At the risk of self-contradiction, I want to draw attention to a recent "Room for Debate" in the New York Times. Gathering together a number of critics, including Stanford's very own Blakey Vermeule, the Times asks:
A recent Times article described the use of neurological research and cognitive science in the field of literary theory.
“At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is providing a revitalizing lift,” the article said.
Does this research — “neuro lit” is one of its nicknames — energize literature departments, and, more broadly, generate excitement for the humanities? Is it yet another passing fad in liberal arts education? If the answer is both, why does theory matter, even if we sometimes don’t understand what the scholars are saying?
While I am a fan of the empirical study of literature, and have been more than willing to join the persistent chorus decrying the current state of humanistic study, and would argue that a literate, humanistically inclined public is vital to the flourishing of democracy -- and would argue, as a corollary, that in an era where one in four Americans read zero books per year (of any type), we face a very serious crisis in humanistic education, and by extension democracy -- something about this prompt in the Times strikes me as strange and disingenuous.
The problem: if our problem is budget cuts and a bad job market, shouldn't the solution be more money and better jobs? What does any of this have to do with "neuro lit" or "crit," as worthy an enterprise as that might be? Indeed, if "neuro lit" or "crit" answers questions such as, "Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?" as the Times article on which the "debate" is based claims, some new questions come to mind almost instantly.
Why, if we care so passionately about literature and nonexistent characters, are we unwilling to fund the humanities? If we love stories, why do we read so little? Why does the introduction of scientific terminology into literary scholarship excite enough passion to draw the attention of the New York Times, while run-of-the mill criticism and scholarship elicits almost no commentary at all?
I've had the same reservation about announcements about federal funding for the digital humanities. I have no objection to digital humanities (I'm afraid I do have an objection to "neuro lit," but that's rather beside the point), but it unnerves me to see the humanities deemed important or worthy of funding precisely insofar as they can be construed as other than the humanities. It seems to me to be a symptom of an erroneous belief I've mentioned elsewhere, i.e. that research and the humanities are mutually exclusive categories.
Natalia, you’ve hit the nail right on the head: “it unnerves me to see the humanities deemed important or worthy of funding precisely insofar as they can be construed as other than the humanities.” Brilliantly put!
For my sins, I attended a talk by Jonah Lehrer last week. The very title of his book--Proust was a Neuroscientist--says it all: don’t worry, Proust wasn’t a mere novelist, he was a neuroscientist; finally we can take him seriously.
Lehrer says some very strange things in his book. He thinks, for example, that In Search of Lost Time is a recording of Proust’s own life (yes, it was Proust who ate a madeleine, according to Lehrer; apparently there’s no neuroscience of the imagination) and that the only reason the narrator describes everything in it as “fictif” is that memory is always distorting. (I asked him whether Proust had forgotten that he was not heterosexual...)
As if that wasn’t bad enough, he told us that when we study aesthetic objects through the lens of neuroscience, we stand to learn something about those objects, “but more importantly” also about neuroscience. He meant it kindly, in a way: he thinks it’s the greatest compliment one can pay to Proust, Woolf, et al. that they discovered things neuroscientists are just coming around to. But as you so rightly suggest, this doesn’t give us a reason to read Proust, Woolf, et al.; we might as well just read the neuroscientists, who are after all so much more concise and up-to-date.
I still think there’s a real role for cognitive science and neuroscience in literary studies, one which does not reduce the humanities to the role of handmaiden to science (to quote David Schneider says in the post Bill mentions). If it can be established--and surely it can--that just sitting on the couch watching Desperate Housewives is in fact not all you need; that not all reading / viewing produces similar neurological results; that some kind of introduction to different modes of reading can make possible important kinds of experience that are otherwise available; well, maybe then we might see an uptick in reading in the population, and (who knows?) even an uptick in funding for the kinds of thing we do.
Joshua, you ask whether "it can be established...that just sitting on the couch watching Desperate Housewives is in fact not all you need; that not all reading / viewing produces similar neurological results; that some kind of introduction to different modes of reading can make possible important kinds of experience that are otherwise available."
