New Critical Directions in Comparative Literary Studies By Frederick Luis Aldama

Patrick Colm Hogan. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. New York : Cambridge UP, 2003.

Patrick Colm Hogan. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanities. New York : Routledge, 2003. pp. 244.

Tectonic shifts are fracturing old models of literary analysis and pushing forward approaches anew.  Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-Marxist Marxism, Foucaultian new historicism, and Derridean deconstructionism are being radically revised--or discarded all together.  Seemingly dissatisfied with endless streams of esoteric speculation, many such scholars today seek terra firma in the verifiable and quantifiable.  In a 2004 issue of New Left Review, Franco Moretti proclaimed forcefully his hard-fast stance to ground literary analysis in empirical method: hard-data to quantify books sold and read in particular places and historical moments.   And, scholars  such as Nancy Easterlin, Robert Storey, David Herman, Glen Love, Susan Lohfer, Joseph Carroll, Lisa Zunshine, Porter Abbott, Michelle Sugyiami, to name a few, variously reach out to cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and post-Chomskyean linguistics to clarify why our minds do what they do when we read and write fiction. 

The work of Patrick Colm Hogan adds significantly to this new comparative scholarly impulse.  In 2003 Hogan published Mind and Its Stories  and Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts where he covers a massive range of literary and other cultural phenomenon like painting, film, and music, in his exploration of how authors, directors, musicians employ and re-deploy certain cognitive and emotive schema to engage minds.  (Notably, he also published in 2004 Empire and Poetic Voice  where he continues to build and revise several approaches formulated in his 2003 publications.)

•

Before framing his analysis of specific texts, Hogan pours his foundation:  that all the information we as Homo sapiens sapiens receive is shaped through our universally architectured cognitive and affective mind.  The more we understand how we process (select, segment, and structure) the information and stimulus that exists outside our mind, the more we can clarify why an author, musician, and/or filmmaker employs, for example, third-person point of view, certain rhythmical sound patterns, or the flashback/flashforward to engage the mind--and even transform preconceived cognitive schema.  Here, Hogan establishes three important substructures that guide how our mind's process information:  "schema (hierarchy of definitiveness: conception of human as organic), prototype (concretization of schema, concept of men, say, those more different to women, sadness as sadder than average), and exemplum (specific instances of a category, say, man)" (The Mind and Its Stories 63).  All three levels are active in our everyday response to our interpretation of the world: guided by our in-built schema of behavioral acts and gestures, for example, we can infer another's interior state of mind. Likewise all three levels can be activated when we read, write, paint, watch movies, listen to music, and so on.  This is the same whether one is an author or a reader, film director or moviegoer because we are all human and therefore work with, as Hogan states, "a finite range of cognitive processes" (63).

Of course, an author, musician, and film director differ from the reader, listener, and filmgoer, in that they are the individuals shaping the raw material of their various activities into forms that determine which elements from these three levels "maximally relevant" (63).  Let me turn to Flaubert and his writing of Madame Bovary to elucidate.  Flaubert's careful choice of phrasing was aimed to make  "maximally relevant" (cf. Hogan) certain elements in the reader's tripartite (schema, prototype, exemplum) meaning-making process.  Moreover, because Flaubert shares the universal cognitive structures as his readers, just as we "hear" the voice of his narrator and characters (and implied author), so too did he attune himself to how certain phrases might trigger certain responses.  In the phrasing of words and the inventing of ideas, characters, events, and plots, then, the author undergoes his or her own cognitive and emotive priming of memory (and its affiliate emotions). 

Such cultural phenomena as literature, music, and film work as "off-line" strategies (commonly identified as the "vicarious experience") that might, evolutionarily speaking, ready us for real life situations, but they also, as Hogan demonstrates at length, provide our minds (reader, listener, creator) with much needed pleasure; an escape and immersion into personal memory as well as a grand pay-off once we've puzzled together and made whole from textual fragments newly invented and imagined worlds.

Hogan's cognitive based insights into the how and why of literature (film and music) are many.  I will spend the rest of this essay highlighting but a few.  Cognitive science sheds new light on the question of innovation: how the mind works when an author (musician and film director) innovates within their given activity and genre and what happens when a reader (listener and viewer) encounters such narratives.  This isn't a question of an anxiety of influence or mastery, but rather as Hogan clarifies, the result of a given author's plasticity of mind.  Certainly, innovation involves aptness, but it also involves another level of cognitive acrobatics:  the activation of new synaptic bridges between otherwise segregated neural domains.  The author of a poem or novel innovates by reaching into other schema, exemplum, and prototype (the poem might reach into narrative fictional exemplum or texture unlikely pairs of images, and so on), making for a new neural environment that allows the reader's mind to reach into unexpected domains.  Hogan also discusses Picasso, who radically innovate artistic form and content by reaching beyond the painterly domains of Western art and into the painterly domain of Iberian and African aesthetics. 

