientific body of thought. It seems to me that this body of inferential moves, and the texts we produce to convey these moves to others, is different from the inferential moves I made while reading Spartacus a year or three before I began learning how to produce explicit interpretations.

We sometimes talk as though these professional modes of reasoning, that is to say reading2, involve the examination of the (largely unconscious) processes of reading1. I doubt that. I think that's mostly a manner of talking, of framing what interpritive readings assert about primary texts. I am interested in the processes involved in reading1. I see no way to get at them that does not involve a great deal of theory. But not necessarily theory of the sort that is currently taught and read in departments of literature.

GOAT Literary Critics: Part 2, A discipline is founded (sorta’): Brooks & Warren, Northrop Frye, and S. T. Coleridge

I sent the first post in this series – which, BTW, now has its own tag: GOATLiC (GOAT Literary Critic) – to Tyler Cowen, and he got back with a brief response: “Samuel Johnson?” That unsettled me. I hadn’t even thought of Johnson and neither had the Chatster. What’s worse, though I’ve certainly heard of Johnson, knew about his dictionary and his poetry and that he’d done other stuff, I’d read none of it. I thought about it, took a brief look at his Wikipedia entry, and replied to Tyler: “doesn’t compute.”

As things turned out, that first post became Part 1a in the context of GOAT Literary Critics: Part 1b, Lit Crit Compared to Economics; Aristotle, No. In that post I distinguished between literary culture as a whole and literary criticism as an intellectual discipline, suggesting that the discipline only became possible in the wake of conceptual advances that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries and were brought into focus by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. People have been commenting on literature for as long as literature has existed, but only some of that commentary belongs in the intellectual discipline called literary criticism. Johnson – his poetry and criticism alike – belongs in that larger literary culture but not in the intellectual discipline.

My object in this post is to say a bit about how and why we have the modern institutional discipline of literary criticism. For that we must first turn to Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry (1939), which is not a book of criticism at all. It’s a collection of poems with annotations and exercises intended for use in undergraduate classes. A fourth edition came out in 1976, 37 years later. That cleared the ground for the modern discipline. Then we’re going to look at Northrop Fry’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957, same year as Syntactic Structures and Sputnik), which fenced the land in and tented it over. Then we move back in time to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who established the literary mind as a worthy subject of the deepest kind of intellectual inquiry.

Brooks & Warren: The New Criticism

The study of vernacular literature came late to the academy. If you went to college or university in the 18th and 19th century you could study the Classics, in the original Greek and Latin, but not English language literature. Perhaps a bit here and there, but not until late in the 19th century; but more likely the 20th century. The story is complicated, but in order to make any headway at all I’m simply going to bracket those complications and set them aside. If you’re curious, I suggest that you start with excellent review-essay that Michael Bérubé wrote about Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) by John Guillory.

The current academic discipline centers on the act of interpretation: What do these texts mean? That question is such an obvious one that it may be hard to imagine that it is only after World War II – at least in America, if not in England (another one of those pesky complications) – that interpretation became the sun around which the discipline orbited. Prior to that the academic discipline was mostly about philology and literary history. Those disciplines had their great figures, and they deserve consideration for a place in the More Inclusive GOATLiC Hall of Fame, but I’ll let someone else argue the cases for them.

Before considering Brooks & Warrant, the duo, Let’s take quick looks at them separately. Robert Penn Warren is one of the most decorated people in American letters, having won two Pulitzer’s for poetry and one for fiction, making him the only one to win both Pulitzers. Moreover, his prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men, was a best seller that has been twice made into a movie and once into an opera. He also wrote a variety of nonfiction, including critical essays and books. In 2005 U. S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in his honor (16 years after his death in 1989). Cleanth Brooks is primarily an academic literary critic. The Well Wrought Urn is the best-known of his dozen or so books of criticism. He was one of most important expounders of close-reading. While Warren’s public honors over shadow Brooks’s, both men might be plausible individual candidates for the GOATLiC list. But I think the case for the duo is more interesting and perhaps even stronger as well.

The movement Brooks & Warren championed was known as the New Criticism, a term that’s with us even today. The means by which they advanced this movement was, first of all, a reader, Understanding Poetry, first published in 1939. That first edition is 680 pages long, including table of contents and index. Most of those pages are given over to the poems themselves. After a short list of acknowledgements the book opens with “Letter to the Teacher”:

This book has been conceived on the assumption that if poetry is worth teaching at all it is worth teaching as poetry. The temptation to make a substitute for the poem as the object of study is usually overpowering. The substitutes are various, but the most common ones are:

1. Paraphrase of logical and narrative content,
2. Study of biographical and historical material.
3. Inspirational and didactic interpretation.

Of course, paraphrase may be necessary as a preliminary step in the reading of a poem, and a study of the biographical and historical background may do much to clarify interpretation; but these things should be considered as means and not as ends.

That second point is aimed directly at the existing academic discipline, which was based on literary history and on philology. The justification was a doctrine called formalism, which held that, by virtue of their form, literary texts carried their meaning(s) within themselves, free of biographical and historical context. The paragraph continues:

And though one may consider a poem as an instance of historical or ethical documentation, the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains finally the object for study. Moreover, even if the interest us in the poem as a historical or ethical document, there is a prior consideration: one must grasp the poem as a literary construct before it can offer any real illumination of a document.

The innovation of Understanding Poetry was simply to present the texts to students so they could learn to grapple and conjure with them as just that, literary constructs. Nothing more, nothing less, the texts themselves. THAT’s the innovation. It’s so transparent that one hardly notices it as such. I assume that a significant portion of Brooks’ methodological and theoretical writing was a defense and elaboration of the idea of the text AS literary construct, an act of mind in and of itself. Much of the academic discipline of literary criticism has been puzzling over the issue ever since.

This doctrine and the attendant New Critical practice became particularly important after World War II, when college enrollments ballooned with soldiers going to college on the G.I. Bill and with a more general increase in enrollments. What are we going to teach these students, and how? A literary criticism based on history and philology required you to wade through a lot of secondary material before you arrive at the texts themselves. It’s one thing to ask that of professionals, not to mention graduate students, but it’s unreasonable to put freshmen and sophomores through all that. If, however, the meaning of literary texts resides within the texts themselves, then you don’t need the apparatus. You can go directly to the texts.

