The Cognitive Paradigm in Literary Studies

Author(s): Joseph M. Bizup and Eugene R. Kintgen

Source: College English, Vol. 55, No. 8 (Dec., 1993), pp. 841-857
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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 841

THE COGNITIVE PARADIGM IN

LITERARY STUDIES

JosephM. Bizupand Eugene R. Kintgen

he pasttwentyyearshavewitnessedthe birthandadolescenceof the new

field of cognitive science, which takes as its object of study all varietiesof
humanintelligenceand cognition,from"basic"functionssuch as perception
and motor control to those "higher"faculties such as language use and
reasoningwhich we tend to view as integralto our humanity.While it would be
absurdto characterizethe study of the humanmind as a new pursuit,cognitive
science is characterizedby a uniqueblend of researchmethods-empirical inves-
tigation supplementedby computermodeling and philosophicalspeculation-
that blurs the distinctionbetween the humanitiesand the sciences prevalentin
much twentieth-centuryscholarship.
Motivatedby a desire to producea new comprehensiveaccountof human
cognition, cognitive science is radicallyinterdisciplinaryin its approach.As
Donald A. Norman, an earlypractitionerof the science, puts it:
The studyof cognitionrequiresa broadbase,andfullunderstanding willrequire
morethanthe tools froma singleexistingdiscipline.Humancognitionexists
withinthecontextof theperson,thesociety,theculture.Tounderstand thehuman
requiresunderstandingof thesedifferent
issuesand theways in which theinterac-
tionsamongthemshapecognitiveprocesses.(1)
In the introductionto their collectionof classicarticlesin the field, AllanCollins
and EdwardE. Smith suggest "artificialintelligence, cognitive psychology,lin-
guistics,philosophyof mind and language,anthropology,neuroscience,and edu-
cation" (1) as contributorydisciplines,and Daniel N. Osherson and Howard
Lasnik, editors of the first volume of a three-volumeintroductorysurvey of

Joseph M. Bizup is a graduatestudentmajoringin English and minoringin cognitivescience at

IndianaUniversity.He receiveda Masterof Artsdegreein Englishfromthe Universityof Maryland
in 1991. Eugene R. Kintgen is Professor of English and Associate Dean in the Office of Research
andthe UniversityGraduateSchoolat IndianaUniversity,Bloomington.He is interestedin cognitive
approachesto reading,interpretation,and literacy,and has recentlyfinisheda book on readingin
TudorEngland.

COLLEGE ENGLISH, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 8, DECEMBER 1993

842 COLLEGE ENGLISH

cognitive science, list as contributors "thirty-one authors, including linguists,

psychologists, philosophers, computer scientists, biologists, and engineers" (ix).
George Lakoff, a linguist and cognitive scientist who studies the interrelation-
ships between concepts, language, and the mind, includes "psychology, linguis-
tics, anthropology, philosophy, and computer science" as participants in the "new
field" of cognitive science (xi).
Conspicuously absent from these lists, however, is the study of literature. On
the one hand, this omission is not surprising, given cognitive science's strong
reliance on empirical research, a method of inquiry to which literature has proven
consistently resistant. On the other hand, though, several factors suggest that the
two disciplines can contribute to each other. First, like cognitive science, contem-
porary literary scholarship prides itself on its interdisciplinary stance and draws
upon a variety of theoretical approaches which, collectively, demonstrate affili-
ations with continental philosophy and linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology,
sociology, cultural studies, and a number of other fields. Second, both cognitive
science and literary studies share a degree of self-reflectiveness unmatched by
most other academic disciplines. If contemporary criticism can be characterized
broadly as writing about writing, then cognitive science can be characterized
similarly as thinking about thinking.
Third, at least some cognitive scientists seem to have an intuition that
literature has something to do with what they are studying: they occasionally
mention the production or reception of literary texts as a cognitive activity, just
as innumerable critics have offered the (obvious?) observation that literature is a
product of the human mind. Most often, though, these acknowledgments are
nothing more than offhand remarks, the stylistic byproducts of prefaces and
introductory paragraphs. And even when cognitive scientists enter into areas of
study traditionally acknowledged as "literary,"they tend to ignore the work of
literary critics and scholars. For example, Roger Schank and Robert Abelson, in
their significant book Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding:An Inquiry into
Human KnowledgeStructures,develop what amounts to a theory of narrative, but
make no real use of any literary critical work in this area. Generally, most
cognitive scientists seem to view the study of literature as peripheral to their
work, as something to remark upon in an introduction or brief digression but not
an activity which can provide real insights about important issues.
Recently, though, a growing number of literary scholars have asserted that
the study of literature is an important and integral part of the study of the mind,
and that cognitive science and literary studies can be mutually informing. As
Mark Turner, one of the most vocal of these, puts it, "it is not apt for some people
to work on semantics, others to work on literature, and others to work on the
nature of the mind without taking into account one another's insights" (Death 13).
 THE COGNITIVE PARADIGM IN LITERARY STUDIES 843

