Читать книгу The Animal at Unease with Itself - Isaac M. Alderman - Страница 9

Since the 1990s, the humanities, particularly literary analysis, has broadened its scope of research to include what some refer to as cognitivism. Although the approach is itself challenged by what some view as “neuromania,” it is an important development.^[30] As Hogan says, a theory of the human mind which cannot account for art is a poor theory.^[31] Conversely, and more to the point of this project, analyses of the creative products of the human mind should also consider the workings of the human brain. A great deal of work in literary analysis is now focused on the cognitive processes involved in reading, writing, and storytelling.

The cognitive revolution has had a significant impact on literary and cultural studies. The humanities struggled in the early 1990s. Literary analysis in particular was threatened, as a committee studying the field of comparative literature put it, with finding itself in the “dustheap of history.”^[32] The dominance of deconstruction and post-structuralist methods left many feeling that meaningful insights were no longer the focus. It was clear to many that the various sciences were achieving results, real data, in a way that was not possible for literary analysis as it was currently being practiced. One response to this crisis was the incorporation of the insights of cognitive science into the study of literature. The expansion of the cognitive revolution into literary studies and other fields within the humanities should not come as a surprise since interdisciplinarity and “fuzziness of boundaries” is an essential characteristic of cognitive cultural studies.^[33] Communication had long been studied by cognitive scientists, analyzing elements such as patterns of speech, meaning making, and the use of metaphors. With the introduction of the cognitive study of culture, it became clear that art is a form of communication and not a separate system, and so art and literature are now being studied as cognitive acts.^[34] Linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker sees in this process a great merging of the sciences and the humanities.^[35]

In paraphrasing William James, one scholar refers to this type of work as trying to turn on the light fast enough to see what the dark looks like.^[36] The study of stories is in some sense an attempt to understand our own understanding. The arts are not marginal to human existence and storytelling is an integral part of our lives. We tell stories constantly, sometimes habitually and unintentionally.^[37] We are “marinating ourselves in fiction,” consuming and creating stories, often spending more time with books, movies, and television than we do on other activities such as work or relationships.^[38] The study of cultural interactions such as storytelling recognizes that these actions are cognitive actions rooted in the body itself. As Maryanne Wolf puts it, “reading is a neuronally and intellectually circuitous act,” that is impacted by the text, but also by the “unpredictable indirections of a reader’s inferences and thoughts.”^[39] A pioneer in the cognitive study of culture, Ellen Spolsky articulates the goal of the field in terms of a question to be answered:

How does the evolved architecture that grounds human cognitive processing, especially as it manifests itself in the universality of storytelling and the production of visual art, interact with the apparently open-ended set of cultural and historical contexts in which human find themselves, so as to produce the variety of social constructions that are historically distinctive, yet also often translatable across the boundaries of time and place?^[40]

Several scholars, including Boyd and Gotschall, view storytelling as essential to the nature of human beings.^[41] Boyd seeks to understand stories as an important aspect of the evolution of human beings, suggesting that the origins of fiction lay in its many social and individual benefits. For example, there is social capital to be gained through sharing information and even gossip.^[42] It is also easy to see how deception and invented stories could be used for manipulation and material gain.^[43] Finally, fiction and storytelling evolved as a source of entertainment and play.^[44] Boyd also recognizes that theory of mind is essential to fiction and storytelling, recognizing that point of view, irony, and the gap between reality and appearance is so widespread in storytelling.^[45] While Gottschall and Boyd seek the evolutionary origins of stories, and the ways in which they distinguish humans from other animals, David Herman seeks to promote the increased interaction of literary and cognitive studies. Herman points out that most projects that bring together cognitive science and humanities involve the utilization of the sciences of mind to better interpret a text.^[46] In doing so, scholars who take this approach are aware of disciplinary differences, pragmatically adopting useful insights and critically appropriating them for use in their own field.^[47] The goal of this type of work “has been to demonstrate the relevance of developments in the cognitive sciences for problems of narrative understanding.”^[48] This is not the only approach, however. Herman seeks, in the end, to go beyond this interdisciplinary approach, which amounts to the “unidirectional transfers of terms and concepts from one discipline to another,” to develop a “transdisciplinary” approach to understanding storytelling and cognition.^[49] This approach, which seeks to inform both disciplines, is an ambitious goal, which is not the purpose of most of those working to understand the humanities better through the insights of cognitive science.