Hogan is also careful to point out that while such art crisscrosses cognitive schema to fashion something anew, there are cognitive thresholds.  If an artist, writer, musician pushes us beyond what the mind can recognize, then it will fail to engage our mind's selecting, sequencing, and thematizing capacity.  Hogan gives the example of musical composition that manages to push the envelope, but not past the point of "cognitive arousal" (24).  Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" presents unexpected and expected sound schema and prototype without creating "blockages" or a  "cortical arousal overload".

While much is hard-wired, Hogan discusses how our mind's aptitude for discerning and deriving pleasure from innovative cognitive domain bridging and revisions of schema, prototype, and exemplum does change over time. We don't respond, for example, to films the way we did in the early part of the 20th century.   However, as Hogan also points out, our basic cognitive architecture only changes over great spans of time.  This is why we cognitive science is useful for understanding literature (music and film).  Indeed, by demonstrating how the mind universally processes exemplum, schema, and prototype, Hogan can analyze how Coltrane's repeated chord rhythms mimic the verbal rhythm of saying "favorite things" and how our minds can further segment and sequence these chord rhythms to discern a rhythmic leitmotif. 

•

For Hogan, our universal capacity for memory (working- and deep- memory) and its attendant emotions is central to understanding why we read, listen to music, and watch films.  Indeed, it is not only how an author reaches into other cognitive schema to revitalize his/her given artistic activity, but also how he/she composes a verbal or visual text that engages our memory.  As we don't really remember the past, but rather as Hogan informs "reconstruct it--often in a way that reflects our present concerns as much as our past experience" (161), so, too, does our working memory work to synthesize from "fragmentary observations" (162) a coherent sense of scenes, characters, and events.  Of course, this also means that a given author can re-organize time (and space) in ways that engage our minds in interesting and challenging new ways.  For example, when we encounter a murder mystery "much of our cognitive effort is a matter of placing events in their proper order" (123); conversely, when we encounter the Hollywood film, the "story is presented in its actual temporal sequence" (123).  This also necessarily means that an author/director can use certain details (and not others) in a mise-en-scène to describe a particular setting because of the common understanding (and experience) of how the mind organizes space around human acts (live, walk, swim, fly, sleep).  Because we share a universal capacity to imagine other times and spaces not present in our here and now, authors and filmmakers can re-sequence time and warp spaces both to stimulate our imaginations as well as to transform generic preconceptions.  This helps us understand more deeply what happens when, say, a film director alters the prototypical chronology to activate our working memory in new ways.

•

Our engagement with verbal and visual art is not just a matter of puzzling out and imagining spatial and temporal spaces, it is also about how a given film, fictional narrative, musical composition triggers our capacity to empathize.  As Hogan discusses, our ability to feel happy, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness (ourselves and vicariously) is so powerful that such emotions can override reasoning; if about to be attacked by something threatening, we don't contemplate running we simply run; that we experience this same process when watching a film or reading a novel (even listening to music) is tied directly to our empathetic capacity.  We can powerfully feel angry, sad, happy also simply by listening to another's story.  Of course, because our mind's are organized hierarchically, when we respond (sad, angry, and etc.) to the moods and/or actions of others (simulated or not), we share the universal capacity to know that we are reacting in such and such a way.  So, we can become absolutely invested in a story because we feel for a character (this can be quite messy with many different emotions activated simultaneously and conflictually) and at the same time begin to think beyond the character's direct experiences; we can simultaneously feel sad and angry as well as formulate positive outcomes for the character.

Our universal capacity for emotion is a key ingredient in our engagement and creation of verbal, aural, and visual art.  In The Mind and Its Stories Hogan elaborates on the significance of our emotive architecture as Homo sapiens sapiens and thus a cross-cultural emplotting of certain paradigm narratives that gravitate one way or another toward realizing this goal of happiness.  Hogan's reading and research of hundreds of different elemental narratives present in cultures across the globe show the cross-cultural presence of narratives that end with the realization of a romantic union and/or the autonomy of the individual or community.  For Hogan, realizing happiness (most prototypically embodied in a narrative that consummates the romance) is central to our biological (and thus social) survival and evolution as a species.  Hence its universal presence.