We intend in this paper to provide an introduction to some of these attempted

connections.
One of the earliest attempts to use the insights of cognitive science in literary
studies is Reuven Tsur's What is CognitivePoetics?(1983), written after Tsur had
attended the second conference of the Cognitive Science Association and discov-
ered, like the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, that he had been practicing cognitive
science all his life without knowing it (5). In his definition, cognitive poetics

attemptsto find out how poetic language,or criticaldecisions,areconstrainedand

shapedby humaninformationprocessing[;]... assumesthat it should use cogni-
tive theoriesto illuminateliteratureratherthanuse worksof literatureto illustrate
cognitive theories;emphasize[s]the particularand nice differencesbetweencog-
nitive processesin generaland their uniqueexploitationfor literarypurposes.(5)

However, he avoids the fallacy of analyzing all behavior in terms of a single

explanatory system (here cognitive) by combining "the tools of cognitive science
with those of the more traditional disciplines of literary criticism, literary theory,
linguistics and aesthetics" (6).
Echoing the Russian formalists, Tsur argues that the primary purpose of
literature is to defamiliarize or deautomatize our cognitive processing:

One major assumptionof cognitive poetics is that poetry exploits for aesthetic
purposescognitive (includinglinguistic)processesthat were initiallyevolvedfor
non-aestheticpurposes.... In certainextremebut centralcases,this modification
may become "organizedviolence againstcognitive structuresand processes",to
paraphrasethe famousslogan of RussianFormalism.... quite a few (but by no
meansall) centralpoetic effectsarethe resultof some drasticinterferencewith, or
at least delayof, the regularcourseof cognitiveprocesses,and the exploitationof
its effectsfor aestheticpurposes.In otherwords,the cognitivecorrelatesof poetic
processesmust be describedin three respects:normalcognitiveprocesses;some
kind of modificationor disturbanceof these processes;and their reorganization
accordingto differentprinciples.(8)

Cognition normally works unconsciously: we analyze the phonology, semantics,

and syntax of language samples without conscious effort. But poetry interferes
with this everyday cognition, and most of Tsur's examples deal with various kinds
of interference. Normal cognition is strongly categorical: the physical world is
presented to consciousness as a configuration of things (for which language
provides names); as a corollary, "we are nearly incapable of seeing thing-free,
precategorical information" (24). Poetry, on the other hand, "attempts to over-
come these limitations of human cognition .... The cognitive organization of the
environment into things dissolves into abstractions and thing-freequalities. ... the
recourse to lowly-categorized information, which is experienced as affect, height-
ens one's responsiveness and flexibility in orientation" (25).
844 COLLEGE ENGLISH

Romantic poetry, in particular, "is a poetry of integration and orientation

that makes ample use of rich precategorical, or lowly categorized, information"
(40), and many of Tsur's examples discuss specific passages to illustrate how the
poems, by preventing normal categorization, focus attention more on affect. The
"feud" in Keats's "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,"

Such dim-conceivedgloriesof the brain

Bringroundthe heartan indescribablefeud
"is not only undifferentiated and gestalt-free, but is thing-free too.... the more
passionate impact of Keats's lines [compared with a similar passage from Mar-
lowe] has to do with the fact that they are focussed on violent actions that are
stripped of things which might carry them." Similarly, "Keats ... emphasizes the
undifferentiated character of the passion by the adjectives 'indescribable feud', and
'dim-conceived glories"' (27), and the result of this lack of categorization is the
heightened emphasis on affect some readers perceive in the passage (27).
This illustration of Tsur's method indicates his usual three steps: a descrip-
tion of normal cognitive processing, the modification of this normal processing
by the poem and subsequent reorganization according to some different princi-
ple, and its effect (8). For his accounts of normal processing he relies on a range
of cognitive psychologists, most notably Ulrich Neisser, but his accounts of the
interference with normal processing are his own, and suffer mainly from their
insistence that interference (or delay, the other alternative he allows [8]) is the
only truly poetic manipulation of cognitive processing. His broad initial defini-
tion of cognitive poetics ("it attempts to find out how poetic language, or critical
decisions, are constrained and shaped by human information processing" [5]) is
quickly narrowed to a consideration of the "quite a few (but by no means all)
central poetic effects" which "are the result of some drastic interference with, or
at least delay of, the regular course of cognitive processes" (8). The result is a
cognitive poetics that is a supplement to, rather than an integral part of, regular
cognition, a separation which, like that between art and daily life, will likely prove
more a hindrance than a help in understanding the apprehension of poetic texts.
Tsur's emphasis on cognitive processing is reflected in Richard Cureton's
more ambitious RhythmicPhrasing in English Verse,in which Cureton applies the
theoretical frame developed by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff in A Generative
Theoryof TonalMusic to account for poetic rhythm. Drawing directly on parallels
with generative linguistics and Gestalt psychology, Lerdahl and Jackendoff de-
velop a theory to provide "a formal description of the musical intuitions of a
listener who is experienced in a musical idiom" (1). There are three major
components in their theory: groupingreflects the fact that "when hearing a piece,
the listener naturally organizes sound signals into units such as motives, themes,
 THE COGNITIVE PARADIGM IN LITERARY STUDIES 845

