This class memorandum is long, but I hope you will be able to use it as a manual to the course. Hence I have tried to include all the information you need, for example, at the end, proper MLA-style references to all the readings. I have also tried to anticipate and answer all the questions you might ask. This is an effort, I am happy to say, doomed to fail, and I look forward to talking with you about the particular questions you have. Nevertheless, I hope that you will find this memo useful, and you should download it repeatedly before and during the semester, as it changes.
This course explores a new field: the relation between what we are finding out about the brain--cognitive science--and what we have traditonally thought we know about literature. In the last two decades we have seen an explosion of knowledge about our brains. I'm interested in how these new ideas about perception, memory, word recognition, cognitive development, reading, metaphor, and personal identity, might bear on some of our ideas in literary criticism and theory. In other words, this course concerns, not literature, but what we can fairly say about literature in the light of what we think we know about brains.
Here are some of the questions I plan to discuss: How do our brains perceive a text? How are language capabilities embodied in the brain and how do they function? What is a possible brain basis for shared audience responses? How do we acquire a persistent personality and with it a style of writing or reading? Do cultural materials have an evolutionary effect? What is our peculiar state of being "rapt" or "absorbed" in books and movies? What are the relative roles of the mammalian and neo-mammalian brains in responding to literature? What are the kinds of memory, and how do they enter into literary response? How does culture get inscribed in a child's growing brain? In general, how does today's neuropsychology bear on our understanding of literature and the literary processes of creation and response?
You can buy these at Goerings' bookstore (textbook branch, next to Bageland), and you should support your local, independent bookseller instead of the big corporation now running the UF Bookstore.
Each week, I will make available the other readings that you have not purchased. Some will be handouts, and some will be posted online. Where readings are indicated below as "online," you should download them and print them on your own computers. For some of the online files below, you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free download from their site.
Please don't panic! This is the heaviest week for reading. Things will ease up. The readings for this week consist of several introductions to the brain that cover similar ground in different ways. (My own introduction is long. I recommend that you print it out, but, as you read, keep connected to the online file so that you can use the links to get to the illustrations.) Work the graphics through in all of the readings--they will help familiarize you with the materials.
I know that English majors will find this biological material strange indeed. Be patient! You don't have to know everything you read. The list of terms is meant to stake out limits. And you need not know the whole list right away, although you should know it by the hour exam. This will all make more sense when we begin to talk about specific functions that relate to literature. Be patient. Trust me. (Yes, I know that that inspires distrust, but trust me anyway.)
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Discussion:
- What can we say about the brain's role in judging literature?
- What can we say about the brain's role in creativity?
- Why do all human cultures, so far as we know, do literature? Are we genetically programed to do so? Or is there a simpler reason?
- What is pleasure?
- What finally does literature do to or for our brains? Why do we do it?
Reading:
- Holland, "What Makes a Work Good?" Online. 21 pp.
- Holland, "What Is Creativity?" Online. 15 pp.
- Tooby and Cosmides, "Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?" Handout. 22 pp.
- Spolsky, Tooby, and Cosmides, "Dialogue. Handout. 199-202. 4 pp.
- Pinker, How the Mind Works, pp. 521-565. Handout 45 pp.
- PInker, Blank Slate, pp. 400-421. Handout. 22 pp.
- Hogan, "The Evolutionary Turn," Cognitive Science, 191-217. Handout 27 pp.
- Holland, "Why Literature?" Online. 27 pp.
FINAL EXAM. 2 hours. April 29 (Thursday!), 3-5:00 p.m. It will be given in the same room as the class. There is no way, given the dates that grades are required, that I can offer a make-up for those who miss this exam. Students who miss the exam will have to receive an incomplete.
Papers and Grades
After soul-searching, I've concluded that it is not reasonable to ask you to write a paper in cognitive science on the basis of one seminar. Instead, I've decided to rely instead on exams for giving you a grade. I will give an hour exam in class towards the middle of the semester and a two-hour final exam during exam period as indicated on the above schedule. The hour exam will count for 20% of your final grade and the final for 60%. The remaining 20% will represent my estimate of your performance in discussion and on-line and my estimate of how much I think you have learned in the seminar.
This class depends heavily on what goes on in our weekly sessions. What people say is important, and what I say may differ from the online notes. Absences from class meetings will adversely affect the "estimate " segment of your grade, as will failure to complete the readings in time for class discussion. Cogent discussion in class or online will boost this score.
If you are having any kind of trouble with readings or discussions or comprehension, please consult me. I will keep office hours an hour before class. But I much prefer that you email or telephone me (during business hours) so that we can arrange other and sooner times to meet.