•

There are many ways to enter into and engage with a literary, film, and musical text--and all equally run the risk of smelting cookie-cutter molds that predetermine the shape of one’s analysis.  Just because one turns to advances in science doesn't mean that one is free of a syllogistic approach.  Simply stating, for example, that we're hard-wired to perform evolutionary functions like reproduction and then to go through mechanically a variety of novels or films to show how this is articulated does little to lead us down innovative roads where we might verify, refute, and build anew an understanding of how, say, fiction works. 

The cognitive turn--or turn to science generally--in the study of literature (or film) usually fails when it is not considered one tool of many that we may or may not use depending on what a given narrative asks of us.  There are some who have made the so-called cognitive turn to peddle a social constructionism and/or relativism, ultimately proclaiming that facts, truth, value are functions of ideology.  Others, feel the need to make the cognitive turn in an attempt to uplift and/or revitalize a seemingly bankrupt profession of literary. 

Caveat aside, there are many who have turned to cognitive science in such a way that use it as a useful tool to further our knowledge of how the universal presence of fictionmaking (chirographic, gestural, and/or oral) works cross culturally to engage audiences (readers, listeners, viewers).  Hogan is one such scholar who knows well all the taxonomic compartments of his toolbox (biological, cognitive, linguistic, narratological, and so on) that help us better understand that the many elements that make up literature (film and music) depend on and can potentially modify other elements.  Hogan makes it clear in his wide ranging and thorough analysis that when the advances made in cognitive science are used as one tool of many, we don't eliminate the other tools in the toolbox.  Simply put, Hogan eschews the syllogistic study of cultural phenomena by not sticking the research obtained by such fields as cognitive science onto literary studies; and, he never subordinates such a study to the methods and goals that characterize science. 

The Mind and Its Stories and Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts help us understand better they way verbal, aural, and visual artists use certain techniques to transform the everyday experiences (how we remember, emote, experience, interpret) into memorable aesthetic activities.  As Hogan soundly demonstrates, we all share the same mental and cognitive architecture and so we can also build a shareable knowledge base that will clarify how authors worldwide invent, for example, certain characters; how they use certain details to prime and activate memories; and, how we as readers infer cause and effect from such details; how we as readers respond emotionally to certain narrative techniques; how we create empathetic bridges with characters and those that exist outside of the world of fiction.  Using the research and insight from cognitive science allows Hogan to take us deeper and more accurately into an understanding of the many and greatly heterogeneous activities engaged in by present day humans, including literature, its authors and its readers.

-- Frederick Luis Aldama

Tectonic shifts are fracturing old models of literary analysis and pushing forward approaches anew.  Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-Marxist Marxism, Foucaultian new historicism, and Derridean deconstructionism are being radically revised--or discarded all together.  Seemingly dissatisfied with endless streams of esoteric speculation, many such scholars today seek terra firma in the verifiable and quantifiable.  In a 2004 issue of New Left Review, Franco Moretti proclaimed forcefully his hard-fast stance to ground literary analysis in empirical method: hard-data to quantify books sold and read in particular places and historical moments.   And, scholars  such as Nancy Easterlin, Robert Storey, David Herman, Glen Love, Susan Lohfer, Joseph Carroll, Lisa Zunshine, Porter Abbott, Michelle Sugyiami, to name a few, variously reach out to cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and post-Chomskyean linguistics to clarify why our minds do what they do when we read and write fiction. 

The work of Patrick Colm Hogan adds significantly to this new comparative scholarly impulse.  In 2003 Hogan published Mind and Its Stories  and Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts where he covers a massive range of literary and other cultural phenomenon like painting, film, and music, in his exploration of how authors, directors, musicians employ and re-deploy certain cognitive and emotive schema to engage minds.  (Notably, he also published in 2004 Empire and Poetic Voice  where he continues to build and revise several approaches formulated in his 2003 publications.)

•

Before framing his analysis of specific texts, Hogan pours his foundation:  that all the information we as Homo sapiens sapiens receive is shaped through our universally architectured cognitive and affective mind.  The more we understand how we process (select, segment, and structure) the information and stimulus that exists outside our mind, the more we can clarify why an author, musician, and/or filmmaker employs, for example, third-person point of view, certain rhythmical sound patterns, or the flashback/flashforward to engage the mind--and even transform preconceived cognitive schema.  Here, Hogan establishes three important substructures that guide how our mind's process information:  "schema (hierarchy of definitiveness: conception of human as organic), prototype (concretization of schema, concept of men, say, those more different to women, sadness as sadder than average), and exemplum (specific instances of a category, say, man)" (The Mind and Its Stories 63).  All three levels are active in our everyday response to our interpretation of the world: guided by our in-built schema of behavioral acts and gestures, for example, we can infer another's interior state of mind. Likewise all three levels can be activated when we read, write, paint, watch movies, listen to music, and so on.  This is the same whether one is an author or a reader, film director or moviegoer because we are all human and therefore work with, as Hogan states, "a finite range of cognitive processes" (63).

