THEORY AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE
James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Series Editors
Why We Read Fiction
THEORY OF MIND AND THE NOVEL
Lisa Zunshine
T H E O H I O S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
COLUMBUS
Copyright © 2006 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zunshine, Lisa.
Why we read fiction : theory of mind and the novel / Lisa Zunshine.
p. cm.—(Theory and interpretation of narrative series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–8142–1028–7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–8142–5151-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Fiction. 2. Fiction—Psychological aspects. 3. Books and reading. 4. Cognitive science.
I. Title. II. Series.
PN3331.Z86 2006
809.3—dc22
2005028358
Cover design by Laurence Nozik.
Text design and typesetting by Jennifer Forsythe.
Type set in Adobe Garamond.
Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
~
Contents ~
List of Illustrations
vii
Acknowledgments
ix
PART I: ATTRIBUTING MINDS
1. Why Did Peter Walsh Tremble?
2. What Is Mind-Reading (Also Known as Theory of Mind)?
3. Theory of Mind, Autism, and Fiction: Four Caveats
4. “Effortless” Mind-Reading
5. Why Do We Read Fiction?
6. The Novel as a Cognitive Experiment
7. Can Cognitive Science Tell Us Why We Are Afraid of Mrs. Dalloway ?
8. The Relationship between a “Cognitive” Analysis of Mrs. Dalloway
and the Larger Field of Literary Studies
9. Woolf, Pinker, and the Project of Interdisciplinarity
3
6
10
13
16
22
27
36
40
PART II: TRACKING MINDS
1. Whose Thought Is It, Anyway?
2. Metarepresentational Ability and Schizophrenia
3. Everyday Failures of Source-Monitoring
4. Monitoring Fictional States of Mind
5. “Fiction” and “History”
47
54
58
60
65
Contents
Tracking Minds in Beowulf
Don Quixote and His Progeny
Source-Monitoring, ToM, and the Figure of the Unreliable Narrator
Source-Monitoring and the Implied Author
Richardson’s Clarissa: The Progress of the Elated Bridegroom
(a) Mind-Games in Clarissa
(b) Enter the Reader
11. Nabokov’s Lolita: The Deadly Demon Meets and Destroys the
Tenderhearted Boy
(a) “ Distributed” Mind-Reading I: A “comic, clumsy, wavering
Prince Charming”
(b) “ Distributed” Mind-Reading II: An “immortal daemon disguised
as a female child”
(c) How Do We Know When Humbert Is Reliable?
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
73
75
77
79
82
83
91
100
103
109
112
PART III: CONCEALING MINDS
1.
2.
ToM and the Detective Novel: What Does It Take to Suspect Everybody?
Why Is Reading a Detective Story a Lot like Lifting Weights
at the Gym?
Metarepresentationality and Some Recurrent Patterns of the
Detective Story
(a) One Liar Is Expensive, Several Liars Are Insupportable
(b) There Are No Material Clues Independent from Mind-Reading
(c) Mind-Reading Is an Equal Opportunity Endeavor
(d) “Alone Again, Naturally”
A Cognitive Evolutionary Perspective: Always Historicize!
3.
4.
121
123
128
130
133
138
141
153
CONCLUSION: WHY DO WE READ (AND WRITE) FICTION?
1.
2.
Authors Meet Their Readers
Is This Why We Read Fiction? Surely, There Is More to It!
159
162
Notes
165
Bibliography
181
Index
193
vi
~
Illustrations ~
Figure 1 “Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived
I wanted you to feel.” © The New Yorker Collection 1998 Bruce
Eric Kaplan from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
Figure 2
Clarissa dying. Reproduced courtesy of McMaster University
Library.
30
83
Figure 3
Book cover of MANEATER by Gigi Levangie Grazer reproduced
with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group.
Book cover, Copyright © 2003 by Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. Michael Mahovlich / Masterfile (image code 700-075736). 144
Figure 4
“What else is there that I can buy you with?” Sam Spade and
Brigid O’Shaughnessy before Sam finds out that she killed Archer. 151
Figure 5
“When one in your organization gets killed, it is a bad business to
let the killer get away with it—bad all around, bad for every
detective everywhere.” Sam and Brigid after he realizes that she
killed Archer.
vii
151
~
Acknowledgments ~
I
had a great time working on this book because of the people whom I
have met in the process. First, in the late 1990s, I had the privilege to
sit in for several semesters on the graduate seminars taught by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby at the University of California, Santa Barbara, an
experience that I immediately recognized back then and continue to consider now a once-in-a-lifetime learning opportunity. Second, over the last
seven years, I have been fortunate to get to know a distinguished cohort of
scholars working with cognitive approaches to literature. I am simply listing them here in alphabetical order to resist the temptation to fill pages
with the expression of my admiration for their work and my gratitude for
their friendship: Porter Abbott, Frederick Louis Aldama, Mary Crane,
Nancy Easterlin, Elizabeth Hart, David Herman, Patrick Colm Hogan,
Alan Palmer, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, and Blakey Vermeule. I
could similarly talk forever about James Phelan—who has been encouraging my work since the time of publication, in his journal Narrative, of my
essay on Theory of Mind and Mrs. Dalloway—but let me just say that one
could not wish for a better editor or mentor. Peter Rabinowitz, Phelan’s
co-editor of The Ohio State University Press’s book series “Theory and
Interpretation of Narrative,” and Uri Margolin, a reader for the series,
offered the most thorough and thoughtful responses to my manuscript. If
the final product does not live up to their excellent suggestions, the fault
is all mine. The Ohio State University Press continues to impress me as an
exemplary press, a privilege for any scholar to publish with: I am grateful
to Laurie Avery, Sandy Crooms, Maggie Diehl, Malcolm Litchfield, and
Heather Lee Miller for their hard work and support. The participants of
ix
Acknowledgments
the Lexington IdeaFestival (2004); of the annual meeting of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (2003, 2004, 2005); and of the
“Cognitive Theory and the Arts” seminar at the Humanities Center at
Harvard University (2004) asked great questions and made excellent suggestions. Jason E. Flahardy and Christian Trombetta from the Special Collections and Archives at the University of Kentucky’s King Library have
been most helpful with illustrations, and so has been the College of Arts
and Sciences at the University of Kentucky, which once more came
through in the most timely and generous manner to pay for the reproduction of these illustrations. Last but not least, I am indebted to Chris Hair
and Anna Laura Bennett, who were invaluable for editing various drafts of
my manuscript; to my students at the University of Kentucky, Lexington,
whose smart and creative responses to Clarissa and Lolita have made
teaching those challenging novels a pleasure; and to Etel Sverdlov, who
reads and jokes with the best.
x
Part I
ATTRIBUTING MINDS
1
~ ~
WHY DID PETER WALSH TREMBLE?
et me begin with a seemingly nonsensical question. When Peter
Walsh, a protagonist of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, unexpectedly
visits Clarissa Dalloway “at eleven o’clock on the morning of the day she
[is] giving a party,” and, “positively trembling” and “kissing both her
hands” (40), asks her how she is, how do we know that his “trembling” is
to be accounted for by his excitement at seeing his old love again after all
these years and not, for instance, by his progressing Parkinson’s disease?