phrases, periods, theme-groups, sections, and the piece itself' (12); meter ac-
counts for inferences the hearer draws-"the listener instinctively infers a regular
pattern of strong and weak beats to which he relates the actual musical sounds"
(12); and reductionrepresents "the listener['s] attempts to organize all the pitch-
events of a piece into a single coherent structure, such that they are heard as in a
hierarchy of relative importance" (106). For each of these types of structure,
Lerdahl and Jackendoff posit two kinds of rules: "well-formednessrules, which
specify the possible structural descriptions, and preferencerules, which designate
out of the possible structural descriptions those that correspond to experienced
listeners' hearings of any particular piece" (9). Taken together, they characterize
the possible interactions between quite different types of musical intuitions.
In RhythmicPhrasing in English Verse,Cureton attempts to apply this ap-
proach to English poetry, focusing on what he calls "rhythmicphrasing ... those
aspects of rhythmic response that are not metrical . . . Meter presents the basic
'beat' of the verse. Phrasing represents how the text is segmented into parts and
how those parts move, both in themselves and in relation to other parts"(x). Both
rhythm and phrasing have traditionally been understood as relatively local phe-
nomena, limited to the phrase or clause and seldom extended even as far as the
sentence. Cureton conceives of both terms (and their conjunction) more globally:
"a prosodic theory... should be able to tell us what language structures charac-
teristically produce a rhythmic response, how individual responses are combined
into more complex organizations, and how these more complex structures in turn
affect the perceiving subject (perceptually, emotively, and conceptually)" (6). By
concentrating on grouping and prolongation (which corresponds to Lerdahl and
Jackendoff's reduction), he is able to demonstrate how grouping at successive
levels, beginning with individual syllables, eventually leads to the level of the
entire poem.
Grouping is accomplished by means of nine well-formedness rules specifying
what constitutes a well-formed group, and seventeen preference rules (the final
one itself including over fifty subcategories), which readers use "to construct
grouping schemes they prefer" from the material that is provided by the text
(191). The well-formedness rules specify groups of at most seven members with
one strong constituent and no more than three contiguous weak constituents;
these groups combine at increasingly higher levels into more and more inclusive
groups until the level of the entire text, itself the largest group, is reached (190).
How readers do this is the province of the preference rules, which suggest
preferring groups that informationally contain other groups (#1), have two or
three members (#9- #11), are prosodic domains or syntactic constituents (#12),
and contain similar linguistic forms (#13). The peaks, or strong constituents, are
similarly identified: preference is given to those which are physically or linguis-
846 COLLEGE ENGLISH

tically "heavy" (#2), are either linguistically dense or a linguistic change (#4, #6),
are in final position in a group or are formal returns (#3, #5), and are heavily
stressed (#7).
Prolongation derives from readers' "generic expectation for a certain sort of
canonical global movement" in poetry:
The structuralbeginning of the text raises some identifiableissue about human
experience(whatwe might traditionallyidentifyas a theme).The body of the text
explores this issue with description,narrativeor argument, complicatingand
elaboratingthe hermeneuticalproblem.Then the structuralendingresolvesthese
complicationsand elaborationsin some satisfyingway.(149)
Cureton defines three prolongational units: the arrival, which represents a struc-
tural goal; the anticipation, which moves toward the goal; and the extension,
which moves awayfrom a goal, "elaboratingand complicatingits implications"
(147). All three generally coincide with structural groups and are more relevant
at the higher levels of analysis where syntax becomes more dominant in deter-
mining grouping structure.
Meter, grouping, and prolongation interact to provide a rich orchestration
of rhythm in a poem:
In manytextualunits,meterbeginswith a strongbeat,projectsa measure,andthen
winds down. Groupingbuildssteadilyand peaksat the end of the measure.And
prolongationsuggestsa structuralgoal, then tenselydepartsfrom that suggestion,
then anticipates a goal, and then achieves it . . . I take this result as one of the
strongestpossibleargumentsfor a componentialtheoryof rhythm.This elegantly
complementaryrelationbetweenthe three componentsdoes not seem accidental.
(150)
In extended analysesof Hopkins's"The Windhover,"Yeats's"When You Are
Old," and a section fromWilliamCarlosWilliams'sPaterson,Curetonsensitively
demonstratesthe intricateinterplayof these three components,beginningwith
the syllableand moving to the poem as a whole, demonstratingquite clearlythat
the traditionalview of rhythmas a decidedlylocal effect is unnecessarilylimited.
His readingsrevealan extensiveand delicateinteractionof movementsof various
kindswithin the poems,with implicationsfor both criticismandpedagogy(which
he presentsin a final chapter).
The most significantcontributionof Cureton'sbook for us is its adaptation
of preferencerules to explainthe process of rhythmicperception.Lerdahland
Jackendoffderivedthese from Gestalttheoriesof visualgrouping(40) to applyto
musicalgrouping,andJackendoffin Semantics andCognition andotherworkswent
on to explore what he calls "the ubiquity of preference rule systems" (the title of
one section in Semanticsand Cognition)in visual and musical perception, word
meanings (135-51), phonology (153), syntax and semantics (153-54), pragmatics
(155-56), and what he calls "real life" (156). Because preference rules do not
 THE COGNITIVE PARADIGM IN LITERARY STUDIES 847