Of course, an author, musician, and film director differ from the reader, listener, and filmgoer, in that they are the individuals shaping the raw material of their various activities into forms that determine which elements from these three levels "maximally relevant" (63).  Let me turn to Flaubert and his writing of Madame Bovary to elucidate.  Flaubert's careful choice of phrasing was aimed to make  "maximally relevant" (cf. Hogan) certain elements in the reader's tripartite (schema, prototype, exemplum) meaning-making process.  Moreover, because Flaubert shares the universal cognitive structures as his readers, just as we "hear" the voice of his narrator and characters (and implied author), so too did he attune himself to how certain phrases might trigger certain responses.  In the phrasing of words and the inventing of ideas, characters, events, and plots, then, the author undergoes his or her own cognitive and emotive priming of memory (and its affiliate emotions). 

Such cultural phenomena as literature, music, and film work as "off-line" strategies (commonly identified as the "vicarious experience") that might, evolutionarily speaking, ready us for real life situations, but they also, as Hogan demonstrates at length, provide our minds (reader, listener, creator) with much needed pleasure; an escape and immersion into personal memory as well as a grand pay-off once we've puzzled together and made whole from textual fragments newly invented and imagined worlds.

Hogan's cognitive based insights into the how and why of literature (film and music) are many.  I will spend the rest of this essay highlighting but a few.  Cognitive science sheds new light on the question of innovation: how the mind works when an author (musician and film director) innovates within their given activity and genre and what happens when a reader (listener and viewer) encounters such narratives.  This isn't a question of an anxiety of influence or mastery, but rather as Hogan clarifies, the result of a given author's plasticity of mind.  Certainly, innovation involves aptness, but it also involves another level of cognitive acrobatics:  the activation of new synaptic bridges between otherwise segregated neural domains.  The author of a poem or novel innovates by reaching into other schema, exemplum, and prototype (the poem might reach into narrative fictional exemplum or texture unlikely pairs of images, and so on), making for a new neural environment that allows the reader's mind to reach into unexpected domains.  Hogan also discusses Picasso, who radically innovate artistic form and content by reaching beyond the painterly domains of Western art and into the painterly domain of Iberian and African aesthetics. 

Hogan is also careful to point out that while such art crisscrosses cognitive schema to fashion something anew, there are cognitive thresholds.  If an artist, writer, musician pushes us beyond what the mind can recognize, then it will fail to engage our mind's selecting, sequencing, and thematizing capacity.  Hogan gives the example of musical composition that manages to push the envelope, but not past the point of "cognitive arousal" (24).  Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" presents unexpected and expected sound schema and prototype without creating "blockages" or a  "cortical arousal overload".

While much is hard-wired, Hogan discusses how our mind's aptitude for discerning and deriving pleasure from innovative cognitive domain bridging and revisions of schema, prototype, and exemplum does change over time. We don't respond, for example, to films the way we did in the early part of the 20th century.   However, as Hogan also points out, our basic cognitive architecture only changes over great spans of time.  This is why we cognitive science is useful for understanding literature (music and film).  Indeed, by demonstrating how the mind universally processes exemplum, schema, and prototype, Hogan can analyze how Coltrane's repeated chord rhythms mimic the verbal rhythm of saying "favorite things" and how our minds can further segment and sequence these chord rhythms to discern a rhythmic leitmotif. 

•

For Hogan, our universal capacity for memory (working- and deep- memory) and its attendant emotions is central to understanding why we read, listen to music, and watch films.  Indeed, it is not only how an author reaches into other cognitive schema to revitalize his/her given artistic activity, but also how he/she composes a verbal or visual text that engages our memory.  As we don't really remember the past, but rather as Hogan informs "reconstruct it--often in a way that reflects our present concerns as much as our past experience" (161), so, too, does our working memory work to synthesize from "fragmentary observations" (162) a coherent sense of scenes, characters, and events.  Of course, this also means that a given author can re-organize time (and space) in ways that engage our minds in interesting and challenging new ways.  For example, when we encounter a murder mystery "much of our cognitive effort is a matter of placing events in their proper order" (123); conversely, when we encounter the Hollywood film, the "story is presented in its actual temporal sequence" (123).  This also necessarily means that an author/director can use certain details (and not others) in a mise-en-scène to describe a particular setting because of the common understanding (and experience) of how the mind organizes space around human acts (live, walk, swim, fly, sleep).  Because we share a universal capacity to imagine other times and spaces not present in our here and now, authors and filmmakers can re-sequence time and warp spaces both to stimulate our imaginations as well as to transform generic preconceptions.  This helps us understand more deeply what happens when, say, a film director alters the prototypical chronology to activate our working memory in new ways.

