The article that Emily and Elizabeth M mentioned in class about
cognitive brain science and the interpretation of literature has once again opened the question of the relationship between theory and literature. More importantly, as a much older debate, raises the question yet again of the merits of literature. In my opinion, this question will never go away and should be asked every so often. So check out
these short articles in the New York Times by a half dozen writers and professors. It might surprise you.
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ReplyDeleteYou beat me! I had just pulled up the blog to post this very article.
ReplyDeleteMy haphazard stream of rhetorical questions:
(First, did anyone else notice that the more positive reviews of Theory of Mind seemed to be near the bottom of the list?)
“A literary theory should account for what’s special about literature — for the things literature does better than anything else.” Do you agree? We’ve had several literary criticisms that have directly channeled other disciplines, such as psychoanalysis and economics. Does literature ‘do something’ with these fields that their original creators and primary audiences cannot or can only do imperfectly? If so, what do they do better?
"English professors might help those scientists by luring them on into the truly complex networks of mind and imagination that words alone, words in all their intricacy, can generate."
I understand writing tests are used in psychological assessments, but would Theory of Mind encourage the rise of a new psychological methodology that focused on writing as a treasure-trove of analysis data for the human imagination? Literature is the perfect social scenario in some senses because you can have the characters do whatever you want, but it also relies on the skill of the author in making these characters believable enough that the audience is willing to suspend disbelief.
Imagine studies where poets and novelists hooked themselves into brain scanners and wrote creative pieces under the watchful eye of laboratory psychologists. What are the implications of these scientists finding a poetry/fiction area of the brain and being able to stimulate it with a shock of electricity? How would the field of literature react if literally anyone could become the next Nabokov with a long jolt of juice, and several people were already writing ‘under the influence’?
I continually find it interesting how things that are traditionally viewed as polar opposites can really intertwine in so many areas. If we really can "map Wonderland" as the first article suggests, it opens up a whole new area of possibilities. It's almost science-fictional.
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