As a result, we now live in a world where anyone with a college education can talk about the meaning of texts, texts of all kinds including movies, TV, advertising and whatever else is floating about, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, which it has become. It is also a world in which meaning has become the focus of academic literary criticism, which it hadn‘t been beforehand. Now that ordinary readers can trade in meanings, some are prone to be disgruntled when they hear that the academics are trading in meanings they can’t understand. And so, among other things, we have the annual sport of the New York Times poking fun at the titles of papers offered at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association.

When one reads a book or a poem, one participates in literary culture. Reading book reviews in the daily newspaper or articles on literary topics in The New Yorker, that’s another way of participating in literary culture. But, for better or worse, those secondary activities are not intellectually comparable to engaging in the secondary activity academic literary criticism. [Secondary in relation to reading literary texts themselves.] Similarly, we all engage in economic activity of various kinds. We may also read news articles on economic topics in the daily newspaper, not to mention more sophisticated venues such as The Economist and The New Yorker (here I’m thinking, for example, of the work of Ken Auletta, who wrote Three Blind Mice, a book about the three major TV networks of the previous century). But engaging in economic activity is no more doing economics than engaging in literary activity is doing academic literary criticism.

Moreover, the fact that the economist Tyler Cowen can casually offer one-two-and-three-line “Straussian readings” of various texts by the handful at his blog may owe at least at much, if not more, to Brooks & Warren than to Leo Strauss himself (a philosopher, not an economist). That such readings – few of which seem tethered to the specific doctrines promulgated by Strauss – can be intelligibly offered on a blog read by thousands of people, few of whom are professional academics of any kind, piggybacks on the reading practice advocated and promulgated by Brooks and Warren. The reading practice they furthered through Understanding Poetry, and a later companion, Understanding Fiction, thus has echoes far beyond literary criticism.

Understanding Poetry rested on the assumption that interpretive reading requires little beyond will, curiosity, and a few modest pointers. No special learning required. If that is so, then is any special learning required of those who use Understanding Poetry as a vehicle for teaching inquiring young minds the craft of reading? One of the faculty, Bill Sylvester, at SUNY Buffalo where I got my degree, was fond of saying that “interpretations were invariant under transformations of sophistication.” What’s the source of that sophistication?

The profession has spent the last 75 years developing answer upon answer and still more answers to that question as schools of literary theory and method have dashed madly after one another like lemmings to the sea. Whatever the particular critical lens, it is always used to reveal a close reading. In the ideal case, when the reading is ever so close, it disappears, leaving only the text.

I digress.

Northrop Frye: How can we have literary criticism?

Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic who first gained notice through a book about Blake and who published on a wide range of topics in English literature, but also the Bible. But he is best-known for The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Despite the title, the Anatomy reads as much if not more like an anatomy of literature than of criticism. In that he had the audacity to see the study of literature as a (unified) whole. To be sure, the literature he surveyed is almost exclusively Western (though there is a mention of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana), but still, that’s quite a lot to take-in at one gulp. As far as I know, no one else has attempted it, save perhaps Harold Bloom.

Leave ChatGPT Voice on while reading a book

Leaving ChatGPT Voice on while reading a book is one of the most amazing experiences I've had with technology.
byu/RupFox inChatGPT

Anthropology novels?

‘The issue wasn’t that they didn’t understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction, however.

It had to do with how they thought about reading, and about what kinds of text are read in what kinds of way.’

— Philip Balboni

— London Review of Books (@LRB) April 7, 2023

Reading Reading

To the extent that academic literary critics believe that, to properly read a text, you must reflect on it in writing, they are betraying a professional prejudice. If that were the case, then few of us have ever properly read anything. And of course they don't really mean it. But, alas, they don't not mean it either. It's a mess. Anyhow, this is an old post that reflects on such things. I'm bumping it to the top of the queue on general principle.

* * * * *

This post includes major sections from two posts I wrote in 2005 when I first began writing for The Valve: Learning to Read & the Need for Theory and Beyond Reading. The first generated extensive discussion that’s worth reading if you want to puzzle through the difference between reading a literary work and writing criticism about it. But alas, The Valve has been defunct for a long time and is no longer online.

Having expressed misgivings about the notion of distance in “distant reading”, I now want express misgivings about the other term in the phrase, “reading”.

I think it was a mistake of academic literary criticism to allow the term “reading” to elide the distinction between the ordinary activity by which John, Jane, Suzy, and Timmy Smith read texts and the specialized activity of creating written explications of texts. The effect of such elision is to enable the belief that the two processes are basically the same, but that what the professional critic is doing is deeper and more rigorous than what John, Jane, Suzy and Timmy are doing and the Smiths really ought to tighten up their act.

Think about that for a moment or two and you realize that, on that view, Will Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Murasaki Shikibu were really little more than very skilled chimps and they ought to get themselves to the nearest Summer School for Criticism in order properly to be able to “read” the texts they wrote.

Learning to Explicate

When I was in my middle teens I picked up a copy of Howard Fast’s historical novel, Spartacus (I don’t remember whether this was before or after I had seen the movie). It was a rather long book, but, as I recall, I read it in a single session that took me through the night. No doubt my mind was making all sorts of inferences while I was reading. When I was done I no doubt had some recollection of the story and could recount it, or fragments of it, and could answer questions about it. But I could not have done anything approaching an acceptable "reading" or "interpretation" of the book. I simply didn’t know how to do that.

 

It took me two or three years in college to become fluent in writing 10-page papers containing acceptable explications of individual texts. When I first studied literature in college I was pretty much at the mercy of the last interpretation I had read (or had heard in lecture). I simply didn’t have a conceptual “space” in which I could arrange and compare two or three interpretations or explications and make judgments about their relative merits regardless of the order in which I read them. Even when I had built up such a space I found it easier to have someone else "break open" the text for me by providing a reading (which I consumed either through lecture or reading). Once I had encountered one or two explications I could then reason about the text on my own, applying my knowledge of psychology, philosophy, and whatever else to the job.