(If you haven't seen it), Sven Birkerts' most recent article in The American Scholar explores this idea: "Reading in a Digital Age . Birkerts refers to, though not in depth, a number of recent articles (themselves considering recent research) on the question of how activities like novel reading and internet surfing/scanning differently affect neural functioning in the short and long term. These observations about "deep flow"-inducing activities vs. the more common mode of distracted attention are, by now, common enough. But I think the real strength of Birkerts' article is the argument he makes for how reading complex, non-utilitarian narratives (a.k.a. novels) alters the quality of our cognitive experience:
Birkerts considers, at some length, how reading novels affects our thought processes, our habitual perception. He doesn't irrefutably establish that "not all reading/viewing produces similar neurological results," but he makes some really compelling inferences.
I'd forgotten about that article, which I found really beautiful. Thanks for bringing it into the conversation, and also for putting your finger on where exactly Birkerts diverges from the standard line about attention / distraction, which I hadn't seen until you brought it out.
I'd love to hear your objections to "neuro lit/crit," Natalia. I'm somewhat ambivalent about actual cognitive criticism, the little I've read, anyway, but I don't object to studying literature from a cognitive perspective in principle. I hope at some point to study Mark Turner's work on blending in more detail, and start developing opinions on the field. I have far greater problems with Darwinian/evolutionary/sociobiological criticism, which makes strange claims -- and here I feel I am exaggerating only slightly -- such as, "Othello depicts characters experiencing sexual jealousy; Sexual jealousy is a product of evolution; therefore Othello is really about sociobiology!"
Thanks for pointing out the rhetorical contradiction of that article. It's as though the article has an unstated premise that goes something like this: "You and me, the smart ones, WE understand the importance of literatre and of the humanities. But those IDIOTS over there, they don't. But this neuro criticism, that'll get their attention, maybe even convince them."
As for neurocriticism, etc. itself, I've been reading in and using the newer psychologies for decades, but . . . if your focus is textual analysis and explication, you're on your own. These psychologies can give you ways of repackaging what you find in texts (old wine in new bottles), but they're of little value in helping you see new things.
David Schneider writes on Coleridge and neuro lit crit:
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/your-internet-brains-on...
Great post, Lee! I guess it comes back to something Bill Benzon said elsewhere: there’s a difference between defending reading and defending the study of reading. Much writing that defends literary reading / viewing fails to explain why it helps to understand what we’re doing when we’re doing it, or why a richer understanding of what we can do with individual texts might yield a different type of benefit. (I’m definitely guilty of this omission myself.)
Fortunately, Lisa Zunshine and Blakey Vermeule always make me excited to go back and reread literary works (Mrs Dalloway for example in the case of Zunshine, Elizabeth Costello for example in the case of Vermeule). Both are deeply brilliant writers with an infectious passion for literature, and both return us directly to the books they love. I think we can infer from this very fact that we need them—that reading Mrs Dalloway and Elizabeth Costello is a different experience once we have read Zunshine and Vermeule. But one wouldn’t know that from reading the New York Times.
I (not surprisingly) agree, Joshua -- what most needs defending is the practice of literary study and literary study relative to other institutional priorities, not reading itself. However, I should expose two buried premises in my post above. First, as I've previously argued, reading practices are always founded on institutions of education, including higher education; we must, to a person, be *taught* to read. Therefore, those who value literature should also support institutions that support, promote, and expand the life of reading. Second, even if we assume a larger degree of autonomy of literature from literary study than I do -- if we say, for instance, that the market can sustain reading on its own -- the latest crisis in the humanities (the crisis that originating with the popping of the housing bubble) shouldn't impinge on the question of how we study literature. I'd contend that the Times is tacitly proposing a methodological answer to an institutional question, as if buying new cyclotrons would reinvigorate enthusiasm for physics; then again, if our current practices are genuinely moribund, we shouldn't fund the humanities even in the best of times.
Let's just be clear. The New York Times isn't seriously proposing anything about method, in literary studies or in science or in anything. The New York Times isn't interested in research per se of any kind, only in traffic-generating soundbites, which is why it took up this topic in the first place. (See also.)
