Cognitive Poetics

Cognitive Poetics
Ellen Spolsky
Subject: Literary Theory Online Publication Date: Jun 2020
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.968

Summary and Keywords

Northrup Frye expressed a scholarly impatience with what seemed to him the inconse­
quentiality of literary study, asking if criticism might provide “a coordinating principle, a
central hypothesis, which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena
it deals with as parts of a whole" (1957). Cognitive literary theory did not actually answer
to Frye’s scientism until almost fifty years later, and when it did, it moved quickly in many
directions. But it did not (and still has not) coalesced into a unified theory. The vigor and
excitement of the field derive from its openness to many different areas of brain science,
the wide reach of its attention to so many varieties of works of imagination—their produc­
tion, their reception, and their history— and its resistance to a centralizing dogma. In her
introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Lisa Zunshine, scholar
in the field and its best historian, describes cognitive literary critics as working “not to­
ward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoreti­
cal paradigms in literary and cultural studies" (2015). Scholars from most traditional hu­
manities fields: philosophers (both analytical and phenomenological and philosophers of
mind and of language), cultural, literary, and art historians, literary critics and linguists,
for example, and social scientists as well (anthropologists, archaeologists, and etholo­
gists), have found the various fields of brain science to offer new perspectives on some
persistent questions. Studies by developmental psychologists have made major contribu­
tions. And as brain imaging has become more powerful and widely used, the hypotheses
of neurophysiologists and neurobiologists have come into the picture. Evolutionary biolo­
gy has made perhaps the largest contribution by providing the overriding argument in the
field—namely that human potential, individual behavior, and group dynamics can be stud­
ied as emerging phenomena. This begins with bodies that have over the millennia grown
into worlds in which competition and cooperation have built and continue to build cultur­
al life.

Keywords: fiction, embodiment, fit, relationality, social contracts, mirror neurons, evolution of culture, play, Theo­
ry of Mind, genres

Play has at least as many meanings as Wittgenstein found for games, but playing around
excludes some of them. Playing around is spontaneous and not strongly goal directed, if
at all. It doesn’t require concentration and is relatively stress free. One might play around
with a small unfamiliar object but playing around does not need an object; it can be day-
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Cognitive Poetics

dreaming, or mind-wandering.1 While in the playing around mode, one might be cheerful
or just calm, waiting for something unknown but unthreatening to reveal itself. In part be­
cause playing around seems to be only weakly restrained, intrinsically satisfying, and re­
quiring no external reward to motivate it, it has long been thought to describe the experi­
ence of the pleasure derived from the arts as entertainment. An analogy with the
ephemerality of pleasure, however, should not distract from ongoing attempts in biology,
social science, and the humanities to account for the enduring value of play and art. The
question is still alive: when we play with fictions what work is done that can explain its
ubiquity in a world where human survival and flourishing is not child’s play?

Cognitive literary scholars, from evolutionary and biological perspectives, have been ask­
ing what it is about the many forms of creative acts that would have made them worth the
expenditure of energy and attention of artists audiences in early human history. Wouldn’t
it have been better to study which mushrooms are poisonous than to chant and dance, re­
late the adventures of impossible monsters, contrive rhymes, or paint faces? There must
have been a trade-off between calories spent for survival, such as in hunting, and those
invested in playing around. How is playing expedient action? Where is its value?2
Anthropologists talk about the four f’s—feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating.
Scherazade’s contrivance suggests a fifth f: survival by fiction (i.e., storytelling). The
king, like the rest of us, wants to know what happens next. The argument here is that hu­
man survival indeed feeds on our hunger for prediction, and that the kinds of playing
around that produce and consume works of art and fiction are part of the unremitting ef­
fort to find the needed nourishment. If creating and audiencing fictions and arts are uni­
versal, it has to be because somehow they are no less self-preserving than eating or rais­
ing an arm to ward off a blow.3 Although the rules for deriving usable truths in and from
fictions are always culturally specific, everyone does it. All groups produce, appreciate,
and encourage members to infer meaning from a variety of forms of elaborated activities
such as narrating, dancing, or painting. Everywhere, the performances of art form a con­
tinuum with the rest of life; works of imagination rely on the same human brain, the same
neuronal powers that subserve the other aspects of cognition, all having evolved to pre­
pare people for future action by predicting what will be needed. Converging theoretical
claims and empirical evidence are beginning to demonstrate how fiction boosts the
prospects of survival by prediction. And it is the freedom of playing around that under­
writes its predictive power.

In their search for evidence that creative texts can indeed make a difference to the sur­
vival of individuals and groups, cognitive literary scholars have taken a range of interdis­
ciplinary paths. Liza Zunshine’s Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies is a good
survey of many of these.4 Although they take many directions, all share a commitment to
the recognition of the embodiment of cognition.5 With some variation, we use the concept
of embodiment and the complementary notion of fit as we try to articulate what it is about
fiction that warrants a claim for its value beyond its evanescent pleasure. In this, cogni­
tive literary theorists join other students of culture in recognizing that early singers of
tales were acting; that is, they were using their bodies, including the body parts inside

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Cognitive Poetics

the skull just as hunters, sculptors, and drummers would. Mark Johnson describes the
linkage:

In order to have human meaning, you need a human brain, operating in a living
body, continually interacting with a human environment that is at once physical,
social, and cultural. Take away any one of these three dimensions, and you lose
the possibility of meaning: no brain, no meaning; no body, no meaning; no environ­
ment, no meaning.6

Assuming this dynamic and multidirectional interchange, cognitive literary theorists rec­
ognize what Susan Oyama calls the process of “constructivist interactionism.”7 People
have evolved their many cultures in a dynamic of need and possibility. Human life is not
unidirectionally reactive but circularly regenerative. Homeostatic processes sense imbal­
ances, make repairs, and improvise adaptive improvements—stopping only at death.