rigidly determine result but specify tendencies and allow for variation in different
applications, they can be useful in explaining not only the kinds of interpreta-
tion-musical, linguistic, rhythmical-that Cureton and Lerdahl and Jackendoff
arrive at, but also the range of interpretations of literary and musical composi-
tions. Specifically, Cureton's approach suggests a way to account for two "striking
facts" about interpretation identified some time ago by Jonathan Culler: "how it
is that a work can have a variety of meanings but not just any meaning whatsoever
or how it is that some works give an impression of strangeness, incoherence,
incomprehensibility" when "reading poetry is a rule-governed process of produc-
ing meanings" (Culler 122, 126). Through preference rules, reading practices can
be characterized formally without imposing a static conceptual template, and this
allows for the inclusion of incompatible or competing tendencies within and
between interpretive communities. In this sense, the use of preference rules has
obvious relevance to Stanley Fish's interpretive communities (Is ThereA TextIn
This Class? and Doing What ComesNaturally), to Eugene Kintgen's attempt to
define reader's preferred cognitive strategies (The Perceptionof Poetry), and to
Norman Holland's more recent distinction between codes (which all members of
a culture share) and canons (which are more idiosyncratic) (The CriticalI).
Given Cureton's reliance on preference rules, however, it is strange that he
stipulates a single form of meter, adopting Lerdahl's and Jackendoff's well-
formedness rules for musical meter while ignoring their preference rules. The
result is that meter for Cureton is a given, not infrequently at odds with the
phonological stresses in a given line, a view which, as he proudly admits, "differs
radically from the 400 years of discussion of meter in the English tradition" (134).
In favor of his position is the opportunity for increased tension between grouping
and meter and even between linguistic stress and meter, but one wonders whether
a relatively rich conception of meter designed for Western music can be simpli-
fied and applied directly to English poetry. For instance, while Lerdahl and
Jackendoff's restriction of meter to duple and triple patterning corresponds fairly
well to hearers' intuitions about stresses in music written in 2/4, 4/4, 3/4, or 6/8
time, they admit that some musical idioms (e.g. some compositions by Stravinsky
or Claude le Jeune, a sixteenth-century composer) require different well-formed-
ness rules (97-99). But duple and triple patterning is not at all an obvious way to
describe iambic pentameter, which requires both kinds of pattern in each line, and
one wonders whether other metrical well-formedness rules, formulated specifi-
cally for iambic pentameter, might not have been worth exploring.
Finally, we should point out that preference rules, impressive as they may
appear in accounting for a range of interpretations, constitute only one of several
mechanisms proposed for explaining human categorization. Preference rules, as
Jackendoff develops them, are an attempt, within the general paradigm of
Chomskyan linguistics, to account for recent evidence regarding categorization,
848 COLLEGE ENGLISH

the process by which specific instances are understood as examples of more

abstract categories. Many of these categories cannot be defined by lists of criterial
attributes but rather possess more or less typical members, allow for differing
degrees of membership, display family resemblance features, contain members
with contradictory features between them, and so on (Lakoff 12-13). Although
preference rules may be able to account for these findings, as Jackendoff claims,
they nevertheless rely on certain foundational assumptions which are not shared
by all researchers interested in concepts and categorization. Specifically, the
preference rule model assumes that cognitive processing is symbolic and rule-
based, is committed to the principle of decompositionality which proposes that
all concepts may be decomposed into combinations of a finite set of semantic
primitives, and in its strictest moments, consistent with its Chomskyan heritage,
explicitly limits itself to describing information content and structure rather than
processing. Other paradigms for modeling cognitive processes, though, do not
necessarily rely on these assumptions. Connectionist, or parallel distributed proc-
essing models, in which nodes are connected by weighted links, do not explicitly
manipulate symbols according to rules. This is obviously not the place to consider
the competing claims of rule-based and connectionist models (for a good discus-
sion of this issue, as well as for a general introduction to connectionism, see
William Bechtel's and Adele Abrahamsen's Connectionismand the Mind). In regard
to Cureton, suffice it to say that though preference rules are one way of approach-
ing the issues with which he is concerned, they are not the only way and possibly
not the best.
Both Tsur and Cureton emphasize for the most part the procedural aspects
of cognition, the processes readers use in order to understand literary works.
Within cognitive science, however, there is at least equal emphasis on the ques-
tions of how knowledge is represented and meaning created in the mind. The
impetus behind the next two books we will discuss, Nicolae Babuts's The Dynamics
of the MetaphoricField and Mark Turner's ReadingMinds: The Study of English in
theAge of CognitiveScience,is the conviction that any account of reading or literary
interpretation must take into consideration the way the human mind handles
knowledge and creates meaning. In particular, the authors react against what they
perceive as a reliance on incorrect theories of the mind by contemporary literary
scholarship and suggest that, since the structures of texts reflect at some level the
order of the mind, a closer association between literary studies and cognitive
science might enhance both disciplines.
Nicolae Babuts's The Dynamics of the MetaphoricField is an attempt to de-
velop, through the vehicle of cognitive science, an alternative to what he calls
"formalist" theories which devalue the author and reader: "It was imperative to
reaffirm the value of the roles of both author and reader as a counter to the
massive contemporary denial of the creative impulse. For the many and varied
 THE COGNITIVE PARADIGM IN LITERARY STUDIES 849

