The other day a bit of coffee-break Googling and Youtubing led me, for once, to something other than videos of ships in storms, or Sigur Rós playing in fields. I found a talk given by my friend Sean Keilen (of the University of California, Santa Cruz) as part of an event held back in 2010 at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. An impressive group of speakers gathered to discuss ‘The State and Stakes of Literary Study’. The video is available online.
      The speech is thought-provoking and inspiring in several ways, and it prodded me back towards the problem (central to this blog here and here) of what literature might know, and especially what it might know about minds. Sean’s argument focuses on the priorities of undergraduate education and the justification of literary study.
      He argues that we should move away from the ‘compulsive mistrust’ of literary works that some political and theoretical approaches have fostered; we should instead take the risk of loving the books we read. Early on he suggests we should see literature as a form of wisdom (rather than a form of knowledge). Later on, citing Hans-Georg Gadamer, he says that while ‘sciences stand apart from the objects of their study’, the humanities are ‘inside the frame of their own enquiry’. That is, in literary study the observer and the thing being observed are so entwined that they have to reflect on one another.
      As a result, Sean argues, we should not argue for literary study in the language of science or market forces. Claiming to know things about ‘your brain’ may not be the right strategy. He cites Stanley Cavell, proposing that ‘the works of art we study don’t seek to give us knowledge of other minds, but to bring us to a point at which we can acknowledge their existence. This acknowledgement requires from us that we put ourselves in the presence of those works, and show ourselves and our limitations’. The outcome of this acknowledgement would be personal growth for the reader, but it may also be a more interactive, experiential, generously disposed encounter with the world, and with the mind.
      In an essay entitled , Cavell defines his terms. One point he makes is that perhaps ‘acknowledgement goes beyond knowledge… Goes beyond not, so to say, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge’. From ‘inside the frame’ it is not possible to stand apart; literary knowledge about the brain may be animated by the need to respond, to live with it all.

The blog is a year old. I’m surprised and pleased by how easy it’s been to produce posts at pretty much a weekly rate. I’m grateful for guest contributors who have written excellent material. I’m grateful to readers for their comments and encouragement. I still hope for the kind of interaction and conversation that I refer to in the ‘About’ page, but a year is not a lot of time to get something like that going, especially since the strategy so far has basically been ‘‘.

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I would like to offer a bit of reflection on what’s been achieved (and not yet achieved), and this post might also give new readers an easy way of reaching old posts. Lots of topics have been broached, and some have been considered at length. I have chosen to feature these here not because I think they are necessarily the best posts, but because in a series of posts I seem to get a bit further into the dialogue between literature and cognitive science.

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* So, if you like, you could look at a handful of posts about time in thoughts and texts: in order, here, here, here, here, and indeed here.
* Or you could see what I think literature has to tell scientists about wandering minds: firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly.
* I enjoyed thinking about music and cognitive dissonance here and also here.
* Ah, the vivid days when I got interested in self-recognition and mirrors, the results of which are in this post and this one too. Well, they meant something to me.
* And you might also follow a quartet of posts about how our brains, and our literary works, make us forget things. I started here, persisted here, consolidated here, and sealed the deal here.

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Finally, I have made intermittent attempts to work at the terms of the blog’s title. The nuances of what I thought I meant by ‘know’ and ‘about’ bugged me here and here. It’s been easy to find diverse things to write about in posts, but it hasn’t proved all that easy to use this format to set about the large questions underlying the idea that Literature Knows things About Your Brain — things that can mean something to literary people, psychologists and all. But that’s in the nature of the questions rather than the format. Plenty to do in the year ahead!

This is a follow-up to my previous post about how certain characteristics of human speech (rhythms, turn-taking) might have evolved from other primates’ sonic communication. I have been reading some Greek plays recently – I am teaching a paper called ‘Tragedy’ this term. It struck me that the stichomythia – rapidly alternating units of speech in dialogue – must be both a high example of turn-taking and its dirty secret. All too often any assumptions one might have about orderly, cooperative time-sharing are overturned by the conflict-filled, uncompromising exchanges we see in tragedies.
      In Euripides play The Bacchae this is taken to an interesting extreme. Pentheus, the young sceptical king, has several exchanges with Dionysus, the disguised new god who is causing frenzied revels that disrupt the city. Here the issue is not a bestial failure to keep to human norms, but a divine refusal. The power of Dionysus transcends human practices and he plays along only to engineer and magnify his triumph. In the long quotation I put here, there are vestiges of turn-taking communication, but really Pentheus is powerless. With his mind clouded by the God, he is about to humiliate himself by wearing drag to spy on the god’s followers, an escapade that will end with him being murdered by his own mother.

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PENTHEUS
What! I’m not going up there as a man?
I’ve got to change myself into a woman?
DIONYSUS
If they see you as a man, they’ll kill you.
PENTHEUS
Right again. You always have the answer.
DIONYSUS
Dionysus taught me all these things.
PENTHEUS
How can I best follow your suggestion?
DIONYSUS
I’ll go inside your house and dress you up.
PENTHEUS
What? Dress up in a female outfit?
I can’t do that—I’d be ashamed to.
DIONYSUS
You’re still keen to see the , aren’t you?
PENTHEUS
What sort of clothing do you recommend?
How should I cover up my body?
DIONYSUS
I’ll fix up a long hair piece for your head.
PENTHEUS: All right.
What’s the next piece of my outfit?
DIONYSUS
A dress down to your feet—then a headband,
to fit just here, around your forehead.
PENTHEUS
What else? What other things will you provide?
DIONYSUS
A to hold and a dappled fawn skin.
PENTHEUS
No. I can’t dress up in women’s clothes!
DIONYSUS
But if you go fighting with these Bacchae,
you’ll cause bloodshed.
PENTHEUS
Yes, that’s true.
So first, we must go up and spy on them.