•

Our engagement with verbal and visual art is not just a matter of puzzling out and imagining spatial and temporal spaces, it is also about how a given film, fictional narrative, musical composition triggers our capacity to empathize.  As Hogan discusses, our ability to feel happy, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness (ourselves and vicariously) is so powerful that such emotions can override reasoning; if about to be attacked by something threatening, we don't contemplate running we simply run; that we experience this same process when watching a film or reading a novel (even listening to music) is tied directly to our empathetic capacity.  We can powerfully feel angry, sad, happy also simply by listening to another's story.  Of course, because our mind's are organized hierarchically, when we respond (sad, angry, and etc.) to the moods and/or actions of others (simulated or not), we share the universal capacity to know that we are reacting in such and such a way.  So, we can become absolutely invested in a story because we feel for a character (this can be quite messy with many different emotions activated simultaneously and conflictually) and at the same time begin to think beyond the character's direct experiences; we can simultaneously feel sad and angry as well as formulate positive outcomes for the character.

Our universal capacity for emotion is a key ingredient in our engagement and creation of verbal, aural, and visual art.  In The Mind and Its Stories Hogan elaborates on the significance of our emotive architecture as Homo sapiens sapiens and thus a cross-cultural emplotting of certain paradigm narratives that gravitate one way or another toward realizing this goal of happiness.  Hogan's reading and research of hundreds of different elemental narratives present in cultures across the globe show the cross-cultural presence of narratives that end with the realization of a romantic union and/or the autonomy of the individual or community.  For Hogan, realizing happiness (most prototypically embodied in a narrative that consummates the romance) is central to our biological (and thus social) survival and evolution as a species.  Hence its universal presence.

•

There are many ways to enter into and engage with a literary, film, and musical text--and all equally run the risk of smelting cookie-cutter molds that predetermine the shape of one’s analysis.  Just because one turns to advances in science doesn't mean that one is free of a syllogistic approach.  Simply stating, for example, that we're hard-wired to perform evolutionary functions like reproduction and then to go through mechanically a variety of novels or films to show how this is articulated does little to lead us down innovative roads where we might verify, refute, and build anew an understanding of how, say, fiction works. 

The cognitive turn--or turn to science generally--in the study of literature (or film) usually fails when it is not considered one tool of many that we may or may not use depending on what a given narrative asks of us.  There are some who have made the so-called cognitive turn to peddle a social constructionism and/or relativism, ultimately proclaiming that facts, truth, value are functions of ideology.  Others, feel the need to make the cognitive turn in an attempt to uplift and/or revitalize a seemingly bankrupt profession of literary. 

Caveat aside, there are many who have turned to cognitive science in such a way that use it as a useful tool to further our knowledge of how the universal presence of fictionmaking (chirographic, gestural, and/or oral) works cross culturally to engage audiences (readers, listeners, viewers).  Hogan is one such scholar who knows well all the taxonomic compartments of his toolbox (biological, cognitive, linguistic, narratological, and so on) that help us better understand that the many elements that make up literature (film and music) depend on and can potentially modify other elements.  Hogan makes it clear in his wide ranging and thorough analysis that when the advances made in cognitive science are used as one tool of many, we don't eliminate the other tools in the toolbox.  Simply put, Hogan eschews the syllogistic study of cultural phenomena by not sticking the research obtained by such fields as cognitive science onto literary studies; and, he never subordinates such a study to the methods and goals that characterize science. 

The Mind and Its Stories and Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts help us understand better they way verbal, aural, and visual artists use certain techniques to transform the everyday experiences (how we remember, emote, experience, interpret) into memorable aesthetic activities.  As Hogan soundly demonstrates, we all share the same mental and cognitive architecture and so we can also build a shareable knowledge base that will clarify how authors worldwide invent, for example, certain characters; how they use certain details to prime and activate memories; and, how we as readers infer cause and effect from such details; how we as readers respond emotionally to certain narrative techniques; how we create empathetic bridges with characters and those that exist outside of the world of fiction.  Using the research and insight from cognitive science allows Hogan to take us deeper and more accurately into an understanding of the many and greatly heterogeneous activities engaged in by present day humans, including literature, its authors and its readers.

-- Frederick Luis Aldama