approaches within the formalist enterprise have at least this in common: they
are all system oriented and all attempt to neutralize the individual contribution"
(12). Babuts's project is motivated by his sense that these critical approaches-
from American New Criticism through French structuralism to Derridean
deconstruction-rely on erroneous conceptions of the relation between minds,
language, and the world: "Language becomes self-sufficient, self-reflexive, and
self-questioning, and it loses its referential power" (13-14). Formalist theories
attempt to treat language as entirely self-sufficient, as systems of codes or
conglomerations of arbitrary signs, but nevertheless they must ultimately posit
some model of cognition and memory to mediate between language and the
outside world. Babuts rightly criticizes them for accepting without evidence
congenial models of memory while ignoring recent scientific investigations of
these areas and recommends incorporating the empirical findings of cognitive
science into critical discussion: "Just as we require intuition in our research, so
too we need cognitive data about meaning in our philosophical meditations.
Without such data we cannot hope to provide answers to the questions that really
matter" (15).
For instance, the French structuralists, confronted with the failure of Ameri-
can New Criticism and European formalism to account for the relation between
language and the world, merely denied that any such relation existed: "Instead of
striving for a new integration," Babuts observes, "they simply disengaged lan-
guage from the attraction of reality. At one stroke they appeared to have solved
a most intractable problem" (29). This maneuver proves unsatisfactory because it
distances language from humanity and ultimately renders language-understood
as the interaction of networks of signifiers-literally meaningless: "the concern
with the plurality of the system has done away with the creative and charac-
teristically human faculties involved in both reading and writing. I am not deny-
ing the existence of codes; I am only saying that they are not sufficient to produce
meaning" (33-34). In its attempt to formulate a comprehensive theory of signifi-
cation, French structuralism actually impoverishes itself by ignoring the human
mind-the very site of meaning and creativity-altogether.
As an alternative to these "formalist" critical theories, Babuts sets out to
develop a cognitive approach to literature. For Babuts, "the fundamental premise
of a cognitive view is that both reading and writing are memory dominated" (49).
He proposes a theory of "mnemonic potentials"-defined as "endogenous repre-
sentational patterns in memory, which play a crucial role in the integration and
recognition of incoming stimuli" (164)-to formalize this insight: "These mne-
monic potentials represent both encoding skills and knowledge of the value of the
dynamic patterns encountered and of their potential context" (108). These pat-
terns are organized into larger "metaphoric fields" within which meaning is
created and interpreted in light of some dominant concern (164). Babuts'snotion
850 COLLEGE ENGLISH

is that authors encode the meaning which emerges from these fields in their texts
and readers reconstruct it in interpretation:

Wordscreatea metaphoricfield, a gravitationalcore, andin turnareheld together

by the tensionof the mentaldrama.The fieldis a mnemonicspacenewlyawakened
by the involuntarystrategy of memory, where single and fragmentaryword-
bondeddynamicpatternsarebroughtinto a proximityandconditionedto interact
and produce new metaphoricsequences.It is the author'screativedrive, often
bringingtogether two or more levels of experience,that generatesthe tension of
the field. When readersreencode the dynamicpatternsand the specificways in
which signifiersand signifiedswere bonded, they in effect re-createthe original
identity-definingtension of the field. (105)
The common encoding mechanisms of all human beings-"we can communicate
through dynamic patterns because they are to a degree shareable by a community
and a tradition" (93)-guarantee identity between an author's intention and a
reader's interpretation. Babuts's tendency towards traditional humanism is evi-
dent here: he suggests that we are able to communicate because we use the same
dynamic patterns, by which he seems to mean concepts, and grounds this sugges-
tion in his theory of memory.
The principal flaw of this approach is its reductionist appeal to neural
processing to explain the interpretation of literary texts. This is like calling
Microsoft for help operating Windows and being told about the circuitry of the
microprocessor. Reductionism, as Hilary Putnam defines it, is "the doctrine that
the laws of such 'higher-level' sciences as psychology and sociology are reducible
to the laws of lower-level sciences-biology, chemistry, and ultimately to the laws
of elementary particle physics" (205). Putnam argues that this doctrine is wrong
because it confuses deduction and explanation: while the behavior of higher-level
systems is in principle deducible from lower-level laws, this alone does not
constitute an explanation, which must include relevant and exclude irrelevant
information (205-6). Further, reductionist accounts are prone to obscure the
pertinent features of a situation in a mass of irrelevant lower-level information
(206), a charge to which Babuts's book is susceptible.
Babuts's reductionist strategy damages his argument by forcing him to ac-
count for phenomena which should be transparent to his analysis and by prevent-
ing him from making useful distinctions at an appropriate explanatory level. He
becomes overly involved, for instance, in discussions about whether memories are
encoded by specific neurons or whether they are distributed (54-55) and about
the specific search procedures the brain uses to access stored information (63-64).
But the physiological mechanismsthrough which memory is implemented are
incidental to Babuts's argument; what matters is how the functioning of memory
affects the interpretation of texts. Nevertheless, by appealing to the neural level,
he obligates himself to make pronouncements about neural processing which are
 THE COGNITIVE PARADIGM IN LITERARY STUDIES 851