Assuming that you are a particularly good-natured reader of Mrs. Dalloway, you could patiently explain to me that had Walsh’s trembling been
occasioned by an illness, Woolf would have told us so. She wouldn’t have
left us long under the impression that Walsh’s body language betrays his
agitation, his joy, and his embarrassment and that the meeting has instantaneously and miraculously brought back the old days when Clarissa and
Peter had “this queer power of communicating without words” because,
reflecting Walsh’s own “trembling,” Clarissa herself is “so surprised, . . . so
glad, so shy, so utterly taken aback to have [him] come to her unexpectedly in the morning!” (40). Too much, you would point out, hinges on our
getting the emotional undertones of the scene right for Woolf to withhold
from us a crucial piece of information about Walsh’s health.
I then would ask you why is it that had Walsh’s trembling been caused
by an illness, Woolf would have had to explicitly tell us so, but as it is not,
she simply takes for granted that we will interpret it as having been caused
by his emotions. In other words, what allows Woolf to assume that we
will automatically read a character’s body language as indicative of his
thoughts and feelings?
L
Part I: Attributing Minds
She assumes this because of our collective past history as readers, you
perhaps would say. Writers have been using descriptions of their characters’ behaviors to inform us about their feelings since time immemorial,
and we expect them to do so when we open the book. We all learn,
whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior
reflects a character’s state of mind, and every fictional story that we read
reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first.1
Had this imaginary conversation about the automatic assumptions
made by readers taken place twenty years ago, it would have ended here.
Or it never would have happened—not even in this hypothetical form—
because the answers to my naïve questions would have seemed so obvious.
Today, however, this conversation has to continue on because recent
research in cognitive psychology and anthropology has shown that not
every reader can learn that the default meaning of a character’s behavior
lies with the character’s mental state. To understand what enables most of
us to constrain the range of possible interpretations, we may have to go
beyond the explanation that evokes our personal reading histories and
admit some evidence from our evolutionary history.
This is what my book does. It makes a case for admitting the recent
findings of cognitive psychologists into literary studies by showing how
their research into the ability to explain behavior in terms of the underlying states of mind—or mind-reading ability—can furnish us with a series
of surprising insights into our interaction with literary texts. Using as my
case studies novels ranging from Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway to Dashiel Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, I advance and explore a series of hypotheses about
cognitive cravings that are satisfied—and created!—when we read fiction.
I divide my argument into three parts. The present part, “Attributing
Minds,” introduces the first key theoretical concept of this book: mindreading, also known as Theory of Mind. Drawing on the work of Simon
Baron-Cohen (Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind), I
suggest that fiction engages, teases, and pushes to its tentative limits our
mind-reading capacity. Building on the recent research of Robin Dunbar
and his colleagues, I then consider one particular aspect of Woolf ’s prose
as an example of spectacular literary experimentation with our Theory of
Mind (hence, ToM). Finally, I turn to Steven Pinker’s controversial analysis of Woolf in The Blank Slate to discuss the possibilities of a more profitable dialogue between cognitive science and literary studies.
The second part, “Tracking Minds,” introduces my second theoretical
mainstay: metarepresentationality. I base it on Leda Cosmides and John
Tooby’s exploration of our evolved cognitive ability to keep track of sources
1: Why Did Peter Walsh Tremble?
of our representations (i.e., to metarepresent them). I begin by returning to
the point made in the first part—which is that our ToM makes literature as
we know it possible—to argue that the attribution of mental states to literary characters is crucially mediated by the workings of our metarepresentational ability. Fictional narratives, from Beowulf to Pride and Prejudice, rely
on, manipulate, and titillate our tendency to keep track of who thought,
wanted, and felt what and when. I further suggest that research on
metarepresentationality sheds light on readers’ enduring preoccupation
with the thorny issue of the “truth” of literary narrative and the distinction
between “history” and “fiction.” I conclude with the case studies of two
novels (Richardson’s Clarissa and Nabokov’s Lolita), showing how several
overlapping and yet distinct literary traditions are built around the narratives’ exaggerated engagement of our metarepresentational capacity.
The third part, “Concealing Minds,” continues to explore the exaggerated literary engagement with our source-monitoring capacity by focusing
on the detective novel. Following the history of the detective narrative
over one hundred and fifty years, I show that the recurrent features of this
genre, including its attention to material clues, its credo of “suspecting
everybody,” and its vexed relationship with the romantic plot, are
grounded in its commitment to “working out” in a particularly focused
way our ToM and metarepresentational ability. I conclude by arguing that
the kind of cognitive analysis of the detective novel advocated by my study
(and, indeed, the analysis of any novel with respect to its engagement of
our Theory of Mind) requires close attention to specific historical circumstances attending the development of the genre.2
This emphasis on historicizing is in keeping with my broader view on
the relationship between the “cognitive” and other, currently more familiar, approaches to literature. I do not share the feelings (be they hopes or
fears3) of those literary critics who believe that cognitive approaches necessarily invalidate insights of more traditional schools of thought.4 I think
that it is a sign of strength in a cognitive approach when it turns out to be
highly compatible with well-thought-through literary criticism, and I
eagerly seize on the instances of such compatibility.5 Given that the human
mind in its numerous complex environments has been the object of study
of literary critics for longer than it has been the object of study of cognitive scientists, I would, in fact, be suspicious of any cognitive reading so
truly “original” that it can find no support in any of the existing literary
critical paradigms.6
But, compatible with existing paradigms or not, any literary study that
grounds itself in a discipline as new and dynamic as cognitive science is
Part I: Attributing Minds
today takes serious chances. In the words of cognitive evolutionary
anthropologist Dan Sperber, “[O]ur understanding of cognitive architecture is [still] way too poor, and the best we can do is try and speculate
intelligently (which is great fun anyhow).”7 I proceed, then, both sobered
by Sperber’s warning and inspired by his parenthetical remark. Every single one of my speculations resulting from applying research in cognitive
psychology to our appetite for fiction could be wrong, but the questions
that prompted those speculations are emphatically worth asking.
2
~ ~
WHAT IS MIND-READING
(ALSO KNOWN AS THEORY OF MIND)?
