Special Feature: "Consciousness and Literature"
Edited by Roberta Tucker

Roberta Tucker
Editorial Introduction: Disorientation, Reorientation, A Compulsion to Explain    full text
Julie Kane
Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language  abstract
Reuven Tsur
Visual and Auditory Ingenuities in Mystic Poetry   abstract
Ellen Esrock
Embodying Literature    abstract
Mark Turner
The Origin of Selkies    abstract
Patrick Colm Hogan
Literature, God, and the Unbearable Solitude of Consciousness   abstract
Brad Sullivan
Romantic Poets, Natural Philosophers, and Early Explorations of the Embodied Mind (Review Article)    abstract
Thomas R. Smith
Narrative and Consciousness (Review Article)   abstract

REGULAR BOOK REVIEW SECTION   full text

Anthony Freeman
The Chinese Room Come of Age (Review of Views Into the Chinese Room, ed. J. Preston & M. Bishop)
Robert I. Damper
The Chinese Room Argument: Dead but not yet Buried
Gary Fuhrman
Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness
Alwyn Scott
Vincent Walsh & Alvardo Pascual-Leone, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Bill Faw
Pierre Jacob & Marc Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing
Julian Candy
The Dalai Lama, Stages of Meditation
Alan Wallace, Choosing Reality
Michele Martin, Music in the Sky
Justus de Swart
Paula Droege, Caging the Beast
Clare McNiven
James H. Fetzer (ed.), Consciousness Evolving
John McCrone
John N. Findlay & Iain D. Gilchrist, Active Vision
Greg Nixon
Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind
Peter Howorth
Bill Fulford et al. (ed.), Nature and Narrative
David W. Salt
David Herman, ed., Narrative Theory and Cognitive Sciences
Alwyn Scott
Eric B. Baum, What Is Thought?

POEM

William Irwin Thompson
To Evan

 

TEN YEAR CUMULATIVE INDEX

Ten Year Index of Authors
Ten Year Index of Titles

ABSTRACTS

Ellen J. Esrock

Embodying Literature

Walt Disney’s movie, The Pagemaster (1994) begins on a dark and stormy night, with a young boy stumbling into an immense, gothic-styled library for refuge from the rain. Once inside, he is soon carried away by a tumultuous river of coloured paints, transformed into an animated characterization of himself, and thrust into an animated world of literature, where he battles Captain Hook, flees Moby Dick, and participates in other classic tales of adventure, horror, and fantasy.

Adults might understand the film as a fanciful description of how they feel when reading a lively book. Although they would probably not imagine themselves tagging along with the animated characters like a 4th musketeer, they might very well claim that they enter a fiction through the viewpoint of one or more of the characters, experiencing, imaginatively, mental images of the sights, sounds, smells, and movements that the character would experience. Under this description, the reader would be forming multi-modal images that would correspond directly to what the literary characters are doing, thinking, and experiencing. When a fictional hero whips out his sword and slashes a rope in half, the reader might form a visual image of the hero’s determined face, an auditory image of the sound of the whizzing sword, and a motor image of an extended arm movement. I call such an imitative participation, by use of mental images in any modality, a simulation.

I suggest that this imitative experiencing of a fiction through the production of multi-modal imagery — a simulation — is not the only way in which readers might engage a literary text. In this paper I explore the hypothesis that readers might use their own bodily processes — those of the somato-viscero-motor system (SVM) for a non-imitative activity that I call a reinterpretation and that the reinterpretation might make a distinctive contribution to the reading process. As an example of a simulation and a reinterpretation, take the SVM experience of the reader’s breathing. A simulation would occur if the text describes a character who is taking deep breaths of air and the reader creates a mental image representing the experience of breathing. In this case, the reader’s mental image of breathing would stand for a property of the literary work — the fictional experience of breathing.