quite possibly wrong and often too vague to be of much interest. In the worst
cases, he couches his claims in an idiosyncratic pseudo-scientific vocabulary
which obscures the specificity and significance of his observations: "I propose that
recognition is accomplished through the meeting and integration of stimulus
sequences and the mnemonic sequences of the cerebral potentials. These poten-
tials represent the synapses that have been activated by an act of attention or by
the preliminary recognition of the stimulus" (52). If Babuts here is saying merely
that when recognition occurs, certain neurons increase their activity, his observa-
tion is trivial. If, on the other hand, he is remarking upon the way neurons
function, he gives no evidence to support his claim.
A corollary difficulty is that Babuts's decision to emphasize the neural level
prevents him from making useful distinctions regarding the interpretation of
texts. If his "cognitive approach" is to have any utility, it must be able to differ-
entiate between different readings and account, in a systematic way, for variations
in literary interpretation. It is not enough to say the "mnemonic potentials"
interact in "metaphoric fields"; Babuts should be able to show specifically how
the interaction created by reading one text differs from the interaction produced
by reading another. Discussing his reading of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," for
instance, he observes: "My impending act of reading is already modulated by all
the knowledge I have of Faulkner and of some of his other stories; specific
mnemonic potentials are alerted; and a certain metaphoric space is prepared"
(134). This remark is not an explanation of anything, because it could apply
equally to any text by any author.
These faults are compounded by Babuts's odd decision to ignore most of the
recent research in the fields-neuroscience and cognitive psychology-to which
he specifically appeals. In the chapter called "Mnemonic Principles," which
provides the scientific background for the theory, for instance, Babuts refers to
practically no work published within the last decade (two articles published in
1982 are the most recent of over thirty references). He justifies this by admitting
in his introduction that he "decided neither to accept concepts or data because
they are new, nor to reject them because they are old" (11), but one must still
wonder whether he might not have found something in the explosion of work
during the last decade that would have engaged his interest, particularly in the
work on concept formation and cognitive representations.
Finally, Babuts offers little that is new for practical criticism. The cognitive
view of literature, he writes, "should encourage individual readings and interpre-
tations that stay close to the actual contact with the text and that attempt to reach
the identity of its metaphoric field" (123). Babuts's theory of reading is thus little
more than an attempt to reinscribe authorial intention by reference to authors'
and readers' cognitive processing. His suggestions that the "reader'smeaning is a
re-creation in terms of his or her own imagination, a reencoding, of the author's
852 COLLEGE ENGLISH

meaning," and that "Faith in our coding processes allows us to believe that we as
readers can recover the identity of the author's message and make its meaning our
own" (131) owes more to E. D. Hirsch's 1967 Validityin Interpretationthan to
anything in cognitive science or even in literary theory published since Hirsch's
book. What Babuts provides, finally, is a highly conservative theory of interpre-
tation based on close reading of texts justified by a problematic appeal to contem-
porary neuroscience.
Like Babuts, Mark Turner, in ReadingMinds: The Study of English in the Age
of Cognitive Science, looks to cognitive science to correct what he perceives as
shortcomings in contemporary critical theory. But his ability to conduct the
discussion at an appropriate level of explanation and his familiarity with and
application of current research in such areas as categorization, perception, and
metaphor theory allow him to avoid Babuts's principal faults and to produce a
cogent and convincing argument for the applicability-and even centrality-of
cognitive science to literary studies. Reading Minds begins with an essay that
surveys the current state of literary studies and argues for the reconstitution of
the study of English around questions of human cognition. The first and second
chapters introduce basic concepts about the body and the mind which form the
foundation of Turner's approach. The body of the book-chapters 3 through
9-is comprised of seven fairly autonomous chapters which use findings from
cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics-particularly those regarding hu-
man categorization, image schemas, and metaphor-to address questions of po-
etics, and conversely, address questions of cognition by looking at the structures
of specific literary texts. Chapter 10 argues that cultural literacy does not merely
entail knowing a certain body of information but requires familiarity with the
basic conventions upon which a cultural community relies to facilitate communi-
cation among its members. The final chapter sketches in a general way some
potential connections between cognitive science and critical theory. The book
does not purport to be a comprehensive treatment of any of the broad variety of
subjects it broaches, but attempts rather to blaze a trail for future interdisciplinary
research on language, literature, and the human mind.
Turner notes that although literary interpretation depends fundamentally on
the cognitive apparatuswhich gives rise to language, much critical theory assumes
and relies on erroneous notions of how the mind works. In an earlier book,
Turner observed that

