®UFZapfHumnst BT¯ N. N. Holland's Seminar, Your Mind on Media: Description

Workman  This is a work in progress. All semester, I will be updating this, the syllabus for Your Mind on Media, Spring 2005.

Your Mind on Media

SPRING 2005

Norman N. Holland



Head and Brain
ver. 12.03.04--update!!
ENG 4936
Meets in: CBD105 Rm 312
My office: Turlington 4221
My assistant, Mrs. Moreno:
  Turlington 4730
 on Wednesdays at 4:05-7:05 p.m. (periods W 9-11)
Office hours, one hour before class in my office, but I'd rather arrange individual times.
For that, please use the telephone
392-7332 (O) or 377-0096 (HO)
or, easiest, e-mail: nholland@ufl.edu

    This seminar explores how our brains turn stories, movies, poems, and plays into pleasure. As such, it uses neuroscience to expand and extend the basic principles of psychoanalytic and reader-response criticism. Since we are not laboratory scientists, we will proceed by reading accounts of the work of those who are. These will vary from newspaper accounts to papers in scientific journals.

    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 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, because it will change.

    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 are the kinds of memory, and how do they enter into literary response? 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 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? 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?

    The course syllabus will be available online here. Since there will be changes from time to time, please make a practice of checking it and printing out new pages or copies as you need them. In addition, after each class I will post my notes online. Caveat lector: the discussion may depart considerably from the notes.

Books to purchase:

Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World (Other Press, paperback)

Holland, Poems in Persons, rev. ed. This is only available online from www.cybereditions.com. If you are ordering the paperback, please order this quickly--I have no idea how long it will take.

You can buy Solms and Turnbull 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. Most will be handouts, and a few 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.

Reading Schedule

    You will find the readings easier if you read them in the order given. I have arranged them from topic to topic in the order that I think will make most sense to you.

1. January 5. Introduction to the course and the brain. Settling enrollment. Notes for this session are now online. Vote on further assignments. Questions addressed in this course:

As soon as you can, download the following and read them over:

2. January 12. More about the brain. We will watch a video on basic information about brain structures and neurochemicals (Zellner 2003). By contrast, the encyclopedia article should get you started asking questions about the nature of literature, its difference from other kinds of writing, your response, its role in your life, and so on. It is these two quite different kinds of thinking that we are trying to put together.
   Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

3. January 19. More about the brain and some discussion of aesthetic issues. We will watch a video on basic information about how the brain does emotions (Turnbull 2003). Again, the encyclopedia article should open up questions which we are going to try to address with brain information.
   Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

4. January 26. This will be our last session that develops the knowledge of the brain that we will be using throughout the rest of the seminar. We will watch a video giving basic information about how the brain does memory--something that will be important further on in the seminar (Yovell 2003). We will open up some fundamental issues about the relation of mind and brain with respect to literature. And we will be taking a look at the ideas behind reader-response criticism.
   Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

Writing:

5. February 2. Is a text something "out there" in the world beyond your skin? What is the role of your senses? Given the brain's role in creating what we take to be reality, how can we talk about texts at all? A second group of questions: What is the "willing suspension of disbelief" How does it work? Why does it work?
   Notes for this session are now online. Your responses to the first two parts of non-gradable exercise 1 are online:
Exercise 1, part 1
Exercise 1, part 2

Reading:

6. February 9. We will continue discussion of the willing suspension of disbelief. Why do we feel real emotions at unreal, i.e., fictional, situations? What are emotions, anyway? How do we feel them? When do we feel them and why? Why do we feel them in response to fictions? What are our brains doing when we are "rapt," "absorbed" in a literary experience? Talk about the hour exam.
   Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

Writing:

7. February 16. Why do we feel real emotions at imaginary situations? Why do we care about what happens in fictional events? What is a literary character? Why do we care about literary characters?
Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

The following items will not be covered in the hour exam and will not be discussed on Feb. 23, but will be discussed March 9. And they should be read before March 9. Questions you should consider in doing these readings are: What are the kinds of memory? What do they lead us to expect? Recall the Yovell video (Jan. 26). What memory systems are involved in doing different genres of literature?

8. February 23. The HOUR EXAM. It will consist of multiple choice questions on the brain only. Afterwards, we will talk about the nature of literary characters. They are just words, yet we think of them as real people--how come?
Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

SPRING BREAK

9. March 9. What do we expect when we pick up a book or buy a ticket for admission? When we turn to literature, what are we looking for? What is literary form? What is attention? How do literary forms work in the brain?
   Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

10. March 16. People often say that a given literary work "means" this or that--what does such a statement itself mean? How do literary forms do what authors want them to do? We speak of the "content" of a literary work--what does that mean? To what extent does it come from the work, to what extent from us?
   Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

11. March 23. How does literature mean--or does it? How can we explain the agreements and disagreements among readers and audiences as to what works mean or what is "in" them? Why do we enjoy literary works? Does meaning have anything to do with enjoyment?
   Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

12. March 30. What is the nature of pleasure and literary pleasure in particular? Why do we enjoy literature? Why are there styles? How did you come to be the person you are with the style you have? What is "creativity"? Is it just one thing, or are there different kinds (e.g, scientific, literary, entrepreneurial, etc.)? What can we say about the brain's role in creativity? Can one escape one's "style"?
   Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

13. April 6. How did you come to be the person you are with the style you have? What is "creativity"? What leads us to say some work is "good" or "great"? Is there something in our brains that guides these conclusions? What can we say about the brain's role in judging literature? Why do we do literature at all?
   Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

14. April 13. 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? Why do individuals do literature? Why do some people make literature? Why do people value some literary works? What is pleasure? What finally does literature do to or for our brains? Why do we do it? Review of semester's work for final exam.
   Notes for this session are now online.

Reading:

15. April 20. FINAL EXAM. 2 hours. It will be given at the same time and 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 much thought, I've decided 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 threfore are a poor idea. Also, 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.

    In response to what students have told me year after year. this year I have cut back the amount of reading radically. I have divided the readings so as to keep the weekly assignments to between 100 and 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. http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=108463.

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.

Damasio, Antonio R. "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.

Faust, Miriam. "Obtaining Evidence of Language Comprehension." Right Hemisphere Language Comprehension. Ed. Mark Beeman and Christine Chiarello. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998. 161-85.

Freud, Sigmund. "Creative Writers and Day Dreaming." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. 9, 1908e. 142-53.

Hasson, Uri, et al. "Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision." Science 303 (12 Mar 2004): 1634-40.

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.

---. 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.

---. "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.

---. "Your Mind on Media: How Your Brain Turns Stories, Movies, Poems, and Plays into Pleasure." Book in progress.

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.

Ohmann, Richard. "Generative Grammars and the Concept of Literary Style." Word 20 (1964): 423-39.

Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univerisity Press, 1998.

---. "The Neuro-Evolutionary Cusp Between Emotions and Cognitions: Implications for Understanding Consciousness and the Emergence of a Unified Mind Science." Evolution and Cognition 7.2 (2001): 141-63.

Paris, Bernard J. A Psychological Approach to Fiction: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1974. As excerpted in Keesey, Donald. Contexts for Criticism. 3rd ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1998.

Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, 1999.

Solms, Mark and Oliver Turnbull. The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. New York: Other Press, 2002.

Spolsky, Ellen. "Response to John Tooby and Leda Cosmides." SubStance 94/95 (2001): 201-02.

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.

Zillmer, Eric A. and Mary V. Spiers. Principles of Neuropsychology. Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 2001.