I
n spite of the way it sounds, mind-reading has nothing to do with
plain old telepathy. Instead, it is a term used by cognitive psychologists, interchangeably with “Theory of Mind,” to describe our ability to
explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and
desires.1 Thus we engage in mind-reading when we ascribe to a person a
certain mental state on the basis of her observable action (e.g., we see her
reaching for a glass of water and assume that she is thirsty); when we interpret our own feelings based on our proprioceptive awareness (e.g., our
heart skips a beat when a certain person enters the room and we realize
that we might have been attracted to him or her all along); when we intuit
a complex state of mind based on a limited verbal description (e.g., a
friend tells us that she feels sad and happy at the same time, and we believe
that we know what she means); when we compose an essay, a lecture, a
movie, a song, a novel, or an instruction for an electrical appliance and try
to imagine how this or that segment of our target audience will respond to
it; when we negotiate a multilayered social situation (e.g., a friend tells us
in front of his boss that he would love to work on the new project, but we
have our own reasons to believe that he is lying and hence try to turn the
conversation so that the boss, who, we think, may suspect that he is lying,
would not make him work on that project and yet would not think that
he didn’t really want to); and so forth. Attributing states of mind is the
default way by which we construct and navigate our social environment,
incorrect though our attributions frequently are. (For example, the person
2: What Is Mind-Reading?
who reached for the glass of water might not have been thirsty at all but
rather might have wanted us to think that she was thirsty, so that she could
later excuse herself and go out of the room, presumably to get more water,
but really to make the phone call that she didn’t want us to know of.)
But why do we need this newfangled concept of mind-reading, or
ToM, to explain what appears so obvious? Our ability to interpret the
behavior of people in terms of their underlying states of mind seems to be
such an integral part of what we are as human beings that we could be
understandably reluctant to dignify it with fancy terms and elevate it into
a separate object of study. One reason that ToM has received the sustained
attention of cognitive psychologists over the last twenty years is that they
have come across people whose ability to “see bodies as animated by
minds”2 is drastically impaired—people with autism. By studying autism
and a related constellation of cognitive deficits (such as Asperger syndrome), cognitive scientists began to appreciate our mind-reading ability
as a special cognitive endowment, structuring our everyday communication and cultural representations.
Cognitive evolutionary psychologists working with ToM think that
this adaptation must have developed during the “massive neurocognitive
evolution” which took place during the Pleistocene (1.8 million to 10,000
years ago). The emergence of a Theory of Mind “module” was evolution’s
answer to the “staggeringly complex” challenge faced by our ancestors,3
who needed to make sense of the behavior of other people in their group,
which could include up to 200 individuals. In his influential 1995 study,
Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and a Theory of Mind, Simon BaronCohen points out that “attributing mental states to a complex system
(such as a human being) is by far the easiest way of understanding it,” that
is, of “coming up with an explanation of the complex system’s behavior
and predicting what it will do next.”4 Thus our tendency to interpret
observed behavior in terms of underlying mental states (e.g., “Peter Walsh
was trembling because he was excited to see Clarissa again”) seems to be so
effortless and automatic (in a sense that we are not even conscious of
engaging in any particular act of “interpretation”5) because our evolved
cognitive architecture “prods” us toward learning and practicing mindreading daily, from the beginning of awareness.
Baron-Cohen describes autism as the “most severe of all childhood
psychiatric conditions,” one that affects between approximately four to fifteen children per 10,000 and “occurs in every country in which it has
been looked for and across social classes.”6 Although, as Gloria Origgi and
Dan Sperber have pointed out, “mind-reading is not an all-or-none affair
Part I: Attributing Minds
. . . [p]eople with autism lack [this] ability to a greater or lesser degree,”7
and although the condition may be somewhat alleviated if the child
receives a range of “educational and therapeutic interventions,” autism
remains, at present, “a lifelong disorder.”8 Autism is highly heritable,9 and
its key symptoms, which manifest themselves in the first years of life,
include the profound impairment of social and communicative development and the “lack of the usual flexibility, imagination, and pretence.”10 It
is also characterized—crucially for our present discussion—by a lack of
interest in fiction and storytelling (although one should keep in mind
here, and I will address shortly, the important issue of degree to which people within the autistic range are indifferent to storytelling).
One immediate, practical implication of the last two decades of
research in ToM is that developmental psychologists are now able to diagnose autism much earlier (e.g., the standard age for diagnosis used to be
three or four years, whereas now it is sometimes possible to diagnose a child
at eighteen months11) and to design more aggressive therapeutic techniques
for dealing with it. Moreover, cognitive anthropologists are increasingly
aware that our ability to attribute states of mind to ourselves and other people is intensely context dependent. That is, it is supported not by one uniform cognitive adaptation but by a large cluster of specialized adaptations
geared toward a variety of social contexts.12 Given this new emphasis on
context-sensitive specialization and the fact that Theory of Mind appears to
be our key cognitive endowment as a social species, it is difficult to imagine
a field of study within the social sciences and the humanities that would
not be affected by this research in the coming decades.
What criteria do psychologists use to decide whether a given individual has an impaired Theory of Mind? In 1978, Daniel Dennett suggested
that one effective way to test for the presence of normally developing ToM
is to see whether a child can understand that someone else might hold a
false belief, that is, a belief about the world that the child knows is manifestly untrue. The first false-belief test was designed in 1983 and has since
been replicated many times by scientists around the world. In one of the
more widespread versions of the test, children see that “Sally” puts a marble in one place and then exits the room. In her absence, “Anne” comes in,
puts the marble in a different place, and leaves. Children are then asked,
“Where will Sally look for her marble when she returns?” The vast majority of normal children (after the age of four13) pass the test, responding that
Sally will look for the marble in the original place, thus showing their
understanding that someone might hold a false belief. By contrast, only a
2: What Is Mind-Reading?
small minority of children with autism do so, indicating instead where the
marble really is. According to Baron-Cohen, the results of the test support
the notion that “in autism the mental state of belief is poorly understood.”14
But, apart from the carefully designed lab test, how do people with
autism see the world around them? In his book An Anthropologist on Mars,
Oliver Sacks describes one remarkable case of autism, remarkable because
the afflicted woman, Temple Grandin, has been able to overcome her
handicap to some degree. She has a doctorate in agricultural science,
teaches at the University of Arizona, and can speak about her perceptions,
thus giving us a unique insight into what it means to be unable to read
other people’s minds. Sacks reports Grandin’s school experience: “Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing—an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of
understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all
telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of those social signals. She
can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive of the manyleveled, kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it.”15
To compensate for her inability to interpret facial expressions, which at
first left her a “target of tricks and exploitation,” Grandin has built up over
the years something resembling a “library of videotapes, which she could
play in her mind and inspect at any time—‘videos’ of how people behaved
in different circumstances. She would play these over and over again, and
learn, by degrees, to correlate what she saw, so that she could then predict
how people in similar circumstances might act.”16 What the account of
such a “library” suggests is that we do not just “learn” how to communicate with people and read their emotions (or how to read the minds of fictional characters based on their behavior)—Grandin, after all, has had as
many opportunities to “learn” these things as you and I—but that we also
have evolved cognitive architecture that makes this particular kind of
learning possible, and if this architecture is damaged, as in the case of
autism, a wealth of experience would never fully make up for the damage.
