G ESA S TEDMAN Introduction The Cognitive Sciences Meet Literature - and Vice Versa There are several different ways in which the cognitive sciences and the humanities in general, and literary studies in particular, can meet. Most of these possibilities were explored at the conference on ”The Literary Mind“ which took place at the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt Universität Berlin, in April 2008, on which this volume is based. Cognitive scientists can use literary texts as examples for their explanations of the human psyche. Conversely, literary scholars may want to work with the concepts developed by their colleagues from cognition studies in order to find new ways of interpreting textual phenomena. Since many scientists consciously or unconsciously work with stories and metaphors, this usage can be analysed and perhaps even criticised by literary scholars who focus on the manner in which literary texts in the widest sense make their appearance in scientific articles and books written by cognition specialists. A further point of convergence between literature and cognition or neuroscience is the representation of this academic endeavour in novels. Rather than representing differences in kind, these various meeting points between cognition studies and literature and/ or literary studies are points on a scale with the extreme ends being represented, respectively, by those wholly critical of cognition studies and those who wholeheartedly adopt cognitive concepts for their interpretations, whereas the rest of the contributions to this volume can be found veering either to one or the other end of the scale. Any convergence between two separate fields of study is not easy and the jury is still out on the question which type of convergence is the most helpful. That the whole endeavour is not only timely but also productive is borne out by the different contributions to this volume. Needless to say, Mark Turner but also Patrick Hogan are advocates and practitioners of cognition studies and their articles reflect this. Mark Turner clarifies the frequently misunderstood relationship between double-scope blending and mature narrative cognition. While there is evidence of rudimentary narrative cognition in other species, mature narrative cognition, which is characterised by conceptions of the self and others as interactive intentional agents over time, is exclusive to human beings and predicated on the uniquely human cognitive operation of double-scope blending. Albeit blending can also occur on other levels of the cognitive process, including in G ESA S TEDMAN 8 the blending of fully formed particular narratives, much blending takes place on an unconscious level and is fundamental to human thought processes. Patrick Hogan explains a critical moment from Leo Tolstoj’s Anna Karenina in terms of the interruption such critical moments produce for the emotional, temporal and spatial experience of those involved in the incident - in the context of the novel, the critical moment is of course one based on disturbed emotional attachments, in this case between two of the protagonists, Stiva and Dolly. As Hogan states: … our experiences of both space and time are encoded non-homogeneously. The principles by which objects and occurrences are selected, the principles by which they are segmented, and the principles by which they are structured, both internally and in embedded hierarchies, are crucially … emotional. Hogan then goes on to explain that a story can only occur when there is an episode or ”sequences of causally linked events that move from normalcy to temporary normalcy, and finally, stories that conclude the sequence of episodes with enduring normalcy.“ How speakers of a language and more particularly, how readers, make sense of what they hear or read when seemingly incompatible words are combined or the boundaries of genres are stretched to unexpected points, is the focus of Alexander Bergs’s contribution. He explains how the human mind adapts itself to apparently incongruous linguistic and generic circumstances: ”This creation of and search for meaning, and the use of mismatch and coercion are something deeply ingrained in our linguistic and literary mind.“ With varying degrees of intensity, the second point of convergence between cognition studies and literary analysis is represented by a number of contributors whose articles either try to expand the vocabulary currently available for the analysis of literary texts, or who argue that their readings of specific texts are only possible if cognitive approaches are adopted. First and foremost, Lisa Zunshine investigates literary representation of multi-layered and mutually-reflecting subjectivity from Jane Austen onwards in her article. Although she calls for a historical contextualisation of her findings, she argues that ”a cognitive approach encourages us to see fictional narratives as engaging our evolved cognitive adaptations: playing with these adaptations and pushing them beyond their zones of comfort.“ Working on examples taken from Jane Austen, Restoration comedy and contemporary TV sitcoms, Zunshine intends to show that fictional narratives endlessly experiment with rather than automatically execute our evolved cognitive adaptations. … The culturally enmeshed cognitive ‘limits’ thus present us with creative openings rather than with a promise of stagnation and endless replication of the established forms. This realization marks the possibility of a genuine interaction between cognitive psychology and literary studies … The Cognitive Sciences Meet Literature - and Vice Versa 9 Alan Palmer would certainly agree with the latter statement, since he, also, lets cognitive psychology and literary analysis interact. His contribution explains certain features of Charles Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit not based on the usual concept of individualised subjectivity, but on what he calls ”intermental units“, that is shared, social subjectivity. Palmer argues that one overlooks these intermental forms of subjectivity if one bases character-analysis only on concepts derived from high modernist literary representations of subjectivity. The shared forms in Little Dorrit point to the essentially public, social nature of what goes on in Dickens’s characters’ minds - and Palmer argues that these ”intermental units“ ”are the chief means by which the plot is advanced.