Literature and the plastic arts play out in similar circularity, according to genre contracts
that evolve within groups. Since meaning must be shared to be functional, the rules that
guide the production and understanding of creative work are constructed and revised by
communal and public negotiation. People not only infer, or symbolize, not only make infer­
ences and understand indirection, they also communicate inferences and inscribe them
for others and for future others to consider. Meaning relations that are given material
form as sentences, laws, rituals, equations, poems, and pictures are available for our con­
tinued consideration, and also to others, for reflection, elaboration, and revision. There is
no need to start from scratch; in every generation, speaking and writing, we build texts
and pictures into libraries and museums that in turn encourage the production of more
texts and pictures. Here is Andy Clark, describing the compounding interest of cultural
cognitive achievement:

Courtesy of all that material public vehicling in spoken words, written texts, diagrams,
and pictures, our best predictive models of the world (unlike those of other creatures)
have thus become stable, reinspectable objects apt for public critique and systematic,
multi-agent, multi-generational test and refinement.8

But embodiment is also vulnerability. Human survival depends on fitting within a common
environment no less than animal survival does. Herbert Spencer was the first to use the
phrase, “survival of the fittest,” to describe Darwin’s theory of natural selection.9 A
longer formulation is now required: The evolutionary success of a group depends on its
being able to learn to cooperate sufficiently so as to manage its environment and to adapt
as it changes. And the group must pass on that knowledge. Humans have evolved, in
short, to build and live in cultures.10 Kin groups build these cultures, over time, as a set
of mostly unarticulated agreements that guide expectations and beliefs.

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Cognitive Poetics

Genres as Social Contracts: Encouraging Fit,

With Flexibility
The genres of storytelling, in their diversity, can be thought of as social contracts that
function in ways parallel to those of language, law, kinship, religion, and money.11 Each is
a set of rule-guided abstractions encouraging a shared playing around within tractable
but recognizable bounds. Each has developed a way of contributing to the building of cul­
ture, of helping people to fit together sufficiently and maintain the species. New genres
are easily constructed for new purposes. This is a cognitive (if clunky) way of restating
Horace’s recognition that poetry both pleases and instructs. Both assert not only that
pleasure makes the learning go down easy, but that we experience learning as a pleasure
because it is good for us. Recent descriptions of the advantages of playing around have
been articulated by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser, and Jacques Derrida, among
others. In their demonstrations of the dependence of meaning on its fit in context, the de­
constructionist critics of the late 20th century seemed to be courting a dangerous indif­
ference to truth. Indeed, their recognition of the impossibility of locking in a literal mean­
ing for any word or text seemed, to some, to produce a pyrrhonist skepticism, as in
Montaigne’s “Que sais-je?”12 What may seem like danger, however, actually provides the
plasticity necessary to any dynamic system, biological or cultural, to both stabilize itself
in context and adapt when the context changes. We are well served by the flexibility and
relationality of words. We are satisfied when a fit is found; as from a satisfying meal or
sexual pleasure. Fit or appropriateness, rather than truth or falsity, is often the more use­
ful way of describing large swathes of human meaning and performance.13 It is often (not
always) the case that the truth of something doesn’t matter as much as its being the right
action or representation in the right time and place.

J. L. Austin used the adjectives “felicitous” and “infelicitous” rather than true or false to
describe the distinction most important to cooperative conversation.14 Speech acts are fe­
licitous within the context and among the speakers for whom the conventions of language
provide support. They are meaningful as they are situated and only as such can they be
judged as cooperative, appropriate, and effective (or not). In the face of this apparent
abandonment of truth, some literary scholars argued that a turn to empirical science
would strengthen the claims of literary studies to be a serious business.15 This claim,
however, is undermined by the scientists themselves who have been uncovering and de­
scribing the importance of fit to function in context. Biology, neurobiology, and the vari­
ous branches of psychology that depend on them, have been demonstrating the many
ways in which life sustains itself through the play of interrelationality.

Fitting in for survival emerges as error tolerance and correctability. Organisms must be
able to recognize a problem and adapt, to separate what is important in the context from
what is not; then they must act to influence the environment. Using its own processes to
survive and reproduce, life is an open and an ecological system, able to make use of what
is outside itself. Success is optimal fit, often achieved as a result of serendipitous random
mutation or play.16 At all levels of description, living communities thrive when playing

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Cognitive Poetics

around is allowed to produce just what’s needed to encourage the emergence of a config­
uration that can critique and enhance current understanding and practice. The claim,
then, for the theoretical power of a biological understanding of the notion of embodiment
and fit within a cognitive literary criticism is that it answers the worry that skepticism
closes down inquiry by displaying the value of ambiguity. The abstract uncertainty of lan­
guage, including the language of science and philosophy, is shown to emerge from a bio­
logical grounding that, at many levels, keeps life going under both constructivist and de­
constructionist descriptions by being open to corrective, adaptive, re-use. Furthermore,
the claim goes both ways. The recognition of the part that imaginative, indeed fictional,
work contributes to the stability of social groups and to the group’s ability to adapt to
changing circumstances contributes a human perspective to the biological and social sci­
entific view of cultural life. Cognitive literary theorists are working to make these various
levels of investigation fit together. Recognizing our overwhelming need for reliable ac­
counts of the future, brain scientists have caught up with the poet, Sir Philip Sidney, who
begins his Arcadia of 1580 describing his protagonist, Basilius, as vainly “desirous to
know the certainty of things to come, wherein there is nothing so certain as our continual
uncertainty.”17 We have been learning that the brain itself not only affords but guarantees
the cognitive creativity of prediction out of the uncertainty that Basilius bemoans. We
now call it serendipitous plasticity and recognize its connection to play.18