Predictably, Grandin comments on having a difficult time understanding fictional narratives. She remembers being “bewildered by Romeo
and Juliet: ‘I never knew what they were up to.’”17 Fiction presents a challenge to people with autism because in many ways it calls for the same
kind of mind-reading—that is, the inference of the mental state from the
behavior—that is necessary in regular human communication.18
Part I: Attributing Minds
Whereas the correlation between the impaired ToM and the lack of
interest in fiction and storytelling is highly suggestive, the jury is still out
on the exact nature of the connection between the two. It could be argued,
for example, that the cognitive mechanisms19 that evolved to process
information about thoughts and feelings of human beings are constantly
on the alert, checking out their environment for cues that fit their input
conditions. On some level, then, works of fiction manage to “cheat” these
mechanisms into “believing” that they are in the presence of material that
they were “designed” to process, that is, that they are in the presence of
agents endowed with a potential for a rich array of intentional stances.
Thus one preliminary implication of applying what we know about
ToM to our study of fiction is that it makes literature as we know it possible. The very process of making sense of what we read appears to be
grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we
generously call “characters” with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, and desires and then to look for the “cues” that would allow us to
guess at their feelings and thus predict their actions.20 Literature pervasively capitalizes on and stimulates Theory of Mind mechanisms21 that had
evolved to deal with real people, even as on some level readers do remain
aware that fictive characters are not real people at all.22 The novel, in particular, is implicated with our mind-reading ability to such a degree that I
do not think myself in danger of overstating anything when I say that in
its currently familiar shape it exists because we are creatures with ToM.23
As a sustained representation of numerous interacting minds, the novel
feeds the powerful, representation-hungry24 complex of cognitive adaptations whose very condition of being is a constant social stimulation delivered either by direct interactions with other people or by imaginary
approximation of such interactions.
3
~ ~
THEORY OF MIND, AUTISM, AND FICTION:
THREE CAVEATS
I
n theorizing the relationship between our evolved cognitive capacity
for mind-reading and our interest in fictional narratives, one has to be
3: Theory of Mind, Autism, and Fiction
careful in spelling out the extent to which one builds on what is currently
known about autism. Three issues are at stake here. First, though the studies of autism were crucial for initially alerting cognitive scientists to the
possibility that we have an evolved cognitive adaptation for mind-reading,
those studies do not define or delimit the rapidly expanding field of ToM
research. For example, later in this section I discuss the work of cognitive
evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who deals with autism only tangentially and who grounds his study of cognitive regularities underlying
our mind-reading processes in a different kind of compelling empirical
evidence. Similarly, Alan Palmer’s recent groundbreaking study of cognitive construction of fictional consciousness, Fictional Minds, mentions
autism only briefly. I use research on autism merely to provide a vivid
example of what it means not to be able to attribute minds (just as in Part
II I use research on schizophrenia to show what it means not to be able to
keep track of the sources of one’s representations); the bulk of my argument does not rely on it.
Which brings me to the closely related second point. Increasingly
probing and sophisticated as research on autism is becoming, it still is—
and will remain for the foreseen future—a research-in-progress. Given the
broad range of autistic cases—indeed it is often said that no two autistic
individuals are alike—it seems that the more cognitive scientists learn
about the condition, the more complex it appears. Again, the complexity
of the issues involved should be a warning to cultural critics casually pronouncing some texts, individuals, or groups somehow deficient in their
mind-reading ability—an increasingly popular practice, as autism
becomes what one researcher has called a “fashionable”1 cognitive impairment. I remember giving a talk once on ToM and fiction, after which one
of my listeners suggested that adolescents today must all be “slightly autistic” because they are not interested in reading books anymore and want to
watch television instead; as if—to point out just one of many problems
with this suggestion—making sense of an episode of Friends or Saved by
the Bell somehow did not require the full exercise of the viewer’s Theory of
Mind. Consequently, my present inquiry into Woolf ’s, Richardson’s,
James’s, and Nabokov’s experimentation with our mind-reading capacity
should not be taken as a speculation about what so-called normal versus
so-called borderline autistic readers can or cannot do.
My final point sounds a similar note of caution about applying our
still-limited knowledge of autism to the literary-critical analysis of reading
and writing practices. Although I used the now-iconic story of Temple
Part I: Attributing Minds
Grandin to illustrate the challenge faced by autistic individuals in understanding fictional narratives, we have to remember that this challenge
varies across the wide spectrum of autism cases. For example, if we include
within that spectrum people with Asperger syndrome2—which is sometimes classified as high-functioning autism and sometimes viewed as a separate condition (i.e., a nonverbal learning disability3)—we can say that a
“dash of autism”4 does not necessarily preclude people from enjoying fictional narratives.
Consider Christopher, a bright teenager with Asperger syndrome from
Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel
drawing on Haddon’s previous work with autistic individuals. Although
Christopher “mostly [reads] books about math and science” and is not
interested in what he calls “proper novels” (4), he does like murder mysteries, appreciating, in particular, their puzzlelike structure. Following the
advice of his teacher (a figure based, perhaps, on Haddon), Christopher
decides to write his own mystery murder narrative. Christopher’s novel
will tell the true story of his quest to find the person who killed the neighbor’s dog because, as he puts it, “it happened to me and I find it hard to
imagine things which did not happen to me” (5).
In describing the story that Christopher wants to write, Haddon
attempts to capture the boy’s peculiar mind-reading profile. For example, Christopher can figure out, at least partially, some states of mind
behind some behavior. Thus he guesses that, when an elderly lady tells
him that she has a grandson his age, she is “doing what is called chatting,
where people say things to each other which aren’t questions and
answers and aren’t connected” (40). Similarly, Christopher knows that
“people do a lot of talking without using any words.” As his teacher tells
him, “[I]f you raise one eyebrow it can mean lots of different things. It
can mean ‘I want to do sex with you’ and it can also mean ‘I think that
what you just said was very stupid’” (14–15). This nonverbal
communication—which requires reconstructing (and, inevitably, often
misconstructing) a mental state behind an ambiguous gesture—is one
reason that Christopher finds people “confusing.”5 Consequently, his
murder mystery novel is mostly lacking in attribution of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes to its protagonists (we, the readers, supply those missing mental states, thus making sense of the story). Still, as a novel
authored by a child with a compromised Theory of Mind (even if this
child is himself a fictional character), The Curious Incident is a muchneeded reminder about the complexity of the issues involved in the relationship between autism and storytelling.6
Conclusion
WHY DO WE READ (AND WRITE) FICTION?