Thus, in learning to explicate or interpret texts I began by imitating the strategies of my teachers and of the critics I read. I assume, though perhaps I am mistaken in this, that most critics have had to learn their craft in much the same way. We learn a large collection of critical moves, which we then apply to the texts.

Some of these moves may be uninformed by any explicit theory while others are explicitly derived from some philosophical, psychological, or social scientific body of thought. This body of inferential moves is extra, in addition to, the routines we use in simply reading the texts. When we elide the difference between reading and explication or interpretation by referring to both as reading we can end up believing that being deeply confused about what we’re up to in criticism.

Geoffrey Hartman is Confused

This confusion is evident in the title essay of Geoffrey Hartman’s collection, The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (U of Chicago Press, 1975). Consider this passage (p. 255):

That darkling appropriation of works of art we call interpretation is surely as much a blind drive as an objective interest. We are forced to predicate a narrative or interpretive will, the will to be an author oneself, or even the author of oneself (and others).

Why "appropriation, much less "darkling appropriation"? What is the scope of that "We"? It’s as though Hartman does not wish to, somehow cannot, distinguish between himself at the author.

Some more passages:

Literature is today so easily assimilated or coopted that the function of criticism must often be to defamiliarize it. [p. 260]

A great interpreter like Erich Auerbach, a great critic-scholar like E.R. Curtius, a prodigal son like Kenneth Burke, or men of letters like Paul Valéry and Edmund Wilson, who practiced the minor mode of prophecy we call criticism, are not annulled by the fact that they may be explicitly writing about the writing of others. It may be a weakness in them to prefer, at times, the indirectness of commentary to the creation of their own news, but it may also be a conviction that their identity is bound up with the writings of others-that the mind is laid waste by the false Unas of literature even as it is renewed by faith in the classic or neglected text. [p. 267]

Reading, then, includes reading criticism. [p. 268]

The question persists, however, whether there is a specific function that differentiates literary criticism from literature. . . . Literary understanding, then, has two components: literary tradition proper, or an expansible canon of texts; and criticism, which helps to form this canon and guide its interpretation-which prepares us, at least, for the complexities of literary expression. [p. 270]

All we can be certain of is that literary understanding is bipartite, requiring both literary discourse (texts), and that too strong a privileging of fictional over nonfictional texts (of "primary" over "secondary" literature) reifies literature still further and disorders our ability to read. [p. 271]

I find some of this overwrought and overly anxious, just a bit professionally self-serving, and I’m skeptical about the ability of critical explication to bring us closer to the text. Perhaps it does that in the way "wood-shedding" a difficult piece of music helps a musician work it up for performance. But I would distinguish between the "shedding" and the performance itself.

If you want to get closer to the text, read the text, don’t write about it. Writing about literary texts is, well, writing about literary texts. It is not reading.

Make the Distinction Now

The problem with conflating textual commentary and reading is that it invites you to believe that textual commentary proceeds from the motives and is to be justified by the same arguments as simply reading those texts, that is, the terms we use to justify literature itself. That may seem harmless enough when the commentary is regarded as “appreciative” or even interpretive. Such commentary, we say, is intended to serve the text.

These days, though, we talk of “distant reading”. Whatever distant reading is, it is not serving literary texts. And it cannot be understood and justified in the terms we use to justify literature itself. It must be understood and justified on other terms. But then, I contend, so must explication and interpretation.

As far as I’m concerned we’re dealing with three activities: 1) reading texts, 2) interpreting or explicating literary texts, singly or as body of work, and 3) some other activity, which includes so-called distant reading. Let’s recognize the distinction in our terminology. 

 

* * * * *

 

Note: You might want to look at a somewhat never post, On Learning to “Read” a Text – But what’s next?, that goes over similar ground.  

Map of cortical activation while reading aloud

Now available at #JNeurosci @SfNJournals “A spatiotemporal map of reading aloud”
We mapped the spread of activity across the brain while reading aloud known and novel words, using intracranial recordings (46 patients, >3k electrodes, ~10k words) https://t.co/HGPyh94vgh pic.twitter.com/SE501jXiJ9

— Oscar Woolnough (@OWoolnough) June 1, 2022

Abstract

Reading words aloud is a fundamental aspect of literacy. The rapid rate at which multiple distributed neural substrates are engaged in this process can only be probed via techniques with high spatiotemporal resolution. We probed this with direct intracranial recordings covering most of the left hemisphere in 46 humans (26 male, 20 female) as they read aloud regular, exception and pseudo-words. We used this to create a spatiotemporal map of word processing and to derive how broadband γ activity varies with multiple word attributes critical to reading speed: lexicality, word frequency, and orthographic neighborhood. We found that lexicality is encoded earliest in mid-fusiform (mFus) cortex, and precentral sulcus, and is represented reliably enough to allow single-trial lexicality decoding. Word frequency is first represented in mFus and later in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and inferior parietal sulcus (IPS), while orthographic neighborhood sensitivity resides solely in IPS. We thus isolate the neural correlates of the distributed reading network involving mFus, IFG, IPS, precentral sulcus, and motor cortex and provide direct evidence for parallel processes via the lexical route from mFus to IFG, and the sublexical route from IPS and precentral sulcus to anterior IFG.

Significance Statement:

Reading aloud depends on multiple complex cerebral computations: mapping from a written letter string on a page to a sequence of spoken sound representations. Here, we used direct intracranial recordings in a large cohort while they read aloud known and novel words, to track, across space and time, the progression of neural representations of behaviorally relevant factors that govern reading speed. We find, concordant with cognitive models of reading, that known and novel words are differentially processed through a lexical route, sensitive to frequency of occurrence of known words in natural language, and a sublexical route, performing letter-by-letter construction of novel words.

“NATURALIST” criticism, NOT “cognitive” NOT “Darwinian” – A Quasi-Manifesto

Time to once again bump this to the top of the queue. 

* * * * *

Reposted from The Valve, 31 March 2010, this is an informal manifesto for whatever it is I'm up to, and why I'm come to think of it as naturalist criticism. I could link a lot more into this piece now, especially my recent work on ring composition and digital humanities, but I won't. It's a decent map to my work in literature, a place-holder until I have time to do something a bit more formal.