Play: Learning About Uncertainty and Coping

With It
Gregory Bateson described the play of puppies as a metacommunication within a frame­
work agreement: animals at play apparently signal each other at the start that no harm is
intended. Bateson saw this signaling as analogous to other kinds of symbol use, for exam­
ple, metaphor. More recent hypotheses about the uses of play, as surveyed by Gordon
Burghardt, suggest that children’s play trains resiliency and flexibility and that adult play
keeps up competence.19 Paul L. Harris’s review of studies of children’s imagination em­
phasizes the importance of pretend play as children learn to distinguish and use counter­
factual alternatives.20 Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin, having studied animals and hu­
mans at play, argue that the activity “is about breaking away from established patterns
and combining actions or thoughts in new ways. Playfully rearranging disparate ideas in­
to novel combinations is a powerful means of gaining new insights and opening up possi­
bilities.”21 Arguing for the adaptive value of art as play, Brian Boyd suggests that art
trains our brains in pattern recognition, and then the best of it produces “unpredictable
combination of patterns [that repay] intense attention and yield rich inferences.”22 Works
of imagination, on this view, using standard cognitive equipment, bridge gaps and uncer­
tainties with new hypotheses, presenting new patterns as possibilities. The provision of
alternatives contributes to the survival of the species by providing warning messages
about dangers and misfittings; playing around with the old and new alternatives, on this

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Cognitive Poetics

view, keeps the players in practice, ready to hone predictive powers and make apposite
adjustments.

Tracking metacognitive possibilities and recognizing the uncertainty of interpretation is

not a novel activity for literary scholars. Artists themselves often explicitly request that
their audiences acknowledge the play of possibilities. Varying values are often taught by
the texts themselves. Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest defends his fable of talking animals—Chanti­
cleer and the fox—citing the apostle Paul. Concluding, Chaucer has the priest admonish
his pilgrim audience:

Ye that holden this tale a folye,

As of a fox, or of a cok and hen,
Taketh the moralite, goode men.
For seint Paul seith that al that writen is,
To oure doctrine it is ywrite, ywis;
Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille.23

That the tellers of tales felt the need to remind their audiences that even an apparently
fantastic story can be fruitful is itself evidence that fictions do not immediately speak for
themselves. To put it sternly: if you want results, do some work. Conclusions reached are
not tightly restrained. Chaucer’s audiences hear three different morals following the
same events: one each from the Nun’s Priest, the fox, and Chauntecleer the cock.24

More recently, Elena Ferrante reminds her readers of the need to play. In the first of her
Neapolitan quartet, My Brilliant Friend, the narrator describes her own process of learn­
ing how stories work via the history of her friendship with Lila, joint protagonist, from the
time they were both children playing with dolls.25 In the first pages, she asserts that now
at the age of sixty-six she will tell “all the details of our story.” By the end of the fourth
book, The Story of the Lost Child, she has indeed told her story of becoming a writer. She
begins the last of the four books reiterating her hope that writing will bring clarity. “I
want to seek on the page a balance between her and me that in life I couldn’t find even
between myself and me.”26 By the end, she has, finally, found an image that makes the
story reflect on its own work. Her narrator-protagonist has just received in the mail,
anonymously, a package containing the two small dolls that had been hers and Lila’s—the
same dolls that were lost down a cellar grate early in their story.

I examined the two dolls carefully, I smelled the odor of mold, I arranged them against
the spines of my books. Seeing how cheap and ugly they were I felt confused. Unlike sto­
ries, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.27

In these last sentences she acknowledges the precariousness of the work of fiction.
Throughout, she has explicitly illustrated the importance of books and their power to
change the direction of individual lives: school books, library books, books lent or even
written by adults in their world, newspapers, periodicals, and also a story written by Lila
as a schoolgirl, which is valued differently by different characters. Not just the books but
literacy itself has helped her recover from her early painful childhood, as represented by
the disappearance of the dolls. Experienced readers of fiction recognize the power of
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Cognitive Poetics

closing lines as an author’s last offer of “moralite.” The recovered dolls, once beloved but
now seen as “cheap and ugly,” unsettle her adult trust in the power of her novel writing.
Postmodern writers, apparently, cannot be as certain as was Chaucer’s Priest of the value
of fictions.

The claim for fiction, nevertheless, from Chaucer to Ferrante, is that imagined stories
nourish our search for the invisible patterns that structure our social and material envi­
ronment and that reward consideration. Our cognitive systems are evolved, it seems, to
infer the meaning of signs—insubstantial, fictional as those signs may seem. They pro­
duce neural (i.e., chemical/electrical) reality: what else? We learn by indirections to find
directions out. Growing children in all cultures are taught by example and explicitly how
to produce the kinds of meaning valued by their elders. But if they are to use what they
learn predictively, they must also learn that the words and actions of others can be mis­
leading and that they must judge the trustworthiness of sources.28 In complex texts for
adult readers, inferring the lies beneath the fictions—the inaccuracies, irrelevancies, or
deceptions—is crucial to the value and the pleasure the text provides.

What Does Cognitive Literary Study Add?

