G. Gabrielle Starr
For much of the twentieth century, criticism that concerned the psychology of literature or of reading had an implicit dualistic perspective. One might sum this up in the idea of “interiority”—the supposition that subjective experience is somehow “inside” us, while the objective world is on the “outside”; interiority became a watchword in criticism of the novel as well as in formalist investigations of the lyric as colloquy or meditation, or the notion of lyric intimacy, or simply the idea that a lyric is subjectivity overheard (see Jackson and Prins 2014).
But if the brain or mind exists on a separate plane from the broader body or the wider world, it becomes hard to explain our multilayered interactions with the world around us. Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of the leading proponents of the model generally known as situated cognition, makes this case (with colleagues) about emotion: “emotions emerge, and regulation occurs, as the consequence of an ongoing, continually modified process that makes sensory inputs meaningful” (Barrett et al. 2014). In this account, our own perceptions of our bodily sensations are categorized over time, given linguistic shape by parents or community, as well as given form by memory and analysis of the context in which our sensations have occurred. Emotions in this sense are situated, and are not permanent constructs independent of a continual, recursive process. What we feel is a product of brain, body, culture, and context. As Jonathan Kramnick puts it, in a situated model of cognition, “Actions extend mind into the world,” and so‐called external and internal life are not fully distinct (Kramnick 2010: 3). A situated model cannot bear a dualist schism between behavior and world, brain and world, or mind and world.
Dualism is deeply linguistically ingrained (e.g., phrases like “inner life,” “heart of hearts,” “mind and body,” etc.) in part because there is some sense of phenomenal truth to it for many: some experiences seem invisible to those around us, and the emergence of a sense of self as distinct from the world is a crucial part of human development. Even so, Kay Young argues that dualism is belied by the very language we use to describe it. Taking to task the modern father of dualism, René Descartes, she quotes his continual return to embodied language in the Meditations, when for example, he uses metaphors of physical destruction to describe attacks on consciousness, or describes his attempts at skepticism as akin to drowning in a whirlpool. “To get to the idea of a disembodied truth, he uses … embodied idea[s] …: Descartes’ language ‘acts’ differently than his argument does” (Young 2010: 14). Even in the core of dualist skepticism, human practices of language and cognition make the embodied mind hauntingly inescapable.
A key concept for understanding how the recursive interactions that shape perception, emotion, or aesthetic life may occur is John J. Gibson’s idea of affordances. As individuals move through the world, objects and places do not enter experience without constraints. For example, while we might imagine many different ways to pick up a mug, mugs have two primary affordances, two primary ways of grasping them: one might take the handle, or grasp the roundness of the bowl. Affordances are not absolute (there are many culturally improper ways to hold a fork), but they give the general clue to solving the puzzle of navigating and manipulating the world around us. While tools clearly have affordances built into them, Gibson’s concept extends to the natural world as well: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.” Thus, a landscape’s salient features carry affordances: paths afford navigation, a sharp drop “affords injury”; indeed, the “sharp” metaphor conveys that knowledge (Gibson 1986: 127: 36ff). We navigate the world and learn about it, in Gibson’s theory, not by classifying objects or scenes first, but by perceiving opportunities for action or interaction.
Literature offers affordances, too; in fact, I would argue that elements of form are understandable in those terms. A poem’s line breaks or caesurae, for example, afford the intake of breath. At a larger level, the representation of character affords mentalizing, imagining, empathizing, disagreeing, and so on. Again, readers need not to classify features to engage or grasp them—we are not all literary critics—but as we gain experience of literary works, we learn, phenomenally, about their potential. A model that explores affordances may be able to give access to a developmental model of literary engagement, as well as insight on how genres provide particular invitations (and unconscious possibilities) for different kinds of readers.