---

You mean a quasifesto?

Shoo, get out . . .

Fact is, if I’d known then what I know now, I’d never have thought of myself as being in the business of bringing cognitive science to literary criticism much less represented myself to the world in that way. But I didn’t (know) and I did (represent), so now I seem stuck with the moniker. I’d like to shake if off.

When I finally decided to publish a programmatic and methodological statement, “Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form,” I adopted naturalism as a label. Fact is, I’d just as soon not think of it as anything but the study of literature. But we live in an age of intellectual brands, so I chose “naturalism” as mine.

Yes, I know that “the natural” is somewhat problematic, but you’ll just have to get past that. No label is perfect and I’m not about to coin a new term. Assuming you can struggle past the word, what does naturalism suggest to you? To me the term conjures up a slightly eccentric investigator wandering about the world examining flora and fauna, writing up notes, taking photos, making drawings, and perhaps even collecting specimens. That feels right to me, except that I’m nosing about poems, plays, novels, films, and other miscellaneous things. Beyond that I’d like the term to suggest some sense of literature as thoroughly in and a part of the world. There’s only one world and literature exists in it.

Beyond that, what does the term suggest? . . . Nothing, that’s what I’d like it to suggest, nothing. But whatever this naturalist criticism is or might become, that it has some kind of name suggests that it’s probably not myth criticism, New Criticism, Marxist criticism, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, archetypal, phenomenological, reader response, or any of the other existing critical brands.

What do the terms “cognitive criticism” or “cognitive rhetoric” suggest? Like many of those other labels, they suggest some body of supplementary knowledge and practice that one brings to the study of literature. Just exactly what the supplementary body is, that may not be terribly clear. But that doesn’t matter. The terms emphasize and draw your attention to the supplement. The same with “Darwinian literary criticism,” only vaguer. The only thing that’s clear about that label is a towering intellectual figure whose work had nothing to do with the study of literature.

None of this should be taken to imply that I’ve lost interest in the newer psychologies, as I like to call them. I haven’t. I believe that future literary studies must take them into account, and other theories, concepts and models as well. I just don’t want to stick those names in my brand label.

Anything else?

Yes, I put the study of form at the center of the enterprise.

So why not label yourself a formalist?

Because that’s already of term of art, and it’s too strongly identified with approaches that treat the text as an autonomous object more or less independent of reader, author, and the larger world. For that matter, many formalist critics are more interested in textual autonomy than in systematically analyzing and describing the manifold formal aspects of literary texts. In the end, they’re as greedy after meaning as most other critics are.

OK, so what do you have in mind with this naturalist criticism that emphasizes form?

Good question. And I’m afraid my best answer is a bit embarrassing. I figure the best way to scope out any literary program is to look at practical criticism. What does it do with an actual text, in some length and detail. And the best examples I know are, umm, err, from my own work. And that, as I said, is embarrassing. I’d rather point out someone else’s work.

Really? There’s nothing else? Your work is de novo, so to speak?

Well, everyone has precursors and models. I was certainly influenced by the structuralists, Roman Jakobson, Edmund Leach, Jean Piaget, and Lévi-Strauss above all. For that matter I should probably know narratology better than I do. And I’ve enjoyed the detailed analytic work that David Bordwell’s posted on his blog, though I’ve not gotten around to reading any of his books except Making Meaning, which is an analysis and critique poststructuralist film criticism. If more people analyzed literary texts like Bordwell analyzes film, that would be good.

[More specifically, check out, e.g. Bordwell’s post on “Tell, don’t show,” or this post on “Kurosawa’s early spring,” other posts tagged as “Film technique,” and this essay, “Anatomy of the Action Picture.”]

OK OK, I get the idea. I’m skeptical, but go on. What’s your best analytic work?

I suppose my recent essays on “Kubla Khan,” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” but they’re a bit of a slog, long and detailed, and lots of diagrams. I like this old piece on Sir Gawin and the Green Knight too, and this Shakespeare piece, which looks at three plays, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale and even uses evolutionary psychology.

Perhaps the best place to start would my recent post: Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice. It focuses on form and it’s got some nice screen shots too. It’s relatively short and pretty much free of abstract critical apparatus, though there’s an addendum that heads off into the abstractosphere. Yeah, it’s about film, not literature, but that’s a secondary issue that has no bearing on my main point.

As the title suggests, I consider two episodes in Disney’s Fantasia, the Nutcracker Suite and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. There are three things going on in that post: 1) the analysis and description of so-called ring forms in the two episodes, which is my main focus, 2) a brief characterization of the spatial worlds in the two episodes, and 3) some informal remarks on what those episodes might mean.

A ring form is a text in which episodes mirror one another around a central point or episode, thus: A, B, C . . . C’, B’, A’. One of these episodes has a conventional narrative (Sorcerer’s) while the other does not. But both are rings. Pending strong arguments to the contrary, I regard that as a fact about them. The ring structure really is there; it’s not something I’m reading into the episodes. The core work in the post is to report the relatively straight-forward analytical work needed to establish ring structure as a descriptive fact.

In the course of looking at the ring structure I also offer some remarks on the structure of the visual worlds in the two episodes and how the virtual camera moves through them. This plays no role in my argument about ring structure, but it is a formal feature of the episodes and is important in the larger scope of the hole film. Each of the eight episodes has a different theme and subject matter, and each has a different animation style. Somewhere “between” the style and the subject matter you have visual space and movement through it.

Finally, I offer some interpretive comments, some observations about what these episodes might mean. In the case of Nutcracker those suggestions lean toward the Freudian, though I suppose some might argue it has no meaning at all, that it’s just a bunch of pretty pictures set to music. Sorcerer’s is a different case, because here we have a actual story. I suppose I could’ve gone Freudian and worked on Father and Son, but I got stuck on all those industrious brooms parading across the screen and ended up giving a nod toward the Marxists.

Well, OK, OK. I’ve read the paper and it’s a nice piece of work.

Thank you.

But I don’t see anything new in kind.