Even though few cognitive literary scholars actually work in labs, we have added several
additional levels to the investigation of how these various aspects of metacognition get
done and how readers play with fictions to uncover intentions, judge deception, and as­
sess reliability.29 Learning from cognitive philosophers, evolutionary anthropologists, and
brain scientists, we have found some new cognitive/phenomenological and neurological
perspectives. It has been possible to add another level of analysis, derived from work on
the neurophysiology of brain processes and connectivity, to the work of developmental
psychologists on children’s growth in understanding others, in particular to their studies
of how making meaning varies among heterogeneous readers and audiences. My example
here concerns the process of inference, an activity so fundamental, as Hugh Mercier and
Dan Sperber have recently written, that people “cannot spend a minute of their waking
life without making inferences.”30 Their claim is that in spite of how the term inference is
used in logic, most inferencing is non-conscious and thus does not manipulate reasons in
a logical way. Based on a combination of gut feeling and past experience, it is hardly wa­
tertight, but it’s what we mostly use as a guide for ordinary behavior, for better or worse.

Necessitating and driving inference at all levels is what Andy Clark and Josefa Toribio call
“representation hungry problems.” Narratives and the allegories and metaphors within
them belong to a class of problems (challenges, riddles) that “involve reasoning about ab­
sent, non-existent, or counterfactual states of affairs.”31 They are difficult because the rel­
evant features are not open to surface inspection but must be inferred. If you are asked to
identify all the red objects in the room, your response might be uncomplicated. If, howev­
er, you are asked to identify all the valuable objects in the room, the relevant regularities
have to be inferred. Cognitive scientists take this ability to infer the unseen as so ax­
iomatic that it usually isn’t even mentioned. Language itself could not have evolved with­

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Cognitive Poetics

out the brain’s being able to recognize that a sound can stand for something not present
to sight or that may not exist; learning to read performs the same trick: marks on paper
stand for the sounds of a language we know. Linguists and anthropologists refer to this as
symbol use. In our discussion, symbol use is functionally the same as inferring, metaphor­
ing, and making use of fictions. They all rely on a brain operation that is indirect and inse­
cure but constantly needed and always turned on, and always, of course, working in a lim­
iting context.

The Constraints of Context

Cognitive literary theory can offer newly embodied insight into a situation that has al­
ways been recognized, namely that communities judge, often actually enforce, interpreta­
tions in ways that satisfy inherited ideas of acceptability. What is the story of Jonah
about? It’s about a man swallowed by a whale. But since its value cannot be to incite ac­
tion—no need to run down to the shore and help the sailors—we recognize it as represen­
tationally hungry. We search for its value in further abstraction, to be arrived at by infer­
ence. This searching is playing around, mind wandering of a sort that is not very strongly
restrained, looking for the catalyst that will turn the images into a reading acceptable to
local interpretive contracts. The rabbis of the Mishna provided several ways to read the
story of Jonah. One describes Jonah as a man who flees from God’s instructions but ends
by learning about God’s power and mercy, inferring further that God’s commandments
should be respected and obeyed. For another, the lesson is that repentance is always ac­
ceptable. The same inferential procedures, in a different population, produce a parable
that prefigures Jesus’s three days in the tomb, Jonah’s emergence from it alive being a
sign of Jesus’s promise of resurrection.32 Part of growing up into a culture is learning how
local contracts of interpretation nest within larger ones. Our human brains actually can’t
avoid making inferences about the intentions and beliefs of those who tell us stories, but
the elders within your community will let you know how they expect you to use them. And
with or even in rebellion against the guidance of communal models of interpretation, our
human minds produce interpretations of intention by making assumptions and guesses,
trying out patterns, and searching for representations that might satisfy. We make a lot of
mistakes. But for just that reason, we continue working at it.

Description at the Psychological Level

Cognitive developmental psychologists have been studying the ways people infer the be­
liefs, desires, intentions, emotions of other people under the headings of Theory of Mind
or mindreading.33 Because the hunger for clarity about the contents of other minds had
and has survival value, mindreading, as a default reaction to the words and actions of oth­
er people is one of the most important uses of our evolved ability to predict what is about
to happen around us. It is another way of talking about the brain’s search for the explana­
tory regularities we need to take account of, when direct evidence is not available, which
means—in the case of other people—almost always. Even very young children construct,

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Cognitive Poetics

evaluate, and navigate their social environment.34 Neurotypical children practice every­
day inferential processes not only on siblings and parents but on the characters in sto­
ries, even when they are animals (Peter Rabbit), stuffed toys (Hobbes), or machines
(Thomas the Tank Engine). Children’s stories, like adult narratives, are often built around
misunderstanding; like readers, characters within stories misread signals. Lisa Zunshine
described readers’ understanding of fictional characters as engaging their everyday The­
ory of Mind, including their ability to keep track not only of what characters think, be­
lieve, and intend, but how these fictional beings recognize (or not) and assess the beliefs
of the other characters as well.35

Description at the Neurophysiological Level

The hypotheses about Theory of Mind were enlivened in the last years of the 20th century
by discoveries by brain scientists. Working with macaque monkeys, researchers were sur­
prised to observe that the motor neurons activated during the monkeys’ performance of
an action are also activated when the same or similar action is merely observed in
others.36 They demonstrated that these same neurons, named mirror neurons, “map a
given motor content like “reach out,” “grasp,” or “hold” not only when controlling perfor­
mance, but also during perception when performed by someone else, when imitating it, or
when imagining performing it while being perfectly still.” This work provides, according
to Vittorio Gallese, nothing less than an empirically grounded notion of “intersubjectivi­
ty . . . as intercorporeality—the mutual resonance of intentionally meaningful sensorimo­
tor behaviors.” Some of these scientists have attempted, through further experimentation
with animals, to demonstrate that the mirror neuron system supports the understanding
of inference about the contents of other peoples’ minds as well.37 It certainly sounds like
the physiology of the mirror-neuron system might be what drives the Theory of Mind. But
since the empirical work that has been conducted thus far has been only on animals, fur­
ther empirical evidence will be needed. Help is available, in the meantime, from the pre­
dictive processing hypothesis.