In the frameworks offered by contemporary cognitive science, complex behaviors and experiences—like walking through a crowded room—are understood not just as somatic events, but social events (we avoid some people and seek others out), emotional events (a touch of anxiety and irritation, perhaps) and cognitive events (remembering the last conversation you had with someone you see across the way), and they make use of the handholds afforded by the world. Other kinds of complex experiences, like reading a novel in a favorite chair, can be modeled thus, too, from analyzing the larger somatic experience of being seated in repose, to constructing imagery, experiencing emotions, semantic analysis, and imagined or real social dynamics and engaging a fictional world. No piece of criticism creates a complete model of reading, of course, and in fact cognitive literary critics tend to take individual components of the full experience of reading as places to begin.
Reading requires extensive, distributed neural architecture and extensive experience and education. Much of the functional basics of both are in place by early childhood, when the ability to decode typically emerges.1 Stanislaus Dehaene describes a “bushy model” of reading, where visual perceptions are resolved into letters; letters and words are connected to sound and meaning, and top‐down processes of attention guide engagement (Dehaene 2009, ch. 2). Attention, however, to the words on a page or the ideas and images they prompt competes against distractions that are enabled by the very complexity of the neural architecture of reading. For example, episodic and autobiographical memory are key to extracting meaning from what we read. However, the “default mode network,” a set of brain regions crucial to remembering the past and imagining the future, as well as simulating others’ mental states, has considerable overlap with reading networks. The default mode is also the network that enables mind‐wandering. Thus, our capacity to simulate what a text describes and to be lost in our own worlds—not that of the text—are intricately connected (Raichle 2015; Altmann et al 2014; Smallwood et al. 2013). Distraction may thus be the sibling of reading. It turns out as well that reading texts an individual believes to be fiction actively recruits different regions of the brain than does reading information believed to be fact, including key parts of the default mode network in cingulate cortex.2 I return to these brain regions in the discussions of imagery and immersion, but for now our focus is on how a situated model of reading functions.
Reading is a recursive undertaking, where we iteratively return to the text, to the world, and to our own knowledge and meaning‐making, to construct a temporally extended sets of events. Paul Armstrong finds the extended temporality of reading one of its most defining characteristics. Given the recursive nature of all cognitive processes, the brain is always integrating over discontinuous moments, going back in time and projecting into the future as well as being in the now. He argues, “Narrative … is a literary form that is based on the brain’s non‐simultaneity. The gap between story and discourse, the events of a tale and how they are told, which creates the possibility of narrative, is a manifestation of the temporal disjunctions” that underlie experience even “at the neuronal level, [and] make life a perpetual process of catch‐up” (Armstrong 2013: 102). This account blends an understanding of the cognitive components of meaning‐making and their time courses, from microseconds to hours or days (as with the consolidation and re‐consolidation of long‐term memories) with a phenomenological consideration of how experience feels. Reading is a “reciprocal, mutually formative process of interacting with the world … [that] can take the form of ‘play,’” and that kind of play requires a “decentered” neurological architecture that is fundamentally responsive to change (2013: 130).
Cognitive neuroscience may also give new perspective on the interpretative components of reading. Wolfgang Iser introduced critics to the key idea that literature constructs gaps through which readers engage in active construction of fictional worlds. As Elaine Auyoung points out, however, gaps in perception and memory are fundamental components of phenomenal experience, and the interaction between sensory information (bottom‐up processes) and our own ability at inference (top‐down processes integrating memory, concepts, and even particular kinds of schema like that enabling facial recognition) is “implicated in almost all acts of perception” (Auyoung 2015: 583). She argues that realist detail, far from being flotsam that together suggest reality (à la Barthes’ effet de réel), has a more complex function. Most gaps are never filled in by readers at all, so that very few readers may visualize the hair color of Jane Austen’s Emma, much less the pattern on her gown.