Prerequisites
This seminar presumes no previous knowledge of cognitive science, neurology, or psychology. I will do my best to give you what you need to know for our specialized, literary purposes. We will do virtually no purely literary reading either. Rather, I will be drawing on the previous reading experiences you have had, whether in literature classes or not. We will often refer to movies.
Doing the Reading
Some in the seminar will know a good deal about literature or linguistics or neuroscience or cognitive science--I hope to draw on your knowledge. Most in the seminar will be exploring a new discipline. I think you will do best if you adopt a tactic of total immersion. Read very hard and read everything you can manage in the opening weeks of the seminar. I think you will find that, after you have mastered the vocabulary and some of the basic concepts and issues, the rest of the reading will come easier. Notice in the Reading Schedule that the readings ease up as we proceed through the semester. As we get into more purely literary matters, there are fewer and fewer writers who address these questions from the point of view of brain functions. Work hard at the beginning, and you will have a much easier time at the end.
The reading is heavy, so students tell me year after year. I know. This year I have cut back the amount of reading radically. I have divided the readings so as to keep the weekly assignments to less than 200 pages and often much less. For discursive prose, that does not seem too bad to me. The first time I gave this course, one student said he had had little trouble with the amount of reading. How come? What he did was divide the assignment into eight equal parts and then faithfully read one part each day from one class meeting to the next. That reduced the reading to 25 pages a day. Surely that is manageable. Incidentally, I've tried this technique myself on some heavy neurological reading, and it works! I highly recommend it.
A Bibliography of the Readings
I hope this is complete, but there may be omissions.
"Aesthetics." Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. 10 July 2003. .
Bear, Mark F., Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso. Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain. Baltimore MD: Williams & Wilkins, 1996.
Blakeslee, Sandra. "Brain-Updating Machinery May Explain False Memories." The New York Times 19 Sept 2000.
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.
Bownds, M. Deric. The Biology of Mind: Origins and Structures of Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. Bethesda MD: Fitzgerald Science Press, 1999.
Cohen, Adam. "What the Monkeys Can Teach Humans About Making America Fairer." The New York Times 21 Sept 2003: 4–10.1.
Cromie, William J. "Researchers Debate Origin of Language." Harvard University Gazette 12 Decmber 2002. . Accessed 8 December 2003.
Crowder, Robert G. and Richard K. Wagner. The Psychology of Reading: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Damasio, Antonio R. and Hanna Damasio. "Brain and Language." Scientific American 267.3 (Sept 1992): 88–95.
Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994.
---. "Some Pointers on the Anatomy of the Nervous System." The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999. 324-35.
Fadiga, Luciano, Leonardo Fogassi, Vittorio Gallese, and Giacomo Rizzolati. "Visuomotor Neurons: Ambuiguity of the Discharge or `Motor' Perception?" International Journal of Psychophysiology 35 (2000): 165-177, 188-194.
Faust, Miriam. "Obtaining Evidence of Language Comprehension." Right Hemisphere Language Comprehension. Ed. Mark Beeman and Christine Chiarello. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998. 161-85.
Fowler, Brenda. "Expert Says He Discerns `Hard-Wired' Grammar Rules." New York Times 15 Jan 2002: Section F; Page 5; Column 2; Science Desk.
Freud, Sigmund. "Creative Writers and Day Dreaming." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. 9, 1908e. 142-53.
Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. "The Faculty of Language: What is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?" Science 298 (22 Nov 2002): 1569-79.
Heilman, Kenneth. Matter of Mind: A Neurologist's View of Brain-Behavior Relationships. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.
Hilts, Philip J. "Images Show Brain Recalling a Word." New York Times 11 Nov 1991: A-1.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.
Holland, Norman N. "`The Barge She Sat In': Psychoanalysis and Diction." Psychoanalytic Studies 3.1 (Mar 2001): 79-94.
---. "Cognitive Linguistics." International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 80.2 (Apr 1999): 357-63.
---. The Dynamics of Literary Response. 1st ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1968.
---. "An Extension of George Lakoff's `How Unconscious Metaphorical Thought Shapes Dreams.'." PsyArt 5 (2001). http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2001/hollan04.htm. Accessed 10 December 2003.
---. The I. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1985. Available at http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/theihome.htm.
---. Laughing, a Psychology of Humor. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.
---. "The Power(?) of Literature." New Literary History (2004 (in press)).
---. "Prose and Minds: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Non-Fiction." The Art of Victorian Prose. Eds George Levine and William Madden. New York: Oxford UP, 1968.
---. "Reader-Response Already is Cognitive Criticism." Bridging the gap. Stanford Humanities Review 4.1 (1994). http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-1/text/holland.commentary.html. Accessed 8 December 2003.