Predictive Processing Hypotheses

The predictive processing hypothesis comes in several varieties, all of which attribute hu­
man survival to the neural attunement of behavior to future challenges and possibilities.38
People must make predictions allowing appropriate action, a large part of which must be
guessing the intentions of others. Lacking direct connectivity between minds, of course,
these intentions are rarely transparent. We learn early that it is a good idea to keep one’s
thoughts and beliefs to oneself, or even to lie about them. The cognitive system, however,
is always at work. Based on past regularities and estimates of the probability of their re­
currence, neural networks produce predictions from innate and grown connectivity
among sense receptors and processors at different internal levels of abstraction. The
present, however, is almost never exactly like the past, so that a system relying on old or
obsolescent information is regularly and predictably going to get things wrong. A mis­

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Cognitive Poetics

match between expectation and the current situation produces an error message, which
prompts a revised signal: that is, another attempt to bring the prediction into attunement
with the current stimulus. The system is continually predicting, judging, rejecting, and re­
constructing inferences on the basis of images and data from as many sources as are
available. Success is not measured by accurate representation but rather by the emer­
gence of a pattern that meets immediate needs for action.

The cognitive system takes new information and calibrates or calculates according to the
perceived strength of the prediction working to identify it. In biological terms, it is a
metabolic system; in computational terms, a Bayesian system, that “trades in probabilis­
tic predictions, inflected at every level by changing estimates of our own uncertainty.”39
In a physicist’s view (Schrödinger’s) brains make “order from disorder.”40 Each person
does this according to the experiences that have trained his or her brain; the world, then,
is

exploited, time and time again, to reduce the complexities of neural processing by
means of canny action routines that alter the problem-space for the embodied,
predictive brain . . . . [At the same time, the brain is learning] how to predict our
own evolving sensory states—states that are responding both to the body-in-action
and to the world. A good way to predict those changing sensory states is to learn
about the world (including our own body and actions) that is causing the changes.
The attempt to predict the play of sensory stimulation can thus itself be used grad­
ually to install the very models that will enable the predictions to succeed. The
prediction task . . . is thus a kind of ‘bootstrapping heaven.’41

Individual performance plays out differently, depending on the connectivity with other
neuronal systems, the strength of available neurotransmitters, and other aspects of the
internal environment such as available nourishment, but since the species has survived
(so far), the system is apparently good enough. Failures, error messages, and speedy self-
correction, rather than patient data collection and considered judgment, are the ingredi­
ents of successful brain work. The view of the brain as curator of a memory museum and
processor of perceptions gives way to a dynamic picture of a relationship between inter­
nal and external images/memories. Our past experience is a storehouse of reusable parts,
all available for further exploitation by reconnection.42 But it is the error messages that
drive the system. The closer the prediction is to the percept, the weaker the signal: thus,
the mismatches are what command attention. They are what provoke a search for some­
thing better. Epistemic success, on this view, depends on the surprise of an error mes­
sage, provoking a stronger signal and a revised response. It is error that is news—and
worth noticing.

Of further interest to us is the work of Rebecca Saxe at MIT. Working with Jorie Koster-
Hale, Saxe has sought the connection between mirror neurons and Theory of Mind. She
argues that since the internal models that provide the predictions are constructed out of
“the individual’s beliefs, personality traits, and social norms,” the speed of a satisfying re­
sponse to a stimulus, object, or person, then, is a measure not of universal value but of fit

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Cognitive Poetics

or attunement of the parties to the transaction.43 Attunement, here, is a complex state, in­
volving not only familiarity from past history but a current level of attention, arising from
interest and/or immediate need. It is hard to resist seeing this as a job description of a
19th-century novel: like the brain, the novel produces and manipulates available informa­
tion, adjusting and reassembling it in context for the desired outcome. The readers’ plea­
sure arises from the surprises, the news, the error messages.

Taken together, then, the entailments of both the psychological level and the neurological
level allow us to rethink an issue that has been recently contentious in literary theory, and
that is how much and what kind of attention should be paid to the intentions of artists and
writers. Although Basilius laments our failures to predict, we see wide agreement that we
predict constantly. The neurological work provides both a useful distinction and an impor­
tant link between the biology of bodies and the meaning of behavior. First, we see that
the neural circuits are the embodied platform on which the structure of our human inter­
communication with the world of objects and people has been built over the millennia of
evolution. The scientists identify the mirror neurons and the error messages as serving
the cognitive processes philosophers talk about as intentionality. Being able to separate
the physiology that underlies the process of inference from the second and separate is­
sue, namely, the ways in which various aspects of social evaluation makes use of that po­
tential gives us, as literary theorists, the advantage of being able to talk about their dif­
ferent claims on our attention.

How Does This Fit with Current Literary Theo­

ry and Criticism?
Cognitive literary theory offers an enlarged perspective on why it is that artists and audi­
ences are attentive to what is new and different. Picking up a pen, opening a book, or en­
tering a theater or a museum, one steps into a circle dance, holding out hands to others
already engaged, signaling an interest in further stimulation, and ready to adapt to find
satisfying attunement. We are ready to play: to convey or receive news. The analogy be­
tween a neurological error message and a surprisingly creative text, picture, or perfor­
mance is irresistible, and the parallelism is another demonstration that everyday cogni­
tive processes are not turned off for fiction, especially when the fiction is new, and may
be hard to understand. A social group that is provided with a constant supply of fictions
is, on this view, furnished with a constant supply of error messages, a to-do list of re­
arrangements to be considered. An echo is heard here of Karl Popper’s advice to make
the mistakes as fast as possible, and even of Aristotle’s explanation of our enjoyment of
tragedy and catharsis.