Readers have no doubt about the ontological status of the objects sketched by authors for the most part. They know they are reading fiction. What details do, in Auyoung’s account, is:
serve as a means of tethering readers synchronically to a world that is absent and implied. At the same time that novel readers experience the drama presented by the story itself, they also undergo the drama of aesthetic illusion … The struggle that results, between knowing that nothing in the story really exists and being unable to help recognizing the promise of something more, is a reality effect generated by the reader’s sensitivity to suggestion.
(Auyoung 2015: 583)
The tension this creates is a “major source of realism’s aesthetic power” (2015: 589). Reading harnesses cognitive resources that were designed for extracting information from the world around us, and it inevitably thus enables fiction to mimic reality, but to do it with a difference.
Few literary devices have been studied by cognitivists more than metaphor. In More than Cool Reason, George Lakoff and Mark Turner began to use concepts from cognitive linguistics to analyze how writers and readers can meet on the ground of metaphor. Metaphors, they argue, are rapidly understandable and easily shared because they make use of fundamental structures known as schema. Schema develop before language and come from basic ways that humans encounter the physical world, most especially from the way in which we explore and understand through motion. These theories presuppose that schema are represented neurally, but make no presumption about the mechanisms of that representation. In other words, these are theories about the relationship of the phenomenology of embodiment and mind. For example, the experience of motion is closely linked with the experience of resistance, and through experience individuals have developed a set of schema that map the two together, yielding the possibility of a range of rapidly, generally effortlessly understood, metaphors like those in this haiku by Richard Wright (2012: 63):
A rooster’s sharp crow
Punctures a gray dawn sky,
Letting out spring rain.
There are two conceits in this poem: that the crow of the rooster moves up and breaks through the sky, and that the sky is like a vessel filled with rain. We understand the puncturing of the moving cry because of our experience of motion and resistance, as well as the way the interruption of a loud sound in silence can feel almost painful, as if something has broken through; equally, we understand the draining of the vessel through prior perceptual and embodied experience. Cultural competence matters too:
Oh Anvil be beaten,
bear all the bitter blows till
The spring sun goes down!
(Wright 2012: 15)
Here the knowledge that the anvil is black helps us see that while Wright envisions an African American body as having been subject to excoriating brutality, the sufferer, like the anvil, will outlast the suffering; night will come and day dawn again. Metaphors, in this view, map between concepts in either conventional or novel ways.
Recent work has further argued that metaphor has two important central functions. The first is enabling us to make and share meaning in emotionally resonant ways (Jamrozik et al. 2016). Metaphor gives quick access to a felt truth—an emotional experience—that helps validate the compact version of knowledge the metaphor carries. Take the end of this poem by Emily Dickinson (Dickinson 1960: 129):
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing—then—
Dickinson’s vertiginous internal drop into an undefined affective space, where all that is left is the end of knowing, resonates in part because it feels like something, this abyss that takes everything. Such affective response is particularly important, as Jamrozik et al. (2016) discovered, for non‐expert readers: most have felt a drop, even if not one like this. The second key function of metaphor is to connect somatic knowledge to more abstract constructions (Dickinson 1960: 158):
All the letters I can write
Are not fair as this—
Syllables of Velvet—
Sentences of Plush,
Depths of Ruby, undrained,
Hid, Lip, for Thee—
Play it were a Humming Bird—
And just sipped—me—
It is not that any of us might have been kissed by a hummingbird, in a magical moment in which he draws out our own sweetness; rather it is the broadly shared knowledge of touch, of the way the mouth feels on a sip, or the deepness of the color of red that matters to readers as they interpret the figures of this poem. By bringing our bodies into play, Dickinson shows metaphor may truly be intimate.