1
~ ~
AUTHORS MEET THEIR READERS
I
have argued throughout this book that certain fictional texts, such as
eighteenth-century epistolary novels (e.g., Clarissa), early nineteenthcentury comedies of manners (e.g., Emma), detective novels, stream-ofconsciousness novels (e.g., Mrs. Dalloway), and novels featuring unreliable
narrators (e.g., Lolita) all engage clusters of cognitive adaptations associated with our ToM and metarepresentational ability in a particularly
focused way. This is not to say that other novels do not (for a characteristically excellent discussion of this issue, see Palmer’s Fictional Minds) or
that all of the above novels do it in the same way. Clearly, the novels of
Woolf and Chandler affect readers very differently and may indeed appeal
to very distinct audiences. Still, most of these narratives seem to demand
outright that we process complexly embedded intentionalities of their
characters, configuring their minds as represented by other minds, whose
representations we may or may not trust.
I have also suggested that at certain junctures of human history (e.g.,
with the advent of print culture and growing literacy), a combination of
new technological developments and socioeconomic conditions may make
the cultural transmission of such “ToM-intense” fictional narratives possible. Such texts can then find their readers, that is, the people who like their
ToM teased in this particular manner and who, once having gotten a taste
of such a cognitive workout, want and can afford more and more of it.
Moreover, when we think of this cultural-historical process of “matching” texts with their readers, perhaps it makes more sense to speak not just
in terms of the text that serendipitously finds its audience but also in terms
of the writer who finds hers. For it seems to me that working on a story
that engages the reader’s Theory of Mind in a particularly focused way
Conclusion: Why Do We Read (and Write) Fiction?
must hit the author’s own mind-reading spot as few other activities do.
The process of writing can be excruciatingly difficult and is sometimes
described in terms reminiscent of torture, but for a mind constituted the
way the writer’s mind is constituted, that process must represent something of a cognitive necessity. I am not saying that people who write fiction do it purely to stimulate or express their own peculiarly developed
mind-reading ability. I do suspect, however, that other conscious and
semiconscious incentives for writing, such as making a living, impressing
potential mates, and advancing pet ideological agendas, would hardly suffice to make one offer up so much of her life to constructing elaborate
mental worlds of people who never existed.
P. G. Wodehouse insisted that authors conjure up fictional worlds precisely for that kick of creating, controlling, and inhabiting other people’s
states of mind. He called it “liking to write,” but the example that he used
to illustrate that elusive “liking” shows that he thought that “what urges a
writer to write” is the pleasurable opportunity for a particularly focused
mind-reading:
I should imagine that even the man who compiles a railroad timetable is
thinking much more of what fun it all is than of the check he is going to
get when he turns in the completed script. Watch his eyes sparkle as he
puts a very small (a) against the line
4:51 arr. 6:22
knowing that the reader will not notice it and turn to the bottom of the
page, where it says
(a) On Saturdays only
but will dash off with his suitcase and golf clubs all merry and bright,
arriving in good time at the station on the afternoon of Friday. Money is
the last thing such a writer has in mind. (110–11)
In response to Dr. Johnson’s categorical “nobody but a blockhead ever
wrote except for money,” Wodehouse would say that when the author has
“written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a
very different thing from writing for money” (110). What drives the creative process is our hankering for mind-making and mind-reading. Some
of us work it by compiling railroad timetables, others by writing scholarly
books, still others by sailing the empyrean with the likes of Galahad Treepwood, Jeeves, and Ukridge.
Note how this view of writing fiction complicates an influential postulate of reader-response theory that “a text can only come to life when it
1: Authors Meet Their Readers
is read, and if it is to be examined, it must therefore be studied through
the eyes of the reader.”1 By now we are accustomed to thinking of a fictional narrative in terms of what it does to us (e.g., Booth is convinced that
“it is good for [him] to be required to go through” The Wings of the Dove2)
and what we do to it (e.g., we bring it to life; we “participate in the production of [its] meaning”3). Deeply congenial as these two views are to the
perspective espoused by this study, we need to add the third component to
them: the mind-reading mind of the writer. To poach on Booth’s formulation, “[I]t is good” for the author to engage in the cognitive workout of
constructing fictional minds. To poach on Iser’s, a text “comes to life” in the
mind of the author just as richly as—if not more richly than, in some
aspects—it does in the mind of her readers because it engages her ToM in
a unique and pleasurable (if at times torturous) manner.
The novel, then, is truly a meeting of the minds—of the particularly
inclined minds in a particular historical moment that has made the
encounter serendipitously possible. Samuel Richardson could indulge the
quirks of his ToM (boy, was he one interesting London businessman!) and
write the 1,500-page Clarissa focusing obsessively on mind-reading and
misreading because he had first tried it first on a lesser scale in Pamela. He
must have liked how it felt, and, moreover, he must have come to believe
that his second novel would be able to reach a group of readers who love
just this kind of cognitive stimulation. Or, to put it slightly differently,
some of the people (by no means all) who read Pamela when it first came
out discovered that they like this kind of story, wished for more, and could
afford more (what with reasonable book prices and increasing leisure time
for readers of a certain social standing), thus ensuring that what we call
today a “psychological” or “sentimental” novel would survive and give
birth to several related genres.
I speak of the “ensured” survival of the psychological novel guardedly.
It did not have to happen like this. As I argued in Part III, there is nothing really ensured or determined about how genres arise, metamorphose
into other genres, or die out, even if they do “get at” our ToM in a particularly felicitous way. For all that we know, there might have been a
man or a woman in the eighteenth century who wrote an experimental
novel that could have started a new literary tradition stimulating our
ToM in a wonderfully unpredictable fashion. That novel did not find a
publisher; or it was lost in the mail; or its author changed his/her mind
and never revisited this particular style of writing in his/her subsequent
publications. Literary history reflects only a tiny subset of realized cognitive possibilities constrained by the myriad of local contingencies, and
Conclusion: Why Do We Read (and Write) Fiction?
those contingencies include personal inclinations and histories of individual writers and readers.
2
~ ~
IS THIS WHY WE READ FICTION?
SURELY, THERE IS MORE TO IT!
T
his emphasis on local contingencies carries over to another claim
that I think you think I have been making throughout this book
(yes, that’s the third level of embedment—we handle it easily). Theory of
Mind is a cluster of cognitive adaptations that allows us to navigate our
social world and also structures that world. Intensely social species that we
are, we thus read fiction because it engages, in a variety of particularly
focused ways, our Theory of Mind.