By contrast to the simulation, a reinterpretation would occur if the text describes a character who is gazing at long, wispy clouds that extend outward from a horizon and the reader uses his own experience of breathing to stand for the visual sense of looking at a long, continuous expanse of filmy white: the reader’s actual breathing would stand for a property of the literary work — the fictional experience of seeing. Breathing is not the same as seeing. This should help clarify the following definition.

I hypothesize that a reinterpretation occurs when the reader becomes aware of some component of the SVM system and reinterprets it as a property of the literary work that is not the same as that particular SVM process. The SVM experience is projected into the literary work.

Correspondence: Ellen J. Esrock, Department of Language, Literature, and Communication, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180. USA. Email: esroce@rpi.edu

Patrick Colm Hogan

Literature, God, & the Unbearable Solitude of Consciousness

One of the primary and most consequential properties of consciousness is that it is absolutely isolated. One’s consciousness cannot be shared by anyone else. Self-consciousness about this condition can give rise to a debilitating sense of loneliness. One important task of culture is to manage this sense of loneliness, to defer and diminish it. Religion supplies ideas that function in this way. Literature supplies imaginative experiences to the same ends.

After introducing the general topic through a literary example, the paper takes up the problem of other minds and solipsism, considering aspects of the issue treated by Wittgenstein, Moore, Heidegger and Descartes. The possibility of solipsism both demonstrates and results from the unbridgeable  isolation of consciousness. The second section turns to the mind/body relation. It argues that intentionality is irreducible to a purely physical explanatory account. This is not because the mind is a brain-like entity that interacts with the body. Rather, it is because any physical explanatory account presupposes an observer or speaker outside the system being observed or described. The irreducibility of that observer is, so to speak, the flip side of solipsism. The unobserved observer is, precisely, each one of us. Each of us is removed in just this way from the world he/she is perceiving and addressing — hence, our isolation. The third section turns to the varieties of loneliness — here called ‘longing’, ‘grief’ and ‘despair’ — relating these to the inevitability of death, primarily the death of others. The fourth part takes up the feeling that makes loneliness intense, love. It goes on to consider the thematization of loneliness in the most common narrative structure cross-culturally, romantic tragi-comedy. The concluding sections examine the ways in which religion and literature serve not only to represent loneliness, but, what is more important,  to inhibit or manage it.

Correspondence: Patrick Colm Hogan, Dept of English and Program in Cognitive Science, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, USA. Email: Ahimsadasa@cs.com

Julie Kane

Poetry As Right-Hemispheric Language

The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, right and left, that are joined by a thick ‘cable’ of neural fibres called the corpus callosum. It has long been observed that injury to the left hemisphere in the average adult damages speech, speech comprehension, and reading, and causes paralysis on the right side of the body. Injury to the right hemisphere, on the other hand, seems to leave linguistic capabilities intact, but causes paralysis on the left side of the body. These observations have given rise to the twin concepts of contralaterality of hemispheric control (i.e., that each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body) and cognitive specialization of hemispheric function. As far back as the nineteenth century, it was recognized that the left hemisphere’s specialty was language. Pioneering British neurologist John Hughlings Jackson asserted in 1868 that the left hemisphere was the ‘leading side’ in most people, responsible for the control of speech and will. In the decade of the 1940s, French neurologist Henry Hécaen and British psychologist Oliver Zangwill demonstrated that the right hemisphere, far from being passive, controlled visuospatial processing (Benton, 1991).

Particularly in the decade of the 1970s, mass market publications popularized the notion of the left brain as the processor of language and rational thought and the right brain as the processor of visuospatial images and holistic or intuitive awareness. Hippies and artists were believed to be ‘right brain’ in orientation, while engineers and businessmen were believed to be ‘left’. Indeed, the rather overly enthusiastic adoption of early laterality findings by western popular culture (exemplified by brain dominance quizzes on newspaper feature pages and the advertising of Saab automobiles as ‘a car for both sides of your brain’) made the whole subject seem rather oversimplified and absurd, and no doubt helped to blind the general public to an awareness of the implications of later research findings in the field of cerebral laterality.

