Literary Brains: Neuroscience, Criticism, and Theory

Abstract

The "neurohumanities" are largely traditional fields of humanistic study -prominently including literature and related arts, such as film -that have taken up findings or methods of neuroscience to advance their research. Despite some (perhaps premature) media attention (see, for example, Quart), the body of work in neurohumanities is limited. It is therefore probably too early to undertake a survey of research in neuroscientific literary criticism and theory. However, there is considerable interest among literary scholars in the possibilities for such criticism and theory, and there are many areas of neuroscientific research that have begun to be incorporated into literary study or are likely to do so in the near future. The following essay first overviews some basic principles of neuroscience, selecting aspects of neuroscientific research that are particularly germane to literary study. It then considers the main tasks of literary criticism and theory and some of the ways in which neuroscience bears on those tasks. The essay ends with a brief comment on the relation between literary study that draws on neuroscience and neuroscience that takes literature as its object.In recent years, there has been growing interest in neuroscientific approaches to literary and other forms of humanistic study. To this point, concrete work in neurohumanities has been limited. Thus, Paul Armstrong chides literary researchers -including cognitive literary critics -for their lack of "serious engagement with neurobiology" (xiii). Much of the work that has been done falls into the broad category of what we might call "correlational criticism," which is often the initial phase of a new theoretical approach to literary analysis. In correlational criticism, the critic takes some theory -whether deconstruction or neuroscience -and finds parallels for its elements and principles in literature (e.g., Proust's treatment of memory might be seen as anticipating that of some neuroscientists, as in Lehrer's widely read book). Nonetheless, it seems clear that there are many promising research programs opening up in neurohumanities that go well beyond correlational criticism. These will undoubtedly develop much further in the coming years. The following essay aims to introduce some of these openings.Before going on to discuss the relations between neuroscience and the humanities, however, we need to be familiar with some basic principles of neuroscience. Thus, the first section of the following essay sets out to orient readers with respect to the anatomy and function of the human brain. Such an orientation is necessarily highly selective. I have chosen those aspects of neuroanatomy and cerebral function that bear particularly on the following discussions of literature. The second section addresses specific areas of literary study that currently are benefiting from neuroscience or that promise to do so, illustrating some of these points with examples from Shakespeare. The final section addresses the practical issue of the extent to which lit...

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