That’s my general claim, and here are the promised qualifications. First
of all, some texts experiment with our ToM more intensely than others,
and some readers appreciate that experimentation more than others, or
appreciate some forms of that experimentation more than others. (Again,
neither preference is a meaningful indicator of the reader’s emotional
intelligence or any other personal characteristic. For example, people who
love Woolf ’s prose at times apply to graduate programs in English, and
that’s as much as I can say about their overall personal profiles.)
Second, the reader’s predilection for a certain form of novelistic experimentation with ToM does not mean that she is guaranteed to enjoy every
well-written novel adhering to that form. For example, among the people
who like the cognitive thrill offered by the figure of the unreliable narrator, somebody could be turned off by Lolita’s theme of pedophilia. By the
same token, an aficionado of a detective novel could find too depressing
certain aspects of P. D. James’s The Black Tower. Conversely, a person
could find intolerable James’s depiction of corruption in the house of
assisted living but still be deeply touched by her portrayal of the novel’s
murdered protagonist, Father Baddeley. This is to say that factors other
than the form of the novel’s engagement with ToM enter into the assessment of our personal liking of the novel or our assessment of its relative
aesthetic value.
Third—but here I ought to be interrupted by my long-suffering reader
2: Surely, There Is More to It!
who feels badly misrepresented by the argument of this book, in spite of
all my qualifications. Let me play the role of that impatient reader myself
and voice her main objection, which would sound (in case she happens to
like Henry James) something like this:
There is more to my reading of fiction than simply having my ToM tickled! The argument of your book does not even begin to explain what I feel
when I learn that the dearest wish of incurably ill Ralph Touchett of
James’s The Portrait of a Lady has always been to die at the same time with
his father, and that Ralph is “steeped in melancholy” (84) when he realizes that this wish will not be granted, and, ill as he is, he will still outlive
his father. As James puts it, “The father and the son had been close companions, and the idea of being left alone with the remnants of a tasteless
life on his hands was not gratifying to the young man, who had always
and tacitly counted upon his elder’s help in making the best of a poor
business” (85). Why I relate to this sentiment so strongly is my own business, but isn’t it obvious that your book’s theorizing on ToM and fiction
does not capture or explain the instant recognition and heartache that is
such an important part of my interaction with the novel? (A hypothetical
reader, who insists, quite rightly, on the complexity and unpredictability
of her feelings)
I expect that by now you have also thought of episodes like this and
concluded that there must be more to our response to our favorite fictional
stories than just having our ToM stimulated by them. Except that if you
have, you are mistaken, and your mistake stems from our use of that little
word “just.” It is fair to say that my book has dealt with just a few aspects
of the relationship between our ToM and fiction—with a tiny subset of
that relationship, in fact. It does not make sense, however, to say that our
interaction with fiction entails much more than just having our ToM stimulated. When it comes to our everyday social functioning (which includes
making sense of the social world of the novel), ToM is always much more
than whatever cluster of cognitive adaptations we have isolated to make
the discussion of it manageable.
For instance, in practical terms, how do you separate our ToM and
emotions? If, using my source-monitoring ability, I remember that it was
my enemy who wanted my boss to promote me into a certain department,
my emotions concerning that impending promotion might be quite different from what they were had I known that he hated the idea of my
transfer. I might feel anxiety and anger instead of happy anticipation, and
Conclusion: Why Do We Read (and Write) Fiction?
I might imagine unknown dangers and difficulties lurking behind my new
appointment. ToM gives meaning to our emotions and is in turn given
meaning by them. As Palmer observes, “[T]he interconnections between
cognition and emotion . . . are difficult if not impossible to disentangle.
Cognitions tend to have a strong emotional element and vice versa. They
also relate closely in causal terms: a character’s anger might be caused by a
cognition of some sort that in turn results in further emotions and then
other cognitions.”1
By the same token, my imagined reader’s argument about The Portrait
of a Lady is a complex amalgamation of dynamically interacting emotions
and cognitions. Her personal feelings about some elder relative that she
herself feels very close to are made more poignant, first, because she is able
to attribute a particular sentiment to a literary character; second, because
she can keep track of the complex source of the sentiment, seeing it issuing from James via “Ralph” and not from herself; and third, because she is
titillated by the similarity between something that she has quietly felt for
a long time and something that a highly sympathetic personage, such as
Ralph, is experiencing. She realizes that she is not alone in the wish that
she used to consider odd, and her new awareness of this fragile but comforting community is not reducible to the sum of cognitions and emotions
that went into it.
In other words, we do read novels because they engage our ToM, but
we are at present a long way off from grasping fully the levels of complexity that this engagement entails. Fiction helps us to pattern in newly
nuanced ways our emotions and perceptions;2 it bestows “new knowledge
or increased understanding” and gives “the chance for a sharpened ethical
sense”;3 and it creates new forms of meaning for our everyday existence.
All of this exploratory work is inextricably bound up with ToM, and the
overall effect of it on the reader is not reducible to the sum of this narrative’s engagements with our various cognitive adaptations. Some day we
may have a conceptual framework that will allow us to speak about this
overall effect—that “emergent meaning”4 of the literary narrative. In
preparation for that sophisticated future, here is a very specific, modest,
take-home claim from my book. I can say that I personally read fiction
because it offers a pleasurable and intensive workout for my Theory of
Mind. And, if you have indeed read this study of mine from cover to cover
and followed attentively its arguments about Clarissa, Lolita, Arsène
Lupin, and Mrs. Dalloway, I suspect that this is why you read fiction, too.
~
Notes~
NOTES TO PART I
I: 1
1. Like Hermione Lee, we could ground it in Woolf ’s position as a “pioneer of
reader-response theory.” Woolf, she writes, “was extremely interested in the two-way
dialogue between readers and writers. Books change their readers; they teach you how
to read them. But readers also change books. ‘Undoubtedly,’ Woolf herself had written,
‘all writers are immensely influenced by the people who read them’” (“Virginia Woolf ’s
Essays,” 91).
2. On the possibility of connecting “cognition and culture, to question the boundaries which keep apart . . . psychology and history,” see Sutton, 30–31.
3. For a suggestive discussion of such, see Meir Sternberg, “Universals of Narrative,”
I and II.
4. For an overview of the work of literary critics who call for an abandonment of the
traditional criticism in favor of that grounded in cognitive sciences, see Richardson,
“Studies in Literature and Cognition,” 12–14.
5. Compare to Spolsky’s hope that the work in cognitive literary criticism will “supplement rather than supplant current work in literary and cultural studies” (“Preface,”
The Work of Fiction, viii).