With so many kinds of fictional stimuli available, and so many different degrees of sur­
prise as ways of delivering news, it’s hard to understand what the argument could ever
be for restraining play by limiting one’s consideration to attempts to recover authorial in­
tention.44 But the answer, which has already been given, is that it is easy for us to meet
new forms of communication since our inference/intention antennae are always on the
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Cognitive Poetics

alert. But fiction offers more: additional meaning in metaphors and analogies, additional
depth in the story of Jonah or of the small dolls that have been returned. Why would one
say no when works of imagination offer the opportunity to play around with something
new? And since our human brains cannot help producing inferences of intentionality, as
literary historians we surely will continue to investigate the author’s loops of experience
and context. Here, too, however, we would be attending to something rather more com­
plex than the recovery of intention—something salient to our own current interest.

Consider, for example, the implications of literary critical assertions from the last quarter
of the 20th century, of our right to remain uninterested in the intentions of a faraway or
dead author. What if we consider them as error messages rather than as assertions? Ju­
dith Fetterley, in 1978, was one of the first readers to set childhood’s dolls on her book­
shelf, reconsidering the work of several canonical American authors.45 Women readers of
Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, James, Hemingway, Mailer, she observed, had taken base metal
for gold in agreeing that authorial intentions were determinative and had allowed these
authors’ images of passive, naïve, and foolish women to shape their own self-understand­
ing. They had put themselves in danger, thereby, and had indeed been damaged by their
reading instead of informed. Almost forty years before Zunshine and before Mercier and
Sperber published their claims about the mind’s constant, inevitable, but not necessarily
reasoned production of inference, Fetterley called on readers to notice the ease with
which they fell in line with these men, failing to resist them. Women’s interests, in
Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, for example, had not only been ignored but actually si­
lenced by death, such that the voice of the male protagonist—in her resisting reading–
could be preserved as the tragic hero. Fetterley was rapidly joined by others in noting
that the dangers of these assumptions were kept hidden by the failure to understand the
nature of the distinction between the neurological facility of inference making and their
culturally shaped content.

Developments in other communities of readers expanded these insights, describing the

danger of such suppressions. These biases had been taught, it was argued, and could be
unlearned: the distinctions between fruit and chaff aren’t universal or permanent.46
Recognizing that intentions are entangled with social agendas was more than half-way to­
ward recognizing what the neurology has documented, namely that even if indeed the po­
tential and the motive for discovering intentions are universals, there is a liberating dif­
ference between the evolved connectivity that contributes to the survival of the species
by producing an unending supply of predictive inferences and the cultural systems that
teach how to make them meaningful within a local context. Chaucer knew this. The con­
trast we need, then, is not between everyday language processing and a special kind of
understanding for imaginative work but rather a distinction between levels of processing
from different sources and sources that almost always connect insecurely. What appears
on a page of Pride and Prejudice as Elizabeth Bennet’s recognition of her mistaken as­
sessment of intentionality results from the connections and reconnections of an equally
wide array of sensory messages read as her own feelings and fed into a wide array of so­
cial signals, many of which ordinary language philosophers have described. The connec­
tivity being so complex and particular to each individual, it would be impossible for any
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Cognitive Poetics

such circuit, even though it emerges from common human biology, to be singular. It’s the
flexibility itself, including its uncertainty, that is so valuable. As infants and then as adult
readers we learn how to use what we’ve got to discover new patterns that will let us cope
with—maybe even welcome and enjoy new experiences and surprises—but also recognize
potential threats. As children we have learned that there are times and places—assigned
contexts that encourage the re-use and reconnection of current experience and the play­
ful exploration of new possibilities. On the alert for intimations of intentionality, we be­
come sensitive to potential realignment; we may like or dislike this one, accept or reject
that one. The cognitive perspective has provided a theoretically significant distinction be­
tween potential and performance. And it is the very gaps—the places for slippage be­
tween potentially connected parts—that afford the possibilities of creative realignment.

Conclusion
The answer to the question, then, of how playing around with fictions can animate and
encourage communal flourishing is that playing can provide creative disruption. The con­
tribution of cognitive literary theory is to expose the relations between the formal and
thematic interpretations of these works on the one hand, and on the other, the biological
analogues that support them. In the example of the predictive processing hypothesis, the
neurology distinguishes two aspects of inference: the potential and the cultural. This is a
difference that describes the turn among literary theorists on the issue of deference to
authorial intention. It provides a new description of how people manage the linkage
among individual minds, communal contracts, and creative texts. Cognitive hypotheses
describe the physiology that affords the loosening restraints on interpretive procedures
that cultural shifts have been encouraging.

In my own work, I have encouraged literary scholars to recognize evidence of useful dis­
ruption—one that signals hunger and initiates a metabolic response that affords a satisfy­
ing replenishment. Evidence of creative disruption is detectable throughout the history of
literary forms and popular taste. Understanding how brains meet and work with fictions,
we can ask how audiences including scholars and critics play around with Philip Roth’s
novels, Coen Brothers movies, Super Bowl advertisements, the mosaics in Ravenna,
Shakespeare’s sonnets, and an everyday run of political slogans, jokes and riddles, re-us­
ing them for current use—or not. At the same time, however, we surely notice that the
openness of fictions to playing around also underwrites their negative uses. We connect
here to the study of rhetoric with its awareness of the public power of patterned lan­
guage to persuade and propagandize by directing our making of inferences. Maybe we
need to keep looking in both directions at once.

