From Object to Affect in Literary Experience, Interpretation, and Evaluation

Abstract

What happens in our heads when reading, and what is the relation between the reading experience and everyday experience? Philosophers and literary theorists have puzzled over these questions since (at least) Plato’s Phaedrus, with new answers offered yearly. However, as I argue, we have not been able to know “what happens in our heads” with any assurance until the advent of neuroscience. Only within the past twenty years have we begun observing activity in our brains with any specificity, and only within the past ten years have we begun tracing— from photons to neurons, from reflected light to sensory transduction (Lumpkin & Caterina, 2007)—the interconnectivity between real and fictive properties and between everyday experience and the reading experience. My thesis harnesses data coming out of the neurosciences and puts them to use for literary theory and criticism, with two principal foci: I seek to clarify the nature of literary “meaning,” or how readers translate textual codes into rich cognitive representations; and I offer a neurobiological account of literary “value” and “evaluation,” or how we come to think of works as “good” or “bad,” and how we may then adjudicate between competing values. An important neuroscientific programme guiding my research is “grounded cognition.” Grounded cognition explains (a) how memory encodes into innate, modality-specific systems in the brain—visual, emotional, auditory—and (b) how acquired memories, from perception, reactivate while reading, generating “situated simulations” of textual contents, or what could be thought of as a type of “simulated” perceptual experience (Addis, 2009; Barsalou, 1999, 2008). Grounded cognition thus offers a uniform account of the relation between innate systems, perceptually acquired memory, and how we simulate and respond to fictional events. Taking cues from grounded cognition, I argue that the reading experience is correlative with perceptual experience, so that how we find meaning in and value perceptual objects and events, in general, explains how we find meaning in and value simulated objects and events in particular literary passages. I have loosely dubbed my approach to literary theory “neurocriticism.” The “neuro” prefix signifies my source of empirical data—namely cognitive, social, and affective neuroscience—while “criticism” signifies the consequences of these data when applied to literary analysis. Neuroscience has its limits, to be sure, and neuroscientists often get things wrong; I have therefore also relied heavily on philosophic work to frame neuroscientific findings, and to select between competing neuroscientific explanations. By offering a neurobiological account of literary meaning and value, and showing how this account militates for and against competing interpretations of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, I believe my thesis makes some headway towards achieving a new wave of reader response theories taking their cues from neuroscientific research.