Today it is known that, in about 97 per cent of all right-handed adults, the left hemisphere is dominant for language (Pinker, 1994). Even among the left- handed population, the great majority, 69 per cent, process language in their left hemispheres, like right-handers (Pinker, 1994). Moreover, the sharply increased rates of neurological deficits such as mental retardation, autism, stuttering, dyslexia, and epilepsy among left-handed individuals (Iaccino, 1993) would make it seem even more apparent that left-hemispheric language is the ‘norm’ and right-hemispheric language a deviation from that norm. The isolated left hemisphere scores in the normal range on standardized tests of verbal intelligence (Gazzaniga and LeDoux, 1978). Only the left hemisphere possesses the complete lexicon and rules of syntax (Zaidel, 1983). Right- but not left-hemisphere-damaged patients, one group of researchers remarked, ‘seldom have difficulties with phonology, syntax, or semantics, and will carry on a conversation which at first glance seems normal’ (Benowitz et al., 1990). It would seem that the evidence for the left hemisphere as the ‘seat of language’ is indisputable. Or is it?

Not at all. Because, over time, evidence has been mounting to show that the right hemisphere controls, or is capable of controlling on its own, a number of very subtle but intriguing ‘linguistic’ functions (Van Lancker, 1997) which, this paper will attempt to argue, are virtually synonymous with ‘poetry’ or ‘poetic’ speech. Indeed, one could assert that the degree of right-hemispheric involvement in language is what differentiates ‘poetic’ or ‘literary’ from ‘referential’ or ‘technical’ speech and texts.

In the following pages, each of the major literary devices characteristic of ‘poetry’ will be shown to be either dependent upon the right hemisphere for comprehension/production, or capable of being processed by the right hemisphere as well as by the left. Definitions of the linguistic features characterizing ‘poetry’ and examples of their usage in actual poems will be drawn from John Frederick Nims’ lucid introduction to the subject for college students, Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (2000), now in its fourth edition, supplemented where appropriate by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan’s more technical New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993). Following the presentation of neurological evidence for poetry as ‘right-hemispheric language’, the question of why poets, in particular, produce language so rich in right-hemispheric content will be addressed and possible answers proposed.

Correspondence: Dr. Julie Kane, Department of Language and Communication, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA 71497, USA. Email: kanej@nsula.edu

Thomas R. Smith

Narrative and Consciousness (Review Article)

This volume of eleven related essays investigates questions about the relationship of narrative and consciousness from several disciplinary points of view, among them psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and literary studies. Showing the strengths of such interdisciplinarity is the editors’ goal, which is, they write, ‘to challenge the conventional wisdom by presenting information that cuts across conceptual levels and disciplines’ (p. 6). The book may be said to embody the wide-ranging interests of one of the editors, Owen Flanagan, who at Duke University holds appointments in philosophy, experimental psychology, neurobiology, and literature. The editors as a group seek in the book to reconceptualize relations between disciplines, elegantly developing a contrast between the metaphor of the archipelago, suggesting both separation and connection, and islands, emphasizing mutual isolation. Reading the book demonstrates their wisdom in adopting this metaphor, since the essays’ arrangement allows one to move easily from one set of disciplinary assumptions to another.

Correspondence: Thomas R. Smith, Department of English, Penn State University, 1600 Woodland Rd., Abington, PA 19001, USA. Email: trs8@psu.edu

Brad Sullivan

Romantic Poets, Natural Philosophers, and Early Explorations of the Embodied Mind (Review Article)

Alan Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind charts the cross-fertilization of ideas and models concerning brain-based psychology that occurred between the domains of literature and science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this exciting book, Richardson deftly interweaves history of science founded on the primary writings of — and historical records concerning — important natural philosophers (the term ‘scientist’ would not be coined until the 1840s) of the period; cultural history founded on reviews and commentary in major journals of the time; comparative science founded on broad and intelligent engagement with contemporary scientists and philosophers of mind; and literary criticism founded on a broad awareness of scientific and cultural trends. The interweaving illustrates, and is fueled by, the spirit of cross-fertilization between the domains of science and literature that was still very much alive in the early 1800s. And Richardson’s work suggests, even as it argues convincingly with its own considerable successes, that we would do well to engage more fully in such cross-fertilization in the early twenty-first century.