The cognitive study of narrative has deep roots in the history of the criticism of the novel, blooming from intricate questions of how readers respond to fictional narratives, how we understand narrative time, how we make inferences and resolve contradictory information, or how we integrate disparate details to posit the minds of literary characters. As with early study of metaphor, cognitive narratology began by focusing on schemata, with critics like Patrick Colm Hogan arguing that readers interpret stories though a filtering set of concepts.3 Schemata here are not single ideas, like “warrior,” for example, but are constructs connecting multiple ideas together (Hogan 2003). One warrior schema might reflect a knowledge of contemporary warfare (gleaned from the news, personal experience, or films like The Hurt Locker); another might come from the world of fantasy fiction or folklore (say, Lord of the Rings); another might see warrior in the context of principled, non‐violent struggle (in Martin Luther King, for example). Schemata are built over time, and may combine knowledge of the real world with knowledge of fiction, and at times, the fictional world is used to explain the real one (see Rapp 2008).
Schemata are not linear connections of one idea to the next, but are dynamic and interconnected. The term “warrior” can activate any of the schemata above, and any individual may have multiple schemata associated with a single concept. A reader can revise and shift interpretations as a narrative proceeds. However, narrative is not always about linear progress. As Peter J. Rabinowitz argues, for some texts, like Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu or even Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, it is the momentary pleasure of intense emotional engagement that may propel narrative pleasure. Such moments help organize one’s navigation of a text, but they also persist in memory and may evolve, too, in quotation, rereading or discussion (Rabinowitz 2015: 94). Intense moments allow readers to actively reorient their relation to a text, whether by savoring these moments, consuming them on their own, or reinterpreting the whole in relation to the parts.
Guillemette Bolens argues that cognitive science has another contribution to the study of narrative, because: “A narrative conveys a specific way of thinking the body and this particular conceptualization of corporeality has an impact on the shaping of the narrative—on the protagonists’ characterization, the plot, and the … spatiotemporal framing” (Bolens 2012: 25; emphasis in the original). This framework treats narrative as a fundamentally bodily way of organizing knowledge and events. Individual texts rely on differing ways “a reader retrieves kinesic information, taking into account the way in which a text triggers sensorimotor simulations of salient properties in conceptual combinations” (2012: 12). Any situation, event, character, or landscape evokes a motor schema. A darkened hallway, for example, triggers the possibility of needing to flee; a crying child suggests an approach to offer comfort; a covert glance shared between the wrong two people implies a clandestine act. Narrative then uses our knowledge of motor possibilities, along with other kinds of sensory, cultural, or historical knowledge, to connect such pieces into a coherent whole.
A key component of literary world‐building involves the ability to participate in the emotional experiences of others. Indeed, empathy and its cousin sympathy have been central to the way literary criticism has approached fiction since at least the eighteenth century (see Engell 1981). In cognitivist accounts, many scholars use theory of mind as a general framework for understanding one key facet of social cognition. Theory of mind describes the complex ways in which individuals are able to ascribe motivations, feelings, thoughts, and other mental content to other individuals, based on their actions, gazes, words; situational context; and diverse somatic manifestations of emotion or ideas (blushing, sweating, fidgeting, etc.). By following someone’s unconscious glance across the room, we might know exactly whom they’re imagining when they make a controversial statement, for example. The ability to infer mental content is universal in normatively functioning human beings over age of about 3 or 4 (Saxe et al. 2004). Normatively functioning, here and elsewhere in this chapter, means individuals who have developed typically, and do not exhibit neurocognitive differences such as autism, or disorders such as schizophrenia, or dementia.4
Human beings are not open books to one another; however, they unconsciously exercise theory of mind (sometimes called mind‐reading) in every social encounter, and not only is it foundational to our use of language and to social life, but it is a fundamental element of survival and the key to much human success, allowing us to assess potentially threatening behaviors and to develop and maintain social bonds (Decety and Jackson 2004).
Theory of mind may in part be built on imitation of the actions of others, their gestures, gazes, and entire bodily postures. Edmund Burke argued in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1990) that what he called sympathy was the basic social passion, the fundamental motivator for pro‐social action.5 A number of researchers currently argue that motor systems are a crucial component of our ability to have a consonant response to others’ emotions and actions and to interpret them. Some neurons fire in similar ways when we ourselves make a particular movement and when we perceive another person doing so; but these mirror‐neurons are only one part of a distributed motor network that enables individuals to parse, understand, and replicate gestures and actions.6 Motor imagery—imagined sensations of movement or imagined representations of individuals moving and acting—probably underlies a range of aesthetic effects.