Of course you're right, Natalia -- there is very little substance in the Times' brief prompt -- but my criticism was more of (a perhaps too generous) reconstruction/extrapolation of the Times' "argument." I think a lot of academic trends -- and the desire for new "hot" literary fields -- are grounded on the idea that methodology can solve our institutional trouble. Which it can't.
True.
Agreed, but I think we can be more specific than that. It's not just that the NYT loves generating sound-bite-level controversy. The piece Lee is discussing unifies two running themes from the newspaper. First, the NYT has a severe case of explanatory neurophilia, the starry-eyed promotion and credulous distortion of anything involving brain scans. Second, the NYT has been devoting ink to the idea that Theory killed the humanities for more than twenty years, at least since the de Man scandal. Weirdly, the perishing of the humanities is news that stays news for the NYT--provided, of course, that, as Lee and Natalia have been saying, the reporting misrecognizes a basically exogenous crisis as an endogenous one, pointing to various dire facts about the institutionalized humanities and explaining them by referring, in a distorted way, to the practices of academics. Certain advocates of "neuro lit crit" have been complicit in this by indulging in some public Theory-bashing (as in this Boston Globe piece from two years ago, by Jonathan Gottschall) and advertising their approach as the Theory-killing cure to the diseases of the humanities. What would it take to dislodge these tropes from mass-media reporting on the doings of the academic humanities? What is it about this story that makes it such an irresistible hook to reporters and editors?
But about the decline of book-reading: credit to the NYT for publishing this nice piece by Leah Price a few years ago.
Thanks for the explanatory neurophilia link, Andrew.
On the NYT and anti-Theory, a couple of years ago I put up a query at The Valve wanting to know just how long the NYT had been writing snarky reports on the annual MLA meeting. The drift of the half-dozen or so comments was such snark predates Theory, perhaps by quite a while. That is, it's standard-issue contempt for those odd-ball professors. Are humanities disciplines more often the target of this contempt than other disciplines? If so, why?
On Gottschall, he's something of a protege of Joseph Carroll, whose 1995 Evolution and Literary Theory is one of the founding documents of Darwinian literary criticsm (I believe the phrase is Carroll's as well). That book, which I've only zipped through on Google Books, is an extended argument against poststructuralist literary theory. I have the sense that much of the Darwinian's intellectual energy is oppositional (see the Wikipedia article on Darwinian literary studies, which Carroll wrote).
Just want to concur strongly here with Lee's follow-up: institutions of reading (or listening or viewing) are all-important; when we say that reading does certain things for us, it's always shorthand for "reading in a certain way--usually picked up from somewhere!--does certain things for us." You've made me wonder whether this crucial premise is one that used to be understood and now is so no longer, whether people stopped making the case, or what exactly accounts for the change. Intriguing!
I wonder if the NYT discussion defines humanistic study too narrowly: from Elif Batuman's remark that "a literary theory should define what's special about literature" to Michael Holquist's argument that "[r]eading and writing is to humanists what nature is to physicists." This line of reasoning places literature at the center of humanistic inquiry and, by extension, suggests that recent collaborations among humanists and neuroscientists diminishes the humanities particular expertise / value: the institutionalized study of reading (as Lee and Josh have eloquently put it).
But I would hazard that the humanities need not be positioned as "tagging along for the ride" with cognitive science –– as gaining value by virtue of association with a well-funded discipline that has a kind of public mandate for research. (However, I definitely concur with Lee's assessment that the NYT is framing cognitive theory as a kind of panacea for the humanities "precarious" financial state.) By comparison with Holquist and others, Blakey Vermeule's piece seems to avoid (1) claiming literature as the humanities most important / unique object of study or (2) suggesting that the humanities, to thrive in the 21st century, must piggy back onto the social or natural sciences. She writes, "the best humanities scholarship has always been slow and patient, done over a wide time scale rather than faddish. And this holds true whether the topic is Herman Melville or the cognitive architecture that allows us to process fiction." I could not agree more. And it seems to me that we should evaluate any interdisciplinary project like that of literature & cognitive science in terms of both how reciprocal and how rigorous the collaboration––the interdisciplinarity––promises to be.