Well, yes, I didn’t invent anything, but . . . .

Anyone could do it. It’s well within range of a good undergraduate . . .

And did you notice it’s not jam-packed with a lot of conceptual apparatus?

That’s what I mean, it’s almost as if anyone could do it.

Well, I rather doubt that. You do have to have a “feel” for the job, and that takes time and experience. You have to work with texts (or films) to learn how to work with them. You can’t get it by reading books and articles. But the absence of a lot of apparatus, that’s a feature, not a bug. In any event the thing to notice is that formal analysis and description is at the center of the piece.

But that’s not a central focus of practical criticism in the discipline as it is currently practiced. Nor does it seem to be on radar screen for the cognitivists and the Darwinians. They still treat meaning as the main event.

Attridge and Staten 2: The Sick Rose [+GPT-3]

Bumped to the head of the queue from 2015. Is it GPT-3 week at New Savanna? Ken Lacker quizzed he/she/it (do we need a new pronoun?):

Q: Which colorless green ideas sleep furiously?
A: Ideas that are colorless, green, and sleep furiously are the ideas of a sleep furiously.

Some years later poet John Hollander wrote a poem entitled "Coiled Alizarin":

Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:
While breathless, in stodgy viridian,
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The (metaphysical) distance between GPT-3 and Hollander is HUGE, ludicrously monumental. I discuss this poem in considerable detail below.

* * * * *

In my first post [1] I commented on Attridge and Staten’s conception of minimal reading in “Reading for the Obvious: A Conversation” [2]. Now I want to comment on their remarks about their example poem, William Blake’s The Sick Rose. My one complaint is that they didn’t finish the job. By that I DO NOT mean that they didn’t describe – my word, not theirs – everything, for that is all but impossible, and they say so. No, what I mean is that after a nice ambling conversation they didn’t conclude with a summary statement of their points of agreement.

While I’ve thought casually about doing so myself, I’ve thought better of it. But I think I’ve quoted enough of their discussion to give you and idea of what they’re up to.

Before proceeding I should note that I’m not a Blake scholar [3], nor a romanticist, nor even a specialist in poetry. It’s not clear to me what I am. I suppose I’m a theoretician and methodologist who pursues the craft mostly by examining texts in some detail.

* * * * *

The Sick Rose

O Rose, thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

Note: Occasionally there is an ellipsis in their text, indicated in the usual way. In those cases where I introduce an ellipsis into a quoted passage I’ll indicated that by enclosing the ellipsis dots within angle brackets, thus: […].

The Obvious

Henry Staten notes that that, in Attridge’s book, The Singularity of Literature, he asserts that the poem deploys “syntax to achieve an unrelenting forward drive that climaxes on a single powerful word” (66). He then quotes this passage:

The simplicity of the strongly articulated phrasal movement contributes to this experience. The arresting initial statement, “O Rose, thou art sick:” – one line, two beats – is followed, after a pregnant pause, by an extension that takes up the seven remaining lines. This extended elaboration of the opening line is made up of three lines of anticipation, followed by the stanza break which further heightens the tension, and then a four-line arrival. And those three lines of anticipation form a crescendo of intensity – “The invisible worm / That flies in the night, / In the howling storm,” – while the stanza of arrival varies the 1:3 balance of the first stanza by taking the reader through two climactic statements of equal length: “Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy; // And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.” (69-70)

Let me supplement this in a rather pedestrian way. As punctuated, the poem consists of two sentences: 1) the first line, and 2) the other seven. That second sentence thus loops over the boundary between the two quatrains. In some sense, Blake is signaling to us, that first line has a (logical) weight equal to that of the other seven lines. The second sentence would seem to amplify the assertion made in the first. The rose’s sickness, a property of the rose, is caused by the invasion of this foreign body, this worm.

Yet me further observe that the poem is addressed to the rose. The rose is not being talked about in the third person, as the worm is, but is included in dynamics of the poem itself. Thus a second person pronoun appears in the opening line (“thou”) , in line 5 (“thy”), and in the final line (“thy”), but not in line 2-4, which are given over to the worm. Thus the worm and the rose have a different relationship to the dialog itself.

And then we have the use of “thou” and “thy”. I’m not sure how to read that. We are dealing with what linguists know as the T–V distinction (after the Latin tu and vos). In Early Modern English “thou” and “thy” would have been used for familiars and subordinates while “ye” and “you” were used for strangers and superiors. But the use of “thou” and “thy” had pretty much disappeared from ordinary discourse by Blake’s time. But those forms have continued in restricted contexts where they “seem pious and (ironically) more formal and respectful than the everyday ‘you’” [4]. What was Blake signally in this usage, familiarity with the rose, or respect for it?

I don’t know how to resolve the matter, though it is quite possible that a Blakean would be able to do so. In any event, I think the precise valence of the second person address is less important than the fact that the poem is addressed to the rose. What that gives is a poem that begins 1) by addressing the rose, then 2) takes a three-line excursion to talk of the worm in third person and then 3) returns to addressing the rose. We might also read a spatial progression where the image of the invisible worm in the storm invokes large unbounded space, the image of the roses bed locates us specifically in the immediate neighborhood of the rose, while the concluding couplet implies that the worm is destroying the rose from within–even as we are addressing the rose.

Let’s move on to a comment by Attridge:

You may have doubts about the symbolic suggestiveness of rose and worm in themselves, but what about the sexual symbolism in their conjunction? Sexual symbolism in its crudest form–the phallic worm, the vaginal rose, the bed: is this not obvious to all readers, and thus part of what it means to take the poem at face value? It relies on the most basic visual associations to do its work (again, a touch of the child’s imaginative world?). Yet the implications of this interpretive leap are shocking: destructive pest entering beautiful flower to kill it equals human love-making... So my term “literal reading” is a bit misleading: it can include a response to symbolic meanings as well as literal. What I wanted to suggest is that the words mean what they mean, and they never stop meaning what they mean. (Meaning being, of course, a matter of general agreement. There is no such thing as a private language– Wittgenstein’s slogan bears repeating.) Even metaphors, as Donald Davidson insisted, mean what they say and not something else. This is a poem in which a worm enters, and destroys, a rose; and it’s only because worms and roses, and howling storms and crimson joys mean more than entomological, botanical and meteorological phenomena when we meet them in this arrangement that it’s a poem in which a great deal more happens.