Lisa Zunshine, Blakey Vermeule, Kay Young and a number of other major critics have argued that theory of mind is central to the way fiction functions (Zunshine 2006 and 2015b; Young 2010; Vermeule 2009). Far from being something radically different from our everyday engagement with the world, fiction relies on capacities that developed to enable social interaction. As a reader imagines Evelina’s blush, or as a story unfolds with every gesture, this happens only because the reader has honed the capacity to impute mental activities to others since early childhood. Arguing that fiction depends on a human ability to imagine and interpret other minds does not mean that this ability is infallible. Zunshine points out that errors frequently occur in our mind‐reading every day, and such errors also appear in the pages of fiction, as when Elizabeth Bennet assumes Darcy’s gaze is one of critique, not powerful attraction (Austen 1996: 45).
While some have argued for the moral effects of empathy, the exercise of theory of mind in reading fiction is not necessarily moral. Susanne Keen argues that “empathetic responses to fictional characters and situations occur more readily for negative emotions,” and that, even if we don’t imitate negative acts or emotions, it is not clear that our empathetic engagement with others or with fiction produces positive ethical engagement with the world (Keen 2007: xii). There has been considerable dispute as to whether there is a particular ethical value to reading literary fiction (not just canonical literature, but middle‐ to high‐brow literature). However, recent work in social psychology has suggested that there may in fact be a special place for the complex representations of human life that have been a hallmark of what, since the nineteenth century, we have thought of as literature (Kidd and Castano 2013).
Theory of mind has other uses in critical analysis. Zunshine (2006) argues that in part, genres may be understood in a more fluid, yet still precise manner by looking at the strategies they call for in understanding characters and actions. Take, as she does, detective fiction and two of its characteristic subgenres—hard‐boiled and romance. Particular novels might be located on various points on a spectrum between them, not based on the presence or absence of romantic content, but whether solving the mystery requires imputation of mental states based on fear or survival, or on decoding romantic or sexual intentions. Different strategies of theory of mind operate in each case. Merging the two kinds of inference may have its own effects:
The detective story in which the investigator’s love interest is also one of the suspects exploits … suggestive cognitive ambiguity … Such a story derives titillating emotional mileage from making the readers mix the inferences from the mate‐selection aspect of mind‐reading with inferences from the predator‐avoidance aspect of mind‐reading.
(Zunshine 2006: 152)
Pleasures of genre may thus be built on particular pleasures of mind.
Finally, cognitive and situated perspectives on empathy pose new questions for a range of theories that rely on ideas of interiority. J. Keith Vincent shows these stakes quite clearly regarding queer theory (Vincent 2014). One of the key contentions in queer theory has been that nineteenth‐century capitalism enabled a private view of sexuality and thus the emergence of gay identity (see D’Emilio 1983). Vincent does not claim that gay identity is a pre‐modern concept; rather, he argues that if sexuality is not primarily an “internal” and private phenomenon, theorists can escape “the logic of the closet” that requires sexuality to be open or hidden, only (Vincent 2014: 209). Desire is in this view legible in more than physical sexual acts, biological imperatives, or cultural categories, and in reading, it is analyzable along a range of cognitive dimensions, from imagery to empathy, or to aesthetics and pleasure.
In recent years, many psychologists have argued that pleasure, as a key part of our motivational systems, has a double function (Carver 2003). As a signal rewarding us for success (e.g., attaining our desires, avoiding dangers, finding solutions to problems, etc.), pleasure has a positive function in goal‐directed activity, pushing us toward goals, lighting them up with potentially satisfying rewards. Pleasure also, to take Barbara Fredrickson’s terms, enables us to “broaden and build” (Fredrickson 2001). If certain pleasures help focus attention on a goal or object, others free attention from goal‐directed behavior so we can look around us. This second characteristic of pleasure seems particularly useful in thinking about literature when we are freed from pursuing particular goals (e.g., reading for the plot) in favor of exploration.