Further Reading
Dissanayake, Ellen. Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began. Seattle: University of Wash­
ington Press, 2012.

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Cognitive Poetics

Jaén, Isabel, and Julien Jacques Simon, eds. Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes
and New Directions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012.

Kukkonen, Karin. A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Morgan Ben, Ellen Spolsky, and Sowon Park, eds., “Situated Cognition”: special issue of
Poetics Today 38, no. 2 (2017).

Polvinen, Merja. “Enactive Perception and Fictional Worlds.” The Cognitive Humanities:
Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture, 19–34. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Popova, Yanna B. Stories, Meaning, and Experience. Routledge, 2015.

Young, Kay. Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy. Colum­
bus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010.

Zunshine, Lisa, ed., Bibliography for Cognitive Literary and Cultural Studies, up­
dated regularly, on Academia. 2016.

Notes:

(1.) John Sutton, “Carelessness and Inattention: Mind-Wandering and the Physiology of
Fantasy from Locke to Hume,” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge, ed.
Charles Wolfe and Ofer Gal (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2010); and Paul Seli
et al., “Mind-Wandering as a Natural Kind: A Family-Resemblances View,” Trends in Cog­
nitive Sciences 22 (2018): 957–959.

(2.) See Ellen Dissanyake, What is Art For? (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1988); Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), answers the question from an evolu­
tionarily perspective; and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Why Fiction? (Lincoln: University of Ne­
braska Press, 2010, French original, 1999) is a philosophical narrative theory approach.

(3.) Ellen Spolsky, “How Do Audiences Act?” in Movement in Renaissance Literature: Ex­
ploring Kinesic Intelligence, ed. Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters (Basingstoke, U.K.:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 225–240.

(4.) Lisa Zunshine, Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (New York: Oxford Uni­
versity Press, 2015).

(5.) Following on Mary Thomas Crane and Alan Richardson’s collaboration, “Literary
Studies and Cognitive Science: Toward a New Interdisciplinarity,” Mosaic 32.2 (1999):
123–140; Alan Richardson distinguishes and describes several categories of previous
work in cognitive studies and provides a bibliography up to 2000 in “Studies in Literature
and Cognition: A Field Map,” in The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity,
ed. Allen Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004). Later works as­
suming embodiment include Frederick Aldama, ed., Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narra­
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Cognitive Poetics

tive Acts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); Paul Armstrong, How Literature Plays
with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Uni­
versity Press, 2013); Einat Avrahami, The Invading Body: Reading Illness Autobiographies
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Ges­
tures (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Brian Boyd, On the Origin
of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2009); Amy Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts
and Performance through Cognitive Science (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hop­
kins University Press, 2012); Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York, NY: Ox­
ford University Press, 2007); Patrick Colm Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us About
Emotion (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Laurie Johnson, John Sut­
ton, and Evelyn Tribble, eds., Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early-
Modern Body-Mind (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014); Irving Massey, The Neural Imagina­
tion: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (Austin: University of Texas,
2009); Naomi Rokotnitz, Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in
Drama (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Ellen Spolsky, Word vs Image: Cogni­
tive Hunger in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke. U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007);
Evelyn Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre
(Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Shakespeare’ Theatre: Thinking with
the Body (London, U.K.: Bloomsbury, 2017); Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Lit­
erary Characters? (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Lisa Zunshine,
Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 2006); Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture,
Narrative (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) and Getting Inside Your
Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2012); Zunshine has also produced two major collections Intro­
duction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2010); and The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2015) and to our continuing benefit, Zunshine continues to update an
online bibliography of the field at academia.edu. Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature:
Towards a Cognitive Criticism (2016) is a critical overview.

(6.) Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 155.

(7.) Susan Oyama, Evolution’s Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

(8.) Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016).

(9.) Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology (London, 1864–1867), 444.

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(10.) Wolf Singer, “The Evolution of Culture from a Neurobiological Perspective,” in Evo­
lution and Culture: A Fyssen Foundation Symposium ed. Stephen C. Levinson and Pierre
Jaisson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).

(11.) The Contracts of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community (New York, NY: Oxford Uni­
versity Press, 2015).

(12.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1989); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader:
Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,”
Glyph 1 (1977), 172–197. See also Ellen Spolsky, “Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary
Theory as a Species of Post-Structuralism,” Poetics Today 23, no. 1 (2002): 43–62; and
Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World
(Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2001).

(13.) Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford,
U.K.: Blackwell, 1986) is an early, powerful, and continually helpful discussion of the cen­
trality of context in cognition. Also important to literary scholars was Stanley Fish’s “Nor­
mal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the
Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases,” in Is There a Text in This
Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1980); See also Spolsky, “Darwin and Derrida”; Artemy Kolchinsky and David H.
Wolpert, “Semantic Information, Autonomous Agency and Non-Equilibrium Statistical
Physics,” Interface Focus (2018).

(14.) J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

(15.) Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloane Wilson, The Literary Animal: Evolution and
the Nature of Narrative (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005).

(16.) See Robert Rosen’s Essays on Life Itself (New York, NY: Columbia University Press,
2000) for an interpretation of Schrödinger’s 1944 Life Itself: Essays on Life Itself (New
York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000), 21. Chemical catalysis within individual cells
as an intensifier of metabolism works by playing around. A substrate floats until it meets
the appropriate enzyme, which then temporarily adjusts its own shape so that the two fit
together to intensify the chemical reaction. See Spolsky in Zunshine, 2015.