I’d put that last notion a bit differently. The reason they “mean more than entomological, botanical and meteorological phenomena” is because they’ve been put in this most particular arrangement, an arrangement that summons their ordinary meanings and rubs them together to spark new meanings.

This in turn makes the notion of a “literal” reading problematic, but we don’t want to give in to “symbolic” readings too foolishly. Henry Staten explains:

I’m very friendly to calling the kind of reading we’re after a “literal” reading, even though it can be misleading (but all our terms can be misleading, starting with “obvious”). I think that the notion of “symbolism” is more misleading than “literal” is. Except when it’s used in the strictest sense, to mean something whose meaning stays more or less constant in each of its occurrences, the notion of the symbol has always seemed to me to introduce obscurity into the discussion of poems. […] You yourself say here that the fundamental conjunction of images “relies on the most basic visual associations to do its work.” Precisely. And I think it’s better not to call this “symbolism,” especially in cases like this one, where the technically non-literal meaning is so reliably linked to the literal meaning. I think it’s highly significant, though, that Blake has not depended on the worm-rose conjunction by itself to communicate the erotic meaning; he has thrown the words “bed” and “love” in there to make it obvious. To read a poem “literally” to me means not to depreciate the figurative meanings, but to

take it at its word and to avoid reading through it or behind it as much as possible.

Somewhat later on Staten invokes structuralism, which is where I got my intellectual start many years ago as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins:

Another aspect of description with a high probability of consensual acceptance is the patterning in many poems of what the structuralists liked to call “binary oppositions.” There is a primary linguistic energy in such oppositions that requires a minimum of understanding of meaning to grasp, and which is very often obvious or close to obvious (beginning with such traditional topoi as light/darkness and the like); in many cases all we have to do is point to the pairs of words that have such a relation to one another and remind ourselves of what it is about them that makes their meanings clash—a clash that can often be felt right at the surface of the words’ meanings, independently of most subtleties of interpretation. By sharpening our sense of this clash, we make palpable the “force” or the “dynamics” of the juxtaposition of these words in this context. Blake’s poem fairly explodes out of the juxtaposition of these two words: worm, flower.

Later in that same passage he has a parenthetical remark where he talks of howling-storm-worm and crimson-joy-rose, a nice opposition and a nice compact statement of the semantic gamesmanship operating in the poem.

What kind of thing is a crimson-joy-rose? A crimson rose, yes. But a joyous rose, or crimson joy? They don’t make sense. I want to take a digression through that kind of nonsense before continuing on with Attridge and Staten.

How fast do we read?

Marc Brysbaert, How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate, Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 109, December 2019, 104047, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047

Highlights

• Reading speed has been overestimated.
• For English silent reading it is 238 words per minute.
• For reading aloud it is 183 words per minute.
• There is no evidence for reading gears except for reading versus text scanning.

Abstract
Based on the analysis of 190 studies (18,573 participants), we estimate that the average silent reading rate for adults in English is 238 words per minute (wpm) for non-fiction and 260 wpm for fiction. The difference can be predicted by taking into account the length of the words, with longer words in non-fiction than in fiction. The estimates are lower than the numbers often cited in scientific and popular writings. The reasons for the overestimates are reviewed. The average oral reading rate (based on 77 studies and 5965 participants) is 183 wpm. Reading rates are lower for children, old adults, and readers with English as second language. The reading rates are in line with maximum listening speed and do not require the assumption of reading-specific language processing. Within each group/task there are reliable individual differences, which are not yet fully understood. For silent reading of English non-fiction most adults fall in the range of 175–300 wpm; for fiction the range is 200–320 wpm. Reading rates in other languages can be predicted reasonably well by taking into account the number of words these languages require to convey the same message as in English.

Literacy and the human mind/brain

From "Culture shapes the brain: How reading changes the way we think":

Reading and writing is something most of us take for granted. Grabbing a pen to jot something down or using our smartphone to read or answer a text message or email is something to which we don’t give even a moment’s thought. Reading and writing, however, are amazingly complex skills – as Falk Huettig from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and his colleagues Régine Kolinsky and Thomas Lachmann outline in the foreword to “The effects of literacy on cognition and brain functioning”, a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. To read and write, the brain must coordinate numerous perceptual and cognitive functions. These include, for example, basic visual skills, phonological perception, long-term memory and working memory. That’s why it takes years of practice for reading and writing to become so deeply engrained as to be effortless. Learning to read and write in turn modifies the structure and function of the brain.

Research in this area focuses on two fundamental questions. What conditions need to be in place for us to be able to learn to read and write? How does this complex skill affect our perception and cognition? In order to answer these questions, comparisons are particularly useful: for example, looking at the differences between good adult readers and adults who have never learnt to read; or the difference between children who learn to read easily and children who have more difficulty with this, or may have dyslexia.

In the case of dyslexia in particular, it is often hard to differentiate whether the associated deficits are causative or whether they occur because readers of comparable age have trained these cognitive skills through reading. Some years ago, José Morais from the University of Brussels determined that reading significantly improves phonological awareness (the ability to recognise specific sound structures of a language). People with dyslexia often find it difficult to distinguish these structures. John F. Stein from the University of Oxford argues that this is merely a side effect, rather than the cause, of reading difficulties.

More at the link. Here's the introduction to a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience:

Falk Huettig, Régine Kolinsky & Thomas Lachmann (2018) The culturally co-opted brain: how literacy affects the human mind, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33:3,275-277, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2018.1425803

Table of contents for the whole special issue. 

Squaring the Sokal – Not again! It's a mug's game

I'm bumping this old post (7.31.2011) to the top in honor of the latest round of "prank the humanists". The academic blogosphere & Twitterverse has been all a-flutter about so-called Sokal 2.0, perpetrated by James A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian. Color me ambiguous. While I share their dismay at what they call "grievance studies", for various reasons I've come to view this kind of hoax as a cheap stunt that does nothing to amend the problem. Perhaps I'll say a bit more about that later. For now I offer a parody of literary criticism that dates back to my undergraduate days. I wasn't trying to fool anyone, nor did I. Still, some were offended.