Literary criticism usually assumes that we understandthe cognitive apparatus

underlyinglanguageand literature,when, in fact, the analysishas only begun....
When a literary critic proposes that he or she understandsthe apparatusand
proceedsto analyzesubtletiesthat derivefrom it, the literarycritic may be simply
mistakenin the presupposition.This may vitiate the worth of the consequent
analysis.(Death4-5)
 THE COGNITIVE PARADIGM IN LITERARY STUDIES 853

In ReadingMinds, he amplifies the implications of this early remark to create what

amounts to a manifesto for locating literary studies in the field of cognitive
science. He surveys "the fragmented, isolated, and inconsequential state" of
contemporary literary studies and proposes "a new common ground for the
profession of English: the analysis of acts of language, including literature, as acts
of a human brain in a human body in a human environment which that brain must
make intelligible if it is to survive" (vii-viii).
Significantly, Turner does not simply appropriate insights about the mind
from cognitive science and then apply them to the interpretation of literature.
Such an approach would lead inevitably to the superficial application of aging
theories of cognition and the consequent production of an unsatisfactory and
derivative criticism. Instead, he argues that if the profession of English were
reconstituted around "a concept of language and literature as acts of the everyday
human mind" (6), the study of literature would play a central and guiding role in
our contemporary discovery of the human mind. Such a "cognitive rhetoric"
would be both a radical departure from contemporary critical practice and a
return to a traditional alignment of disciplines in which rhetorical and literary
studies contributed to scientific and philosophical inquiries into the nature of
mind. It would possess many of the features which characterize ordinary scientific
discourse: most importantly, it is, unlike other schools of literary theory, "rou-
tinely accretive" in that it "always begins where others have left off, and provides
a suitable beginning point for later work" (23). Additionally, a "refreshing conse-
quence" of his approach is that it "allows us to be committed to data rather than
to a critical theory," thereby rendering the claims of criticism "open to falsifica-
tion" (23). These traits-faith in the progressive accumulation of knowledge and
a reliance upon data which are not dependent upon any particular theory-are
characteristic features of normal scientific practice (Kuhn 23-51).
Turner conversely situates his approach in a way that is sensitive to the
demands of the profession of literary criticism. As that consummate literary
professional Stanley Fish observes, "The greatest rewards of our profession are
reserved for those who challenge the assumptions within which ordinary practices
go on, not so much in order to eliminate the category of the ordinary but in order
to redefine it and reshape its configurations" (Is There... ? 366). By arguing for
a revision of the theoretical positions underpinning contemporary critical prac-
tice, for a "reframing of the study of English so that it comes to be seen as
inseparable from the discovery of mind" (vii), Turner lays claims to the highest
accolades of the profession. His assertion that his cognitive approach to literature
is capable of serving "as common ground for many different theories of literature,
conflicting with none of them, however incompatible they might be with each
other" (22), suggests just such a reconfiguration and is fully responsive to the
conventions of the profession.
854 COLLEGE ENGLISH

Like Tsur, Cureton, and Babuts, Turner insists that literary scholars should
not justproduceinterpretationsbut shouldalso addressthe priorquestionof how
interpretationoccurs:
We takefor grantedour capacitiesto inventand interpret,and devoteourselvesto
exercisingthose capacitiesandpublishingthe results.It is the capacitiesthemselves
that need explaining.(19)
This conception of literary study, so similar to the one Jonathan Culler made
Poetics,neverthelessdiffersfrom Culler'sin its insistence
familiarin Structuralist
on the continuity between understanding literary language and understanding
naturallanguage.Culler similarlyprivilegedlanguage,but (specificallyinvoking
a parallel with Chomskyan generative grammar) argued that the understanding
of literature must use operations and processes different from, and supplementary
to, those requiredfor linguisticunderstanding:
The differentmeaningswhich the text acquirescannotthereforebe attributedto
one's knowledgeof languagebut must be ascribedto the specialconventionsfor
reading poetry which lead one to look at the languagein new ways, to make
relevantpropertiesof the languagewhich were previouslyunexploited,to subject
the text to a differentseriesof interpretiveoperations.(114)
For Culler, one understandslanguageby using a series of linguistic perceptual
strategies; poetry is understood by using a different set of poetic or literary
perceptual strategies.
For Turner,on the other hand, the processesby which literarylanguageis
understoodare only special applicationsof abilitieswhich underlieall linguistic
comprehension:
Most of the tools of poeticthoughtnot only existin everydaythoughtbut are
indispensableandirreducible there.Reasonandpoeticthoughtarenot mutually
theyareratherhypertrophies
exclusive; of a commonnucleusof humanimagina-
Structuresof languagesupposedlypoetic are ubiquitousand
tive capabilities.
in everyday
irreducible language.(20)
In Turner'seyes, the common and ordinaryfeaturesof language are the most
interesting, most complex, and most in need of explanation.Throughout his
book, he emphasizesthe constraintsour cognitive facultiesplace on the produc-
tion and receptionof texts.
Chapters5 through9 examinehow basic featuresof humancognition, like
the use of image schemas and analogiesto structureconcepts, manifest them-
selves in a variety of texts. Turner suggests that cognitive rhetoric can be ex-
ploited to conduct practical criticism at the level of the individual phrase, at the
level of the entire literary work organized in terms of a controlling conception or
metaphor, and at the level of the genre (149-50; see also 240-46). At the level of
the phrase, he focuses on analogy, "a blanket term to cover all cases in which we
understand one concept in terms of another concept" (121). Analogies or meta-
 THE COGNITIVE PARADIGM IN LITERARY STUDIES 855

