Schema Criticism: Literature, Cognitive Science, and Social Change

Abstract

This article develops a new critical methodology, called schema criticism, for promoting social justice. Traditional methods of social criticism, including ideology critique and Foucauldian analysis, often fail to correct the faulty and harmful assessments of other people that underlie the punitive, violent, and counterproductive social policies, institutions, and structures that are dominant today. This is because such methods fail to alter certain deep cognitive structures that cognitive science has revealed to be responsible for these faulty judgments. These structures are cognitive schemas, which are composed of several types of knowledge—including exemplars, prototypes, and information-processing routines—each of which includes multiple forms or components. Such schemas cannot be deactivated simply by evidence and arguments that disprove them, but research in the field of schema therapy reveals that they can be corrected by engaging in cognitive activities of the sort that literary study is well positioned to provide.

The Hunger Games: Theorizing opportunities for peace education.

“…Such “empathetic crossings” can happen through reading and critical, collaborative reflection, she claims. Cognitive schema studies have shown that being introduced to “fictional exemplars” can shift people’s beliefs about real people in similar roles (Bracher, 2013). Protest novels “can engage readers in precisely the sorts of cognitive activities that have been found to correct faulty social information processing” (Bracher, 2013, p.17).…”

“…Cognitive schema studies have shown that being introduced to “fictional exemplars” can shift people’s beliefs about real people in similar roles (Bracher, 2013). Protest novels “can engage readers in precisely the sorts of cognitive activities that have been found to correct faulty social information processing” (Bracher, 2013, p.17). Bracher argues that such literature “constitutes radical cognitive politics, a mode of intervention that works to promote social justice by altering the cognitive roots of harmful and unjust social policies” (p. 31).…”

Reading the “Outsider Within”: Counter-Narratives of Human Rights in Black Women’s Fiction

“…Cristina Bruns posits that through collaboration and critical reflection, students are able to "produce the knowledge themselves through what they notice in one another's readings with the facilitation of the instructor, and they experience its value as a means of enriching their own encounters with the literary texts under discussion" (2011,137). In this way, students are able to make explicit connections between what they have learned about human rights vis-à-vis counter-narratives that correct their faulty cognitive schemas (Bracher 2013) regarding women's rights, social justice, and rights-based discourses promoted and controlled by Western nations.…”

“…In a former issue of Radical Teacher, Nick Hengen Fox argues that "how we teach texts may matter more" than "what we teach in literature courses" (2012, 22, author's emphases). But what Fox fails to consider is the impact that literary counter-narratives have on shaping students' world-views, especially the way in which literature can reshape students' cognitive schemas (Bracher 2013). Kanishka Chowdhury posits that a literary text must be studied within "its sociocultural politics" (1992,192).…”

“…Patriotic education also reproduces stereotypical images of foreign nations that has a profound influence on how students construct cognitive schemas of racialized women in post-colonial contexts (Bracher 2013). In the post-9/11 era, the "woman question" becomes even more salient as a cause for war in attempts to rescue "brown women from brown men" (Spivak 1995) in Afghanistan.…”