There is no universally agreed standard as to what constitutes garbage

You had to be there.

This (down ⤋ there), or something very like it, was originally published in the News-Letter, the student newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University, on March 7, 1969. It caused a minor scandal and set tongues a-wagging in the faculty dining room the Friday of publication. Other than an aura of sophomoric virtue and some verbal excess, it is hard to see why it was deemed scandalous.

As I said, you had to be there. This was 1969, before the culture wars, before skin mags came out of the backroom and onto the front racks, before porn on the internet. Before the nation had pulled its sorry ass out of Vietnam.

And before post-structuralism had morphed into deconstruction and sired Theory on the various political criticisms that proliferated in the wake of anti-war, civil rights, and feminist protests. Back then the New Criticism was still flying high in the academy and truth was still the earnest object of literary criticism. This little gem made a mockery of that. That, I suspect, was the core of the scandal; the sexually circumspect, but nonetheless obvious, language was merely a convenient foil on which to hang a bit of righteous indignation. The piece was silly and vulgar, so what?

I’ve reprinted it—it was written by my younger self—as a contribution to the discussion of close reading that has sprung up on the web at Arcade and now Crooked Timber. Who’s next? I’ve made a number of changes, some minor, some not so minor. Should you care about such matters, you can check this version against a somewhat tattered and smoke-damaged copy of the original, which I have archived here (PDF).

As a point of information, without which some of the language is likely to seem excessive even for satire, back in those days condoms were routinely called prophylactics. Also, there was a lot of student unrest and doubt about the university’s mission. A lot.

* * * * *

Of Socks, Prophylactics, and Other Matters Sublime and Heroic

by Carl Jakob Joachim Benzon

In view of the growing student unrest concerning the relevance of the real world to the concerns of the university, I thought it might be relevant to show how the real world is indeed relevant to our universal concerns and thus give a point of fixity upon which young and anxious minds can fix their earnest gaze and which will serve as a North Star by whose light they can chart their course through the treacherous seas of life. Accordingly I have decided to give a close textual analysis of a rather well-known piece of popular verse:

In days of old when knights were bold,
And rubbers weren’t invented,
They wrapped a sock around their cock
And babies were prevented.

Our first problem is the matter of textual authenticity. While popular verse of this sort exists primarily in a nonlinear oral tradition, a few texts were available to the intrepid scholar who is willing to gird up his loins and make a sally into various and sundry places for the evacuation of the bowels and emptying of the bladder open to the public. While most of these texts agree with the version published above, in one version the last line read “Thus babies were prevented” and in another version the second line ended in a semicolon rather than a comma, and in still another “He” was used instead of “They” and “his” instead of “their.” However, these differences, while of great interest to the scholar, are of relatively little importance in the proper interpretation of the text and thus I will say little more about them. Any student interested in pursuing this topic further should consult the magnificent thirty-volume study, The Texts and Techniques in the Study of Folk Literature: A Beginners Guide to Ethno-Philology in the Middle Atlantic Region of the United States from 1237 A.D. Until 1957 A.D. with Special Emphasis on the Twenty-Ninth Block of North Calvert Street [which is in Baltimore near the Arts and Sciences campus of The Johns Hopkins University] by my distinguished colleague, Thomas Aquino Benzon, Ph.D., D.Phil, F.R.S., F.O.P.

This poem is a Double Mock Heroic Quatrain on the Odds, for an ordinary Mock Heroic Quatrain lacks the internal rhyme in the odd numbered lines, one and three. Ostensibly it is a comic lyric meant to achieve effect by playing on advances in methods of curtailing the propagation of the species. A close reading, however, will reveal that this little poem deals with great and weighty matters.

Visual word form - "written words invaded a sector of visual cortex that was initially weakly specialized, slightly responsive to pictures of tools, and that lay next to a face-selective region"

Dehaene-Lambertz G, Monzalvo K, Dehaene S (2018) The emergence of the visual word form: Longitudinal evolution of category-specific ventral visual areas during reading acquisition. PLoS Biol 16(3): e2004103. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2004103

Abstract

How does education affect cortical organization? All literate adults possess a region specialized for letter strings, the visual word form area (VWFA), within the mosaic of ventral regions involved in processing other visual categories such as objects, places, faces, or body parts. Therefore, the acquisition of literacy may induce a reorientation of cortical maps towards letters at the expense of other categories such as faces. To test this cortical recycling hypothesis, we studied how the visual cortex of individual children changes during the first months of reading acquisition. Ten 6-year-old children were scanned longitudinally 6 or 7 times with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and throughout the first year of school. Subjects were exposed to a variety of pictures (words, numbers, tools, houses, faces, and bodies) while performing an unrelated target-detection task. Behavioral assessment indicated a sharp rise in grapheme–phoneme knowledge and reading speed in the first trimester of school. Concurrently, voxels specific to written words and digits emerged at the VWFA location. The responses to other categories remained largely stable, although right-hemispheric face-related activity increased in proportion to reading scores. Retrospective examination of the VWFA voxels prior to reading acquisition showed that reading encroaches on voxels that are initially weakly specialized for tools and close to but distinct from those responsive to faces. Remarkably, those voxels appear to keep their initial category selectivity while acquiring an additional and stronger responsivity to words. We propose a revised model of the neuronal recycling process in which new visual categories invade weakly specified cortex while leaving previously stabilized cortical responses unchanged.

Author summary

Reading acquisition is a major landmark in child development. We examined how it changes the child’s brain. Ten young children were scanned repeatedly, once every 2 months, before, during, and after their first year of school. In the scanner, they watched images of faces, tools, bodies, houses, numbers, and letters while searching for a picture of “Waldo.” As soon as they started to acquire reading skills, a specific region of the visual cortex of the left hemisphere—called the visual word form area (VWFA)—started to selectively respond to written words. In every child, it was then possible to go backward in time and ask what this region was doing prior to reading. We found that written words invaded a sector of visual cortex that was initially weakly specialized, slightly responsive to pictures of tools, and that lay next to a face-selective region. Reading acquisition did not displace those initial responses but blocked their development, such that face-selective responses became stronger in the right hemisphere. Those results provide direct evidence for how education recycles the human brain by repurposing some visual regions towards the shapes of letters.

