I am glad to thank the many colleagues, students, and friends who generously helped me with this book. Its errors and shortcomings are of course my own. Terence Cave, Jakob Lothe, and Jim Phelan responded to my earliest ideas with welcome encouragement and important criticisms and suggestions that had a formative influence on the shape this project eventually took. Nancy Easterlin asked hard questions about my argument at an early stage that forced me to think more rigorously and precisely about a number of key issues, and I am deeply in her debt. As the project neared completion, Steve Mailloux and Don Wehrs took time from their overcommitted lives to read the entire manuscript, and their responses at this late stage were invaluable. Among the many other friends and colleagues with whom I have discussed the ideas in this book, I am especially grateful to Marty Hoffman, Ann Kaplan, Sowon Park, Ben Morgan, Kay Young, Ellen Esrock, Karin Kukkonen, Elaine Auyoung, John Lutterbie, Richard Gerrig, Rita Charon, and George Smith. I also benefited greatly from the careful readings the manuscript received from the two anonymous referees as well as from the faculty editorial board at Johns Hopkins University Press. Their suggestions as well as good advice from my editor, Catherine Goldstead, provided important guidance to my final round of revision and rewriting.
My research and teaching have always informed each other, and that was especially the case with this project. Working with neuroscience concentrators in my undergraduate seminar on neuroaesthetics and reading at Brown has been one of the ways in which I have stayed in touch with the scientific community. These young scientists are smart and very well trained, and I have learned much from their knowledge of the field as well as from their sharp eye for the weaknesses of a scientific argument or the limitations of a particular experiment. I have also been gratified by their enthusiasm for conducting interdisciplinary conversations about big issues concerning art, culture, and our cognitive lives that go beyond the focus of their laboratory work. Directing Carolyn Rachofsky’s honors thesis on the neuroscience of metaphor for her biology concentration started me thinking about the contradictions in this research that I analyze in this book. I have also learned much from the graduate students whose research on cognitive topics I’ve had the privilege to advise, especially Dorin Smith, Sarah Brown, and Fadwa Ahmed. The students in my courses on narrative theory, phenomenology, and the novel may also recognize in this book many ideas that I have tested on them over the years.
I also learned much from the thoughtful questions I received from various audiences who heard presentations from my work in progress. I am especially grateful to the Cognitive Futures in the Humanities community, whose meetings in Durham, Oxford, and Stony Brook provided forums for trying out my ideas and opportunities for discovering exciting research I might not otherwise have encountered. I also benefited from questions and conversations after talks I gave at the International Association of Literary Semantics meeting in Krakow, the English Language and Literature Association of Korea conference in Seoul, the meeting of the Crisis and Beyond research group in Uppsala, and the “Future of Literary Studies” conference at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo. I am grateful as well for the chance to present my work to the Literature and the Mind group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown.
It is harder to express what I owe to my children, Tim, Maggie, and Jack, to whom I have dedicated this book. I have been surprised to discover over the years that being a parent is a more important part of who I am than I ever thought it would be. I owe most, however, to Beverly, for many things besides what she contributed to this project. The play of her mind has taught me what a joy conversation can be.