Before reading the article by Ghazanfar and Takahashi cited in the earlier post I thought of this as a chilling demonstration of the absoluteness of divine power, but I didn’t think of that on a formal level, in the way that speech is exchanged. Now I see Pentheus as vainly trying not just to uphold the laws but also to undertake a recognisable sort of interactive speaking; the God does not even allow him that.

Asif A. Ghazanfar and Daniel Y. Takahashi, ‘The evolution of speech: vision, rhythm, cooperation’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 543-53.

Ghazanfar and Takahashi examine some key characteristics of human speech: rhythmic vocal acoustics, the coordination of these with rhythmic facial motions, and turn-taking. They find similarities and contrasts with the way other primates communicate with one another. The evolution of language is treated as separate from the evolution of speech in order to focus on these cross-species qualities. The authors acknowledge that the question of language bears on their interests, and vice versa.
      For some reason, despite the sidelining of language, this made me think about drama, which depends on rhythms of voice and body (the flow of syntax, metrical forms, coordinated movements and expressions), and which is built so often on turn-taking (it’s so much easier for the audience when speakers don’t overlap one another). I thought of excess: verse drama, different formal structures, and the exaggerated turn-taking that some kinds of scene depict. I also thought of degeneration, or regression – opposites of evolution – where literary speech falls short of these long-learned ideals. Failures of rhythm and turn-taking might complement – but might be independent of – a descent into linguistic incoherence.

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I have observed before that I always think of Shakespeare and Beckett in this blog. Here too. In the mad scenes of King Lear, the King, his Fool, and Edgar (as Poor Tom) weave strange, incoherent speeches into one another. In Titus Andronicus Marcus has to speak at, to, with, for, over – other prepositions would work too – his voiceless niece, and his ability to engage and respond seems compromised as a result.
      Beckett sees to go even further, contorting his actors’ bodies so that their speech and movement are at odds (most famously in Not I), and altering the dynamics of turn-taking (in
Krapp’s Last Tape, for example). Throughout Waiting for Godot there is a feeling that the characters are displaying the characteristics of evolved speech, but that they are now vestigial, not really suited to a strange world and what has happened to its words. Lucky’s outburst, where turn-taking breaks down and where also the link between words and facial expression is hard to sustain, feels curiously timely. Didi and Gogo try to ask and answer questions, to collaborate in speech, but it does not lead anywhere.
      Literature depends on language, obviously. But if we allow Ghazanfar and Takahashi to isolate speech as a phenomenon of sound and body, then we might see writers doing the same, revealing a major degeneration in characters and their societies by having these basics, rhythm and turn-taking, turn towards the nightmarish.

In a post a while back, I wrote about kinesic intelligence and Guillemette Bolens’s The Style of Gestures, and I credited the phrase (if you look carefully) to Ellen Spolsky’s article ‘Reading Kinesis in Pictures’, Poetics Today, 17 (1996), 157-80. At an we discussed this article, and one sentence is still on my mind:

The foundational assumption of a cognitively responsible theory of interpretation is the assumption of modularity that I mentioned earlier: having many ways of knowing provides the species with a variety of ways of responding to a varied and changing world. (p. 174)

The question is: how to be ‘cognitively responsible’. (I take ‘cognitively’ here at least partly to mean ‘in relation to theories of cognition’.) For Spolsky, this means facing up to the conclusions drawn in Jerry Fodor’s Modularity of Mind (1983), i.e. (in brief) that the things the mind does are best thought of as modular, in that they are discrete in function, evolution, neural architecture, and so on. They interact of course, but sometimes (as in optical illusions) their separateness can cause us interesting problems. For Spolsky, this is part of a larger interdisciplinary theory, in which modularity of mind (and the potential for inconsistencies between the modules’ information) comes together with the importance of indeterminacy in literary theory and the philosophical scepticism that animates .
      Being cognitively responsibly for Spolsky, then, means assessing the available scholarship and any other evidence you can handle, and making a committing decision. In her work this releases a lot of energy. For me, though, being responsible seems to require being prudent (or do I just mean wary or non-committal?). Cognitive science is a changing discipline with many schools and factions arguing their corners. I don’t feel qualified to arbitrate much of the time. Some take modularity to an extreme – the appealingly named ‘’. Others might emphasise interactions between systems that are more than the sum of their parts, with the links in a network being as characteristic and crucial as the nodes.

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The role of hindsight is unclear. After another 18 years Spolsky’s commitment may appear to have been a better or worse call, but does that really make it a wise strategy or not? My solution is to engage with emerging ideas but (whenever I remember) to futureproof what I say about cognitive science – to allow for the possibility that the orthodox view may or may not change. In hedging my bets I am trying to be true to the contours of another discipline as they apply now and at other times. But it may make it harder to create the kind of energetic synthesis Spolsky achieves in her essay. After all, I did just attend a conference that was partly inspired – via Guillemette Bolens – by her work.