---. "Reader-Response Criticism." International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 79.6 (1998): 1203-11.
Hospers, John. "Aesthetics, Problems Of." The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 8 vol. Editor-in-chief Paul Edwards. New York and London: Macmillan/Free Press, 1967. 1: 35-56.
Kalat, James W. Biological Psychology. Belmont CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2001.
Knight, Robert T., Marcia Grabowecky, and Donatella Scabini. "Role of Human Prefrontal Cortex in Attention Control." Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Frontal Lobe. Eds. Jasper. H. H., S. Riggio, and P. S. Goldman-Rakic. New York: Raven Press, 1995. 1357-71.
Knight, Robert T. and Marcia Grabowecky. "Escape from Linear Time: Prefrontal Cortex and Conscious Experience." The Cognitive Neurosciences. Ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga. Cambridge MA: MIT P, 1995. 1357-71.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. "The Self." Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic, 1999. 267-89.
Lakoff, George. "How Unconscious Metaphorical Thought Shapes Dreams." PsyArt 5 (2001). http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2001/lakoff02.htm. Accessed 10 December 2003.
Luria, Aleksandr Romanovich. The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology. Trans. Basil Haigh. New York: Basic, 1973.
Nadeau, Stephen E. "Parallel Distributed Processing: The Relationship Between Neural Microstructure and Higher Neural Functions." Medical Neuroscience 2003. Gainesville FL: Department of Neuroscience; College of Medicine; University of Florida, 2003. 12.66-80.
Ohmann, Richard. "Generative Grammars and the Concept of Literary Style." Word 20 (1964): 423-39.
---. "A Linguistic Appraisal of Victorian Style." The Art of Victorian Prose. Eds. George Levine and William Madden. New York: Oxford UP, 1968. 289-313.
Osborne, Lawrence. "A Linguistic Big Bang." New York Times Magazine 24 Oct 1999. http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19991024mag-sign-language.html.
Pally, Regina. The Mind-Brain Relationship. London and New York: Karnac Books, 2000.
Panksepp, Jaak and Jeff Burgdorf. "`Laughing' Rats and the Evolutionary Antecedents of Human Joy?" Physiology & Behavior 79.3 (Aug 2003): 533-47.
Panksepp, Jaak. "The Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales: Normative Data and Implications." Neuro-Psychoanalysis 5.1 (2003): 57-69.
---. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univerisity Press, 1998.
---. "Response to the Commentaries." Neuro-Psychoanalysis 1.1 (1999): 69-90.
Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking, 2002.
---. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, 1999.
---. "Introduction." The Cognitive Neurosciences. Ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga. Cambridge MA: MIT P, 1995. 851-53.
---. The Language Instinct. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.
Rizzolatti, Giacomo and Michael A. Arbib. "Languge Within Our Grasp." Trends in Neuroscience 21.5 (1998): 188-94.
Schore, Allan N. "Commentary on Jaak Panksepp's `Emotions as Viewed by Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience'." Neuropsychoanalysis 1.1 (1999): 49-55.
Sharpe, Ella Freeman. "Psycho-Physical Problems Revealed in Language: An Examination of Metaphor." Collected Papers on Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth P, 1950. 155-69.
Solms, Mark and Oliver Turnbull. The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. New York: Other Press, 2002.
Solms, Mark. "An Example of Neuro-Psychoanalytic Research: Korsakoff's Syndrome." Journal of European Psychoanalysis 14 (Winter-Spring 2002): 133-45.
Spolsky, Ellen. "Response to John Tooby and Leda Cosmides." SubStance 94/95 (2001): 201-02.
In collaboration with Taylor, Insup and M. Martin Taylor. "Language and Brain." Ch. 12. Psycholinguistics: Learning and Using Language. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990.
Tooby, John and Leda Cosmides. "Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts." SubStance 94/95 (2001): 6-27.
---. "Response to Ellen Spolsky." SubStance 94/95 (2001): 199-200.
Trimble, Hichael R. and Jeffrey L. Cummings. "Introduction." Contemporary Behavioral Neurology. Ed. Hichael R. Trimble and Jeffrey L. Cummings. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997. 1-3.
Wade, Nicholas. "Researchers Say Gene is Linked to Language." The New York Times 4 Oct 2001: A-1.2.
Young, Kay and Jeffrey L. Saver. "The Neurology of Narrative." SubStance 94/95 (2001): 72-84.
Zillmer, Eric A. and Mary V. Spiers. Principles of Neuropsychology. Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 2001.
This is a work in progress. All semester, I will be updating this, the syllabus for The Book and the Brain, Spring 2004.