6. See Spolsky for a critique of the “common mistake of interdisciplinary studies”
which consists in adapting a theory from a field outside of one’s professional expertise
as “(somehow) more reliable than the more familiar, but embattled assertions” in one’s
own field (Gaps in Nature, 2). Also, on the production of original readings of literary
texts while using the cognitive framework, see Tabbi, 169.
7. Sperber, “In Defense of Massive Modularity,” 49.
Notes to I: 2
I: 2
1. For a useful introductory overview of the term, see Gopnik, “Theory of Mind,”
in The MIT Encyclopedia.
2. Brook and Ross, 81.
3. On the social intelligence of nonhuman primates, see Byrne and Whiten, Machiavellian Intelligence and “The Emergence of Metarepresentation”; Gomez, “Visual
Behavior”; and Premack and Dasser, “Perceptual Origins.”
4. Baron-Cohen, 21. For a discussion of alternatives to the Theory of Mind
approach, see Dennett, The Intentional Stance.
5. For a useful related discussion of how we begin to articulate our thought processes
when explicitly asked to explain the observed action, see Palmer, Fictional Minds,
105–6.
6. Baron-Cohen, 60.
7. Origgi and Sperber, 163.
8. Baron-Cohen, 60.
9. Autism was first described in 1943 by Leo Kanner, 217–50. For more than
twenty years after that, autism was “mistakenly thought to be caused by a cold family
environment.” In 1977, however, “a landmark twin study showed that the incidence of
autism is strongly influenced by genetic factors,” and, since then, “numerous other
investigations have since confirmed that autism is a highly heritable disorder” (Hughes
and Plomin, 48). For the “pre-history” of the term autism, particularly as introduced by
Eugen Bleuler in 1911 and developed by Piaget in 1923, see Harris, 3.
10. Baron-Cohen, 60.
11. For a discussion of the comparative mind-reading prowess of fifteen- and
eighteen-month-olds, see Paul Bloom, 18–19.
12. See Clark H. Barrett, “Adaptations to Predators and Prey,” and Lawrence
Hirschfeld, “Who Needs a Theory of Mind.”
13. As Robin Dunbar points out, “Children develop ToM at about the age of four
years, following a period in which they engage in what has come to be known as ‘BeliefDesire Psychology.’ During this early stage, children are able to express their own feelings quite cogently, and this appears to act as a kind of scaffolding for the development
of the true ToM (at which point they can ascribe the same kinds of beliefs and desires
to others)” (“On the Origin of the Human Mind,” 239).
14. Baron-Cohen, 71.
15. Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, 272.
16. Ibid., 259–60.
17. Ibid., 259.
18. An important tenet of a cognitive approach to literature is that, as Paul Hernadi
puts it, “there is no clear division between literary and nonliterary signification. . . . Literary experience is not triggered in a cognitive or emotive vacuum: modern readers, listeners, and spectators mentally process the virtual comings and goings of imagined characters as if they were analogous to remembered actual events” (60, 62). For a related
discussion, see Mark Turner, The Literary Mind. When it comes to the construction of
literary characters, see Hogan’s argument that we build up the “intentional” (that is, as
imagined by [us]) characters “just the same way that [we] build up intentional versions
of real people, imputing motives and broad character traits on the basis of the per-
Notes to I: 3
son’s/character’s actions, statements, and so on.” We may know that Hamlet “is not real,
but the process of constituting an intentional version of Hamlet is automatic or spontaneous. [We] do not plan it out. It is just part of the way our minds work. Once an intentional person is constituted, then he/she is open to the same sort of emotive response as
anyone else” (The Mind and Its Stories, 70). For further discussion, see Boyd, Heads and
Tales, forthcoming.
19. By using the word mechanism, I am not trying to smuggle the outdated “body as
a machine” metaphor into literary studies. Tainted as this word is by its previous history,
it can still function as a convenient shorthand designation for extremely complex cognitive processes.
20. The scale of such investment emerges as truly staggering if we attempt to spell out
the host of unspoken assumptions that make it possible. This realization lends new support to what theorists of narrative view as the essential underdetermination or “undertelling” of fiction, its “interior nonrepresentation” (Sternberg, “How Narrativity Makes
a Difference,” 119). See also Herman’s argument that “narrative comprehension requires
situating participants within networks of beliefs, desires, and intentions” (“Stories as a
Tool for Thinking,” 169).
21. Compare my argument here to that developed in Steven Pinker’s How the Mind
Works, 524–26.
22. The question of just how we manage to keep track of the “unreality” of literary
characters is very complicated. I address some aspects of it in later sections when I speak
of source monitoring. For a further discussion, see the debates by cognitive scientists
and cognitive literary critics of what cognitive mechanisms or processes make pretence
(and imagination as such) possible: Leslie, 120–25; Carruthers, “Autism as MindBlindness,” 262–63; and Spolsky, “Why and How.”
23. Compare to Palmer’s argument that “the constructions of the minds of fictional
characters by narrators and readers are central to our understanding of how novels work
because, in essence, narrative is the description of mental functioning” (Fictional Minds,
12). Palmer further observes (an observation with which I strongly agree) that this claim
applies not just to “the consciousness novels of Henry James or the stream of consciousness or interior monologue novels,” but to “the novel as a whole, because all novels include a balance of behavior description and internal analysis of characters’ minds”
(25).
24. I am borrowing the term from Andy Clark, 167. For a discussion of Clark’s theory of representational hunger and its application to literary criticism, see Spolsky,
“Women’s Work.”
I: 3
1. Fred Volkmar, quoted in “Uncovering Autism’s Mysteries.” Online at http://
www.cnn.com /2003/HEALTH/conditions/03/02/autism.ap/ (March 2, 2003).
2. For further information about Asperger syndrome, see Uta Frith’s edited volume,
Autism and Asperger Syndrome. Particularly relevant for the present discussion are the
essays by Frith, Dewey, and Happe.
3. For a discussion, see Frith, 12.
4. Ibid., 31.
Notes to I: 5
5. Another reason is their tendency to use metaphors (Haddon, 15).
6. For a discussion of autobiographies written by adults with Asperger syndrome, see
Happe.
I: 4
1. Baron-Cohen, 29; emphasis added.
2. Dennet, 48.
3. See Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, 269.
4. Easterlin, “Making Knowledge,” 137. For a qualification of the term inborn in
relation to the processing of incoming data, see Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism, 164.
5. Hayles, 145. For a discussion of “constraints,” see Spolsky, “Cognitive Literary
Historicism.”
6. For a discussion of individual readers’ reactions, see Hogan, Cognitive Science,
130, 160, and 162–65.
7. Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem,” 110–11.
8. Ibid., 110.
9. Brook and Ross, 81.
10. Ibid., 112; emphasis in original.
11. For a discussion, see Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?, 197–267.
I: 5
1. For a discussion, see Leslie, 120–25; Carruthers, “Autism as Mind-Blindness,”
262–63; Hernadi, 58; and Spolsky, “Why and How.”