phors have three aspects: a source domain, a target domain, and a mapping "of
entities, relations, knowledge, reasoning patterns, image-schemas, and semantic
structure from the source to the target" (158). Basic-level metaphors connect
specific domains-LIFE IS A PLAY or DEATH IS DEPARTURE-and are
instantiations of generic-level metaphors which relate more abstract concepts
(or generic-level schemas), "basic ontological categories (such as entity, state,
event, action, and situation), aspects of beings..., event-shape..., causal rela-
tions..., image-schemas..., and modalities" (161). The generic-level meta-
phor EVENTS ARE ACTIONS, for instance, relates the abstract concepts
which allow us to conceive of events in more familiar terms of agent and activity:
"The boulder resisted all of our efforts to move it" (163). In this case, the event
(or non-event) of the boulder remaining stationary is conceived in terms of an
intentional action on its part. The mapping between the source and target tends
to be relatively constrained in basic metaphors, with entity corresponding to
entity and relation to relation, but more flexible in generic ones.
Similarly, the organization of whole texts reflects the structures which sup-
port human cognition. Throughout the book, Turner analyzes various literary
texts, from Bunyan'sPilgrim'sProgressto Pound's "Praise of Ysolte," to show how
their form emerges from such basic metaphors as LIFE IS A JOURNEY and
from commonplace forms of communication such as conversations and argu-
ments. Regarding genre, Turner speculates that our increasing knowledge of
human categorization will produce a reformation in our ways of making and
describing generic distinctions between literary texts. The notion that genres are
defined by criterial features which all the texts of that genre possess must be
abandoned in light of our knowledge of human categorization:
Given the cognitivescientificstudy of the natureof categories,we shouldnot be
surprisedto find effectsof the basiclevel in genre categories,or prototypeeffects
in genre categories,or metaphoricmembersof a genre category,or radialcatego-
ries within our conceptionof a given genre, or a gradientfrom the categoricalto
the analogicalin the ways literaryworks are connected, or (perhapsmost obvi-
ously) familyresemblanceas a creatorof genres,and so on. (150)
Finally, Turner speculates that cognitive rhetoric can provide valuable in-
sights into the connection between the mind and writing and our conceptions of
these entities, since, given this connection, "the activity of author and critic
depends automatically, unconsciously, centrally, and unavoidably upon just those
activities it is the project of cognitive rhetoric to analyze" (246). As Turner
himself observes, the special contribution of his book is not its exhaustive analysis
of any particular phenomenon but rather the suggestive way that it maps out
several possible connections between scientific and humanistic inquiries into
meaning, interpretation, and the mind.
It is precisely in these connections that we see the most promising potential
for the alliance between cognitive science and literary studies. For both, the
856 COLLEGE ENGLISH

central concern is the representation and use of knowledge in interpretation, and

the different emphases within the two fields should not be allowed to obscure this
fact. In cognitive science the emphasis is on how knowledge about the external
world is internalized into categories and then deployed in perception and behav-
ior; in literary studies, the major difference is that texts of various kinds rather
than the world become the focus of inquiry. George Lakoff, whose approach
provides the background for Turner's, describes how his experientialist concep-
tion sees meaning "in terms of the nature and experienceof the organismsdoing the
thinking. ... in terms of our collective biological capacities and our physical and
social experiences as beings functioning in our environment" (266-67; emphasis
in the original). Congruent with general constructivist approaches that seem to
dominate many fields today, this theory locates meaning not in a static and
disembodied symbolic relation between symbols and states of affairs in the exter-
nal world, but rather in an active synthesis of experiences, physical and cultural,
into patterns which have significance for the synthesizing agent. The relation
between the last two words in that sentence is reflexive: there is no synthesis, no
pattern, no meaning, without the agent; conversely, the agent is constructed by
the patterns already synthesized.
This emphasis on agents and their cognitive processes necessarily reinstates
the subject as an explanatory category worthy of investigation and reinscribes
authors and readers as the central foci of literary study. In this sense, cognitive
science provides a framework for those critics who are disillusioned with the
purported "death of the subject." At the same time it reasserts the importance of
culture-our social experiences-in any construction of meaning and thus pro-
vides a way of incorporating the current interest in cultural studies within a
cognitive framework. Indeed, a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue has already
developed around the issue of the relation between mind and culture; there is
growing recognition that cultures do not exist objectively, out there in the world
somewhere, but rather depend for their existence upon their instantiations in
individual human minds. Likewise, texts, as cultural phenomena, exist as mental
instantiations, and not as objective entities. Those who are interested in studying
either texts or culture are thus necessarily involved in the study of the human
mind and can profit, in ways we have tried to illustrate, by incorporating into
their own inquiries some of the methods and results of cognitive science.

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