The Paradox of the Text and Computational Criticism

I've been thinking about the text, especially the standard spatial metaphors literary critics use in talking about them, so I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. I'm working on another post on the topic.

Computational criticism, in Franco Moretti’s well-known terminology, is said to be “distant” reading. And there is an obvious sense in which it consistently deals with the text while so-called “close” reading often elides the text. It all depends on what we mean by “the text.”

There are situations where we mean the physical signs on the page, or even the pages themselves. But these situations are generally circumscribed. First of all there is old school textual criticism, concerned with the editing and preparation of texts. Then there are theoretical discussions about signs. More recently we have the history of the book. Practical criticism may deal directly with the signs on the page, or with the sounds of words (as in working out the rhyme scheme of a poem), but more often than not “looks through” the signs to their (various and possible) meanings.

Most importantly, in discussions of meaning and interpretation, the text is in fact a ghostly object – not the signifiers on the page, much less the pages themselves – which we apprehend through vague spatial schematization. In this schematization the text has an inside, an outside, and a surface. A major discussion has taken place around the question of whether or not the “meaning” of the text is determined only by items inside the text or items outside the text (such as authors and social context). Moreover the interior of the text is often presumed to have some kind of structure such that some meanings can be hidden within it. In contrast, other meanings are said to be on the surface of the text.

The general nature of the space that is articulated through these terms – inside, outside, surface, hidden – is unspecified. It is thus not clear where one must be in this space, or even how one can be in it, to render a so-called close reading. That a reading is close is generally indicated by extensive quotation of the text. Not only is such quotation lacking in so-called distant reading, but individual texts may not even be distinguished from one another.

And yet where the process of distant reading is mediated by digital computation, it is the text itself, the text understood as a collection of signifiers, that enters into the process. That is what I mean by the paradox of the text: computational criticism takes the text into account much more directly than does so-called close reading. The spatial schematization that guides our thinking about close reading is replaced by computational processes that operate directly with and on digital representations of physical signs (and the process by which those digital representations are created is a transparent one).

The critic, of course, supervises this digital processing. And the critic must select and interpret the visualizations of that processing. But that’s quite different from interpreting quoted passages. And the process of creating those visualizations is open to examination in a way that the selection of passages to quote is not. In “close” reading the process by which we get from the signs to meanings is opaque. By contrast, in “distant” reading that process is, at least in some respect, explicit and open to examination.

I note, finally, that this post is subject to deconstructive critique, but that critique will not erase the point that signs play a different role in computational criticism than they place in the many varieties of close and not-so-close reading.

* * * * *

Also see this older post, Commensurability, Meaning, and Digital Criticism.

Virtual reading as a path through a multidimensional-dimensional semantic space [#DH]

In my post, In search of a small world net, I speculated about analyzing Heart of Darkness with some appropriate vector space semantic model so that we could then construct a directed graph of the word types in the text where the length of the edges would be proportional to the distance between the words in the high-dimensional space constructed in the model. That post was about using this model as a way of investigating the centrality of a critical phrase (“My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—“).

But I ended the post with a short note on “virtual reading”:

Consider the connected graph for the emblem phrase. It should be easy enough to calculate a central point for the phrase, no? But then, couldn’t we do that for any sentence or phrase? So, start at the beginning of the text and move sequentially through the text with a moving window of suitable length. Calculate the central point for the phrase within the window and trace the movement of successive centers through the text from beginning to end.

Such a “reading” would not, of course, yield the computer anything like an understanding of the text. That’s not why it interests me. I’m interested in the form the trajectory traces through the space. For example, how does it move with respect to the center of the emblem? What about the volume spanned by the subgraph within this moving window? How does it expand and contract. And so forth.

In looking around on my hard-drive I came across a 2010 article on more or less just that. In the next section of this post I take a quick look at that paper. Then I return to Heart of Darkness, offer some more general remarks, and conclude with remarks about feasibility and intellectual imagination.

It’s gonna’ be another long one.

Hierarchy and dynamical correlations

Here’s that article:

E. Alvarez-Lacalle, B. Dorow, J.-P. Eckmann, and E. Moses. Hierarchical structures induce long-range dynamical correlations in written texts. PNAS Vol. 103 no. 21. May 23, 2006: 7956–7961. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0510673103

I’m sure I hadn’t read it, but I certainly must have skimmed it. Here’s the abstract:

Thoughts and ideas are multidimensional and often concurrent, yet they can be expressed surprisingly well sequentially by the translation into language. This reduction of dimensions occurs naturally but requires memory and necessitates the existence of correlations, e.g., in written text. However, correlations in word appearance decay quickly, while previous observations of long-range correlations using random walk approaches yield little insight on memory or on semantic context. Instead, we study combinations of words that a reader is exposed to within a “window of attention,” spanning about 100 words. We define a vector space of such word combinations by looking at words that co-occur within the window of attention, and analyze its structure. Singular value decomposition of the co-occurrence matrix identifies a basis whose vectors correspond to specific topics, or “concepts” that are relevant to the text. As the reader follows a text, the “vector of attention” traces out a trajectory of directions in this “concept space.” We find that memory of the direction is retained over long times, forming power-law correlations. The appearance of power laws hints at the existence of an underlying hierarchical network. Indeed, imposing a hierarchy similar to that defined by volumes, chapters, paragraphs, etc. succeeds in creating correlations in a surrogate random text that are identical to those of the original text. We conclude that hierarchical structures in text serve to create long-range correlations, and use the reader’s memory in reenacting some of the multidimensionality of the thoughts being expressed.

That “window” they mention is the key. They move the window through a text from beginning to end. That is pretty much what I’ve called virtual reading. The computer doesn’t do anything remotely like understand the text, but it reveals statistical features that the authors of the study attribute jointly to the structure of the text and the attention and memory of a reader.