(17.) Maurice Evans, ed., The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: The New Arcadia
(Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1977), 5.

(18.) Clark, Surfing Uncertainty reviews this work.

(19.) Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New
York, NY: Ballantine, 1972), 177–193. For later work on young animal and children’s play,
see Gordon M. Burghardt, “A Brief Glimpse at the Long Evolutionary History of Play,” Ani­

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mal Behavior and Cognition 1, no. 2 (2014), 90–98; and Angeline S. Lillard, “Why Do the
Children (Pretend) Play?” Trends in Cognitive Science 21, no. 11 (2017): 826–834.

(20.) Paul L. Harris, The Work of the Imagination (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2000).

(21.) Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin, Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation. (Cam­
bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 45. Many researchers of play are etholo­
gists who refer to literature and art only in passing. An exception is Kevin Laland,
Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2017).

(22.) Brian Boyd, “Art as Cognitive Play,” in On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition,
and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 90.

(23.) F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Har­
vard University Press, 1957), 205.

(24.) Ellen Spolsky, “Why and How to Take the Fruit and Leave the Chaff,” SubStance 94–
95, nos. 1–2 (2001): 178–198.

(25.) Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York, NY: Europa
Editions, 2012).

(26.) Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York, NY: Eu­
ropa Editions, 2015), 25.

(27.) Ferrante, Lost Child, 473.

(28.) Dan Sperber et al. describes our monitoring in “Epistemic Vigilance,” Mind and Lan­
guage 25, no. 4 (2010): 359–393.

(29.) Some of us have collaborated with empirical psychologists or surveyed their work
from the doorstep of the lab. See Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think:
Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York, NY: Basic Books,
2002); Ellen Esrock, The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore,
MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1994); David Miall, “Anticipation and Feeling in Liter­
ary Response: A Neuropsychological Perspective,” Poetics 23 (1995): 275–298; Gabrielle
Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2013); and Natalie Phillips, Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Centu­
ry Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Limits of length
here prevent acknowledging other several other important areas of cognitive literary in­
vestigation.

(30.) Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that reasons follow (rather than precede) in­
tuitive guessing; what seems like reasoning is “opportunistic” exploitation of regularities
already grasped. See The Enigma of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2017), 55.

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(31.) Andy Clark and Josefa Toribio, “Doing Without Representing?” Synthèse 101 (1994),
419; and Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 166.

(32.) Matthew 12: 40–41.

(33.) David Premack and G. Woodruff, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1978); Helen Tager-Flusberg, Simon Baron-Cohen, and
Donald J. Cohen, “Introduction,” in Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Devel­
opmental Cognitive Neuroscience, ed. Simon Baron-Cohen, Helen Tager-Flusberg, and
Donald J. Cohen (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000). On the evolution of the
brain allowing theory of mind, see Singer, “Evolution of Culture,” 197. For a summary see
Rose M. Scott and Renée Baillargeon, “Early False Belief Understanding,” Trends in Cog­
nitive Science 21, no. 4 (2017): 237–249.

(34.) See Paul Bloom on infant cognition, Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child De­
velopment Explains What Makes Us Human (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004) and Lisa
Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, 6–7.

(35.) Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction; and D. H. Whalen, Liza Zunshine, Michael Holquist,
“Theory of Mind and Embedding of Perspective: A Psychological Test of a Literary “Sweet
Spot,” Scientific Study of Literature 1, no. 2 (2012): 301–315.

(36.) Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese, “Neurophysiological

Mechanism Underlying the Understanding and Imitation of Action,” Nature Reviews Neu­
roscience 2 (2001): 661–670 reviews this work.

(37.) Vittorio Gallese, “The Problem of Images: A View From the Brain-Body,” Phenome­
nology and Mind 12 (2018): 73; see also Gallese and Corrado Sinigaglia, “What Is So Spe­
cial with Embodied Simulation?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, no. 11 (2011): 512–519.

(38.) Reviews of the prediction hypotheses: Clark, Surfing Uncertainty; Floris P. de Lange,
Micha Heilbron, and Peter Kok, “How Do Expectations Shape Perception?,” Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 22, no. 9 (2018): 764–779; Daniel Williams, “Predictive Coding and
Thought,” Synthèse (2018); Karl Friston ed., Prediction, Perception and Agency: Special
Issue: International Journal of Psychophysiology 83 (2012); and Shaun Gallagher and Mic­
ah Allen, “Active Inference, Enactivism and the Hermeneutics of Social Cognition,” Syn­
thèse (2016).

(39.) Clark, Surfing Uncertainty, xv.

(40.) Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1944). See also Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An
Essay on Disorder and Order (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1971).

(41.) Clark, Surfing Uncertainty, xv–xvi.

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(42.) For a philosophical perspective on re-use see Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft,
Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Uni­
versity Press, 2002).

(43.) Jorie Koster-Hale and Rebecca Saxe, “Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Prob­
lem,” Neuron 79 (2013): 836–848.

(44.) To be fair, here is the argument of philosopher Joseph Margolis comparing the per­
ception of artwork to the perception of speech in one’s native language: “Artworks pos­
sess, where ‘mere real things’ do not, Intentional properties . . . And . . . in perceiving art­
works we do perceive them as possessing intentional properties.” See Joseph Margolis,
What, After All, Is a Work of Art? (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1999), 35, 37.

(45.) Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

(46.) Spolsky, Ellen, “Why and How to Take the Fruit and Leave the Chaff,” SubStance
94/95 nos. 1–2 (2001): 178–198.

Ellen Spolsky

Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University

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