2. Carruthers also sees decoupling as an unnecessarily complicated attempt to
strengthen the mind-blindness theory of autism in the face of alternative explanation
posited by such scholars as Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Uta Frith, who argue
that “mind-blindness of autistic people is a consequence of some other basic deficit”
(Carruthers, 258). See Gopnik and Meltzoff, “The Role of Imitation,” and Uta Frith,
Autism: Explaining the Enigma. For Gopnik and Meltzoff ’s suggestive alternative to the
Theory of Mind theory—their “child as scientist” paradigm—see Gopnik and Meltzoff,
Words, Thoughts, and Theories. For a response to the “child as scientist” paradigm, see
Carruthers, “Simulation and Self-Knowledge.”
3. Carruthers, “Autism as Mind-Blindness,” 265. Emphasis in original. For the most
recent revision of this argument, see Carruthers, The Architecture of the Mind.
4. Carruthers, “Autism,” 264. Though the terms of this comparison may be too
broad, still compare Carruthers’s observation that autistic children do less pretending
because they do not enjoy it to David Miall and Don Kuiken’s observation that the “less
experienced readers seem less committed to the act of reading” (335). Enjoyment of
mind-imagining, both in real life and in reading fiction, seems to come with practice.
5. Carruthers, “Autism,” 267. For an interesting complication of the idea of enjoyment predicated upon nonautistic mind-reading, see Stuart Murray, “Bartleby, Preference, Pleasure and Autistic Presence.”
6. Tsur, “Horror Jokes,” 243. Compare to Dorrit Cohn’s argument that “in narra-
Notes to I: 6
tology, ‘as elsewhere, norms have a way of remaining uninteresting, often even invisible,
until and unless we find that they have been broken—or want to show that that they
have been broken’” (The Distinction of Fiction, 43; quoted in Palmer, Fictional Minds,
6). Compare, also, to Margolin: “The fictional presentation of cognitive mechanisms in
action, especially of their breakdown or failure[,] is itself a powerful cognitive tool
which may make us aware of actual cognitive mechanisms and, more specifically, of our
own mental functioning” (“Cognitive Science,” 278).
7. Tsur, 248–49; emphasis in original. For a more detailed treatment of the topic, see
Tsur, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics.
8. Phelan, Living to Tell about It, 28.
9. Ibid., 20.
10. Marvin Mudrick, 211.
11. The colleague shall remain anonymous. His students’ debate was apparently
prompted by the interview between Colin Firth and Bridget Jones in Helen Fielding’s
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.
12. For very different and suggestive discussions of this point, see Peter Rabinowitz,
Before Reading, 94, 96, and Paul Bloom, 218–19.
13. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 599.
14. Palmer, Fictional Minds, 10.
15. Ibid., 35.
16. Auerbach, Mimesis, 549.
17. Note that I am drastically simplifying Booth’s argument in order to keep my own
argument easy to follow. In the quoted passage, Booth writes not about Henry
James—the “real” James, “capable in his ‘declining’ years” of “daily pettiness,” but of
the “great implied author” of The Wings of the Dove—the “James” who was “superior”
to his maker, “purged of whatever [that maker] took to be [his] living faults” (“The
Ethics of Forms,” 114), an entity characterized by Booth on a different occasion as our
“intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole” (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 73). For
further discussion, see Part II, Section 9, “Source-Monitoring and the Implied
Author,” in this book.
18. Again, here Booth contrasts the “real” James with the “implied” James of the
novel.
19. Booth, “The Ethics of Forms,” 114–15, 120. Emphasis in original.
I: 6
1. For an important related discussion, see Palmer, Fictional Minds, chapter 6.
2. Compare to Palmer’s argument that a “good deal of twentieth-century narration
is characterized by a reluctance to make the decoding of action too explicit and a disinclination to use too much indicative description or contextual thought report.” Palmer
further points out that in the “behaviorist narratives of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond
Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, in which very little direct access to minds is given,
the behavior of the characters only makes sense when it is read as the manifestation of
an underlying mental reality” (Fictional Minds, 140). For a related discussion, see Fludernik on “neutral narratives” (Toward a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 172–75), and Cohn and
Genette on a form of narration that “yells for interpretation” (263).
Notes to I: 7
3. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters [Tri Sestry], 120. Translation mine.
4. Chekhov, Seagull [Chaika], 22.
5. Ibid., 27.
6. Compare to the important discussion of misreadings in Rabinowitz, Before Reading, 173–208.
7. Phelan, e-mail communication, May 23, 2005.
8. For an important related discussion of animism, see Blakey Vermeule, Making
Sense of Fictional People: A Cognitive and Literary Project, in press.
9. As Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, “How many of us can honestly say that we never
skip descriptions?” (“Cognitive Maps,” 219).
10. Compare to Ryan’s elaboration of Ralf Schneider’s observation that “readers focus
their interest in the fictional world on the characters, rather than, for instance, fictional
time or space or narrative situations.” As Ryan demonstrates, in constructing mental
models of the fictional narrative’s topography, readers start with the characters and
remember most effortlessly the landmarks associated with the dramatic turns in the
careers of the characters: “Mental models of narrative space are centered on the characters, and they grow out of them” (“Cognitive Maps,” 236).
I: 7
1. Dunbar, “On the Origin of the Human Mind,” 241.
2. For the more recent version of this study, which sets the bar at the fifth level by
factoring in the mind of the author (which does not change the present results if we do
not factor in the author), see Stiller and Dunbar.
3. For a discussion, see Carey and Spelke, and Cosmides and Tooby, on domain
specificity; and Dunbar, Grooming. For a recent application of the theory of domain
specificity to the study of literature, see Zunshine, “Rhetoric, Cognition, and Ideology.”
4. To which Uri Margolin may add: and how it is being represented. As he puts it,
the “reason for the difference is that the first [sequence] is linear or sequential, unfolding step by step with all members being on the same level, while the second is hierarchical and simultaneous and needs to be grasped in its totality or unpacked in reverse
order of presentation” (“Reader’s Report,” 3). One may thus speculate that the linear
processing might be supported by cognitive adaptations somewhat different from ones
supporting the simultaneous processing, the emergence of the latter correlated with our
evolutionary history as an intensely social species.
5. For a discussion, see Part III, Section 4, “A Cognitive Evolutionary Perspective:
Always Historicize!,” of this book.
6. Now, of course, it does not seem that random anymore, since it has served my
purposes so well. Perhaps I should consider it a “randomly selected serendipitous”
passage.
7. Dunbar, “On the Origin of the Human Mind,” 240.
8. Thus, bringing the findings of cognitive scientists to bear upon the