“ Renate Brosch applies this concept to high modernist literature - she analyses Virginia Woolf’s story ”The Lady in the Looking Glass“. Although generally, short stories ”contain less intermental activity and social thought than novels“ and ”[i]ntersubjectivity poses a real problem for short stories“, she nevertheless focuses on Woolf’s complex story which is very short on events but all the richer for its multi-layered representations of subjectivity, which Brosch analyses with the help of the notion of intermental activity. She concludes that [b]y making the reader consciously participate in the intentionality of the narrative, Woolf offers a complex interaction between the desire for the intermental and its failure. It seems that in modernist narratives intermental processes are stalled or made increasingly difficult at the level of the fictional world, while such mental communication is improved and expanded at the level of interaction between fictional text and reader. Markus Hartner focuses on a specific aspect of (contemporary) literature, namely, the frequent use of multiple perspectives. In order to extend and improve the narratological tools available to analyse such narrative devices, Hartner links blending theory as developed by cognitive scientists with the investigation of multiple narrative perspectives in literary texts. He bases his discussion on the analysis of Tobias Smollett’s novel Roderick Random and of Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger to show that ”[B]lending theory vividly demonstrates that meaning construction is a dynamic process involving multiple stages and mental spaces. … considering cross-space matches between perspectives can lead to stimulating revisions of critical readings.” Wolfgang Hallet works with mental model constructions to explain how readers imagine textual worlds and come to terms with the different kinds of cultural experience they encounter in literary texts. He intends to integrate into the analysis of literary texts the category of experientiality and how the reader’s knowledge and experience of his own world is used to understand and actively engage with the constructed worlds in literary texts. Anna Thiemann and Annette Kern-Stähler also work with literary texts in the widest sense, beginning their contribution on the role of metaphor and embodiment in autistic people and their texts with a quotation from Jorge Luis Borges. They then move on to explain the shortcomings of more traditional approaches to autism and specifically, to the representation of the au- G ESA S TEDMAN 10 tistic mind, ending with an explanation of the ”interrelation between embodiment, cognition, and language use“ in the autobiographical writings of Tito Mukhopadhyay whose examples they set against the ‘external’ view of what goes on in autistic minds, presented by autism specialists. Jürgen Schlaeger, although sympathetic towards cognitive approaches, adopts a slightly different perspective in his paper. He argues that a too-close reliance on historical and literary contextualisation in particular of older literary texts may obscure rather than illuminate what goes on below the surface of such texts and their ‘take’ on the activities of the human mind. He chooses as his example Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry and shows that ”a mind-centred perspective clearly allows us to see below the surface of the text a ‘Theory of Mind’ which privileges the realities of the mind over concepts that tie its workings too closely to outside reality or an idealisation based on it.” Exploring the potential of the mind’s workings as Sidney, according to Schlaeger, did, is and was more productive than ”efforts to make sense of the new with the help of older traditions.“ Decidedly critical stances are taken by Herbert Grabes, Valentine Cunningham, Ronald Shusterman, and Gesa Stedman. Herbert Grabes concentrates his discussion of the cognitive approach to literary characters first on a historical tour d’horizon of character analysis from the structuralist through the poststructuralist to the current cognitive phase and asks why very few critics show an interest in the question why in many readers’ minds literary characters take on a life of their own and are such powerful illusions that they alone are remembered. Grabes contrasts and combines those approaches to character analysis he finds most useful, namely Alan Palmer’s and Lisa Zunshine’s work, but criticises most cognitive models of character analysis for an important oversight: the absence of the bodies of fictional characters. He ends with a plea to continue encountering people through literature, so long as we don’t attempt to make them fit too neatly into a procrustean interpretational frame and instead follow the rule of close reading and try to infer by a bottom-up procedure the theories of mind the author has supplied them with, however difficult that may be. Valentine Cunningham concentrates on the inadvertent but also sometimes intentional and conscious use of figurative speech and stories by cognitive scientists. From the at times laughable metaphors of the mind as porridge, sponges, computers and robots to the use of stories containing colour-blind aliens and similar creatures, Cunningham takes his readers through a large number of recent scientists’ writings on the mind to end with the contention that these imagined minds and the stories in which these minds are said to function are not as interesting, not as imaginative, and not as rewarding as those fictional minds and the metaphors they are couched in which have for centuries been developed by literary writers. In my own paper, I look at the less-than-rewarding minds of a number of literary characters in contemporary American and British novels which all The Cognitive Sciences Meet Literature - and Vice Versa 11 deal explicitly with cognition, neuroscience, the mind, and its possible impairments, in particular in the context of 9/ 11 and 7/ 7. The novels all adopt elements from neuroscience and rework ever-recurrent plot lines without really being able to flesh them out. These ”brain plots“ as I call them are not only repetitive and lack interest in aesthetic terms, they also point to a fundamentally disturbing trend: namely, to represent social, cultural, or political tensions only on the level of individual illness or mental disturbance and thus forego any attempt to find more than individualised answers for these tensions. Ronald Shusterman is even more critical of the meeting between cognition studies and literature than Herbert Grabes and Valentine Cunningham. The contention that metaphor is part of everyday mental activity and that the realm of aesthetics cannot lay claim to a particularly poetic or otherwise separate language is rejected by Shusterman, who argues that equating literature and cognition is not particularly helpful and ”ends up in total selfdestruction.” The emphasis on the ordinariness of literature, claims Shusterman, trivialises literature as well as science. ”Linguists may be wise to underline the ubiquity of the ordinary metaphors by which we live, but in doing so they portray a mind that may be ‘literary’ in a sense of the term that has absolutely nothing to do with art.” He goes on to argue that the second contention - namely, that all minds are based on narrativity, and that therefore the literary mind has to be, too - is equally flawed since one can imagine works of art which are art in spite of the absence of any kind of narrative content or context for these works. Shusterman ends with a call ”for more investigation into certain special operations of the literary, plastic and musical mind.“ Although this tour through the present book seems to end on a critical note, it is clear from the above that most contributors to the volume find at least some inspiration in cognitive approaches and/ or in works of literature. The more creative they are in adopting these approaches for their own ends - be that literary analysis or cognition studies - the more interesting the results of this kind of overlap is. Although much remains to be done, this volume shows that interdisciplinary work requires an open mind, a willingness to interact and to converse, and to see the points of others, to whichever conclusion one then comes oneself. We hope that not only the participants of the conference and contributors of this volume but also the readers of this book will find evidence of such openness, interaction, and discussion in the individual contributions to an exciting field of research.