The imagined world a particular reader constructs is one key opportunity for pleasurable exploration. Most, but not all, readers generate imagery (Otis 2015). Individuals vary in the vividity of their imagined scenes, and in the modalities they prioritize, e.g., the visual, auditory, or tactile (Starr 2010). While varying senses take pride of place for different individuals or at different times, much imagery is multi‐modal or multi‐sensory, as is, indeed, all of our physical sensory experience. We engage the world in the varying combinations of sensory fluency and possibility available to us, and sensory perceptions blend in order that we may plan and execute actions in the world. Thus motor imagery is important for many aesthetic engagements, from imagining movement to the motor imagery created when we read words on a page (see Starr 2013; Scarry 2001).
The centrality of motor imagery is perhaps most visible with poetry. Take the beginning of the fifth of Seamus Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets (1979):
Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,
Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:
It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank
And snapping memory as I get older.
And elderberry I have learned to call it.
I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,
Its berries a swart caviar of shot,
A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.
The poem evokes a visual world that is not static. The folds and freckles of the bark imply the ways the surface of the tree seems to alter with changes in light. The surface of a brimming cup seems to swell. The fruit pops from the bough. More than this, the poem, stages auditory experiences that rely on motion. A significant part of the pleasure one might take in this sonnet is in the fluid slurring of “r’s” in “corrugations,” “boortree,” and “purple.” Auditory imagery often involves encoding temporality as motion: the timing with which syllables are formed recruits motor regions, and imagining making the sounds one reads may involve motor regions used in planning and executing movements of tongue or mouth (Ackerman et al. 2004; Aleman and Van’t Wout 2004). Poetry is a kind of motion, as I have argued elsewhere.
Many readers have immersive experiences that rely on imagery. From the perspective of some cognitive psychologists, immersion depends on some combination of focused “attention … characterized by a deep concentration … that feels effortless,” alongside imagery, emotional engagement/empathy, a feeling of transportation into a story world, and intense enjoyment (Kuijpers et al. 2014).7 It is important to emphasize that though many of us have had moments when the world beyond the book seems to disappear, immersion is not an all‐or‐nothing matter in the cognitive account: “Attention to the task of reading is not complete even in the best of cases” (Bortolussi and Dixon 2015: 527). The question is crucial: to what degree do individuals cease to attend to certain components of their environment as they actively construct the story world?
Neural activity can help us begin to piece together parts of this puzzle. Researchers isolated a particular region in the middle of the anterior cingulate cortex active during immersive reading, and not during reading that was less intensely engaged, for individuals reading for pleasure (Hsu et al. 2014). This region of the brain is crucial for integrating emotional and social information with external visual focus via the frontal eye fields (Etkin et al. 2011). In other words, this region helps us to combine a top‐down set of processes about what we attend to with bottom‐up processes about what we feel and see. It also has been shown to be involved in empathetic engagement, and particularly “the motor component of affective empathy” (Hsu et al. 1359). The researchers note that these particular passages drew heavily on the empathetic capacity of their readers.
While the neural picture is still incomplete, the current evidence leads me to conjecture that immersion is a pleasurable and interconnected monitoring of and engagement with both text and self. There is evidence from studies of visual art to support such a possibility, where intense aesthetic responses—and only intense aesthetic responses—have been shown to activate the default mode network, which is usually not engaged in tasks requiring focus on the surrounding world (Cela‐Conde 2013; Vessel et al. 2012). It may be that with intense aesthetic responses there is an oscillation between sensory networks that are focused on the surface properties of an artwork, with the default mode, which enables self‐monitoring, imagining future and past, and constructing a sense of self over time (Mukhopadhyay 2014). In the context of immersive reading, such an interplay would most probably be between the sensory components of reading, imagery, emotion, and memory. It is also important to understand that the complexity of social cognition is very much in play. Given the variety of individual differences—in which texts and at what places individuals become “immersed,” and how they arrive at this state—there is much more research to be done. Intense engagement with texts, however, is less a plunge into the depths of a text than it is a question of a doubly‐directed, recursive, aesthetic state.
