Karin Kukkonen, A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel (Oxford, 2017)

I said in my recent post about Andy Clark and predictive processing that I’d mention a literary scholar who has pursued these themes to good effect. I’ve already mentioned Karin Kukkonen’s work drawing on Bayesian probability (here), and her recent book puts this in a more ambitious framework.
      She approaches the 18th-century novel by means of interfaces between the neoclassical poetics of the time and the cognitive poetics being developed today. Where the former has poetic justice, the unities of space and time (i.e. limitations on the scope of stories), and decorum (i.e. proper behaviour of characters and plots), the latter has social cognition, embodied cognition, and predictive cognition. So the question of poetic justice is related to the ways that characters cooperate with one another, and benefit as a result, as humans have evolved to do; the question of artistic unity is related to the construction of imaginary story worlds into which both mind and body fit.
      The link between the predictive mind, the actions of characters, and the workings of genre, is highly suggestive. I think it works very well as a way of revealing and exploring the liveliness of neoclassical theories. They can seem rather dry to modern readers — Romanticism really got to us — but actually (for example) a commitment to verisimilitude is a commitment to liveliness, not just to lifelikeness. It also works well as a way of understanding novels as they unfold and progress, twist and turn: there is constant exchange between informed expectations and emerging information.
      Karin is my friend and I try to declare my interests, but, whether by friend or stranger, this is a great example of what a historically aware, cognitively informed, critically imaginative approach to literature can do.