Correspondence: Brad Sullivan, Western New England College, Box 5249, 1215 Wilbraham Road, Springfield, MA 01119, USA. Email: dsulliva@wnec.edu

Reuven Tsur

Some Mannerist Ingenuities in Mystic Poetry

One of the central assumptions of the present study is that mystic or religious poetry not just formulates mystic or religious ideas: it somehow converts theological ideas into religious experience, by verbal means. It somehow seems to reach the less rational layers of the mind by some drastic interference with the smooth functioning of the cognitive system, or by a quite smooth regression from ‘ordinary consciousness’ to some ‘altered state of consciousness’. In this way, the experience is affected not only by its contents, but also by the perceived quality of the structure of the underlying mental process. This brings us to recognize that mystic or religious poetry is sometimes of vastly different styles. In my book (Tsur 2003) I distinguish between two prototypes of such styles, those that are based on drastic and on smooth interference, respectively. The present article will examine poems based on a very special kind of drastic disruption, of which George Herbert was the grand master. This prototype uses typographic schemes for disruptions in orientation, activating mechanisms of prelinguistic babbling, delaying connection of signifiers with the signified, and transcending distinctions to go to unity.  Also looked at will be psychological and social defenses against these disruptions as well as ways to overcome those defenses.
 In this article I will consider the relationship between mystic poetry and what Willie van Peer calls ‘typographic foregrounding’. In this relationship, I will suggest, both mystic and aesthetic principles are involved.

Correspondence: Reuven Tsur, The Katz Research Institute for Hebrew Literature, The Rosenberg School for Jewish Studies, Tel Aviv University, 69987, Israel. Email: tsurxx@post.tau.ac.il

Mark Turner

The Origin of Selkies

[Introduction] Cognitively modern human beings have language, art, science, religion, refined tool use, advanced music and dance, fashions of dress, and mathematics. Blue jays, border collies, dolphins, and bonobos do not. Only human beings have what we have, and this discontinuity in Life, this perspicuous Grand Difference, presents us with the most abiding and compelling scientific riddle of all.
 In The Way We Think, Gilles Fauconnier and I put forward the hypothesis that The Grand Difference arose in the following way (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002). The basic mental operation of conceptual integration, also known as ‘blending’, has been present and evolving in various species for a long time, probably since early mammals, and there is no reason to doubt that many mammalian species aside from human beings have the ability to execute rudimentary forms of conceptual integration. Human beings evolved not an entirely different kind of mind, but instead the capacity for the strongest form of conceptual integration, known as ‘double-scope’ blending. Human beings are thus on a gradient with other species, but what a difference an extra step makes. Double-scope blending is the hallmark of cognitively modern human beings, and The Grand Difference is the product of double-scope blending.

What is blending and why is it so important? (Technical introductions to the nature and mechanisms of blending can be found in Fauconnier and Turner, 1998; 2002; Fauconnier, 1997; Turner, 2001; 2003; see also Goguen, 1999.) As an illustration, consider our perception of a seal. The eyes of a seal are remarkably like the eyes of a human being. When we see a seal at the seashore, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that we and the seal share a category. Compelling and evident analogies leap out at us, between the seal’s appearance and ours, between the seal’s motion and ours. Our human eyes align toward an object as our limbs propel our bodies toward it, and it seems to be no different for the seal.

Working from such analogies, we immediately forge a mental blend of ourselves and the seal. The result is a conception of a seal that has not only all of the seal’s appearance and motion but additionally a feature we know only of ourselves — the possession of a mind . . .

Correspondence: Email: mark.turner@case.edu

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