Although much of the foregoing might come under a broad definition of “poetics,” what I discuss here is the particular marriage of literary study and linguistics using the tools of cognitive science. Starting with the path‐breaking work of Reuven Tsur, cognitive poetics has enabled a nuanced understanding of how language shapes readers’ experiences of poems. Tsur approaches poetry as a special kind of linguistic performance in which individual readers or reciters seek to detect and then enact, vocally or imaginatively, the key aural patterns the poem seems to script. Where should the caesura lie? What variations of stress should be emphasized? How are words most properly grouped? Such questions are both about comprehension and aesthetic response. Finding a viable solution to the linguistic and aural puzzle of a poem requires varying experience and degrees of expertise.
In this account, meter is a perceptual phenomenon, and is thus not bound by any rules formulated outside a primarily perceptual frame: no dicta of taste or period may, a priori, govern meter, because meter emerges only in experience. A poem is a script for a performance, for Tsur, and the body and mind of the reader unlock their own phenomenal presentation and enaction of the work. Tsur calls this “a minor Copernican revolution, shifting the course of the prosodic universe from the ‘metricalness’ of the verse line to the reader’s ability or willingnness to perform it rhythmically” (Tsur 2012: 23). This is as true of Milton as of Pope. Even though these poets show stylistic differences, “All the prosodic figures found in Pope are to be found in Milton, too” (Tsur 2012: 40). Tsur takes a corpus perspective, so that by examining the body of a poet’s work one can identify particular patterns (such as willingness to deviate from established form—which is key with Donne, as he shows), to locate key characteristics of a poet’s style, or of an historical period.
Cognitive poetics has further developed since Tsur. Work at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics has, for the last several years, focused on emotional responses to features like meter and rhyme, as well as explored the ways that prosody interacts with rhetorical feature in poetry to facilitate or slow down comprehension (Menninghaus et al. 2015; Obermeier et al. 2013). Indeed, with the proliferation of tools like fMRI and EEG, scholars are now collaborating to explore multiple features of genres, and because short poems can be read in experimental contexts in their entirety, it is likely that the empirical study of poetry will push forward the understanding of aesthetic responses.
As Zunshine has pointed out, the humanist deep internalization of Fredric Jameson’s dictum that scholarship must “always historicize,” makes historical change a key question for cognitive literary criticism (Zunshine 2006). Are the models of mind and brain we currently study valid for the classical world, early Americas, Middle Ages, or eighteenth century? The answer is yes and no. Individuals’ brains change over their lifetimes, and cognitive capacities and strategies change too; neither mind nor brain is the same at 6 and 60. Equally, we know that the brain physically changes in response to circumstances in life and culture and that events can demonstrably alter our brains.8 The existence of changes in typical or individual neural structures, and even the range of individual differences, do not mean, however, that there is no historical continuity in brain structure, nor that we cannot use what we know about the brain today to help understand the past. Natalie Phillips has contended that some areas of cognitive neuroscience are more useful than others for thinking about historically distant cultures and people: “Unlike the brain’s visual systems for reading, which develop early and thus are more likely to remain stable in various cultures and contexts, the environmental stimuli impacting attention continue to shape the brain well into our teenage years. Because the brain develops different faculties at different ages, and different cognitive regions range in plasticity, it makes sense that not all neuroscientific studies will be equally historically applicable” (Phillips 2015: 64). Cognitive literary study in many ways has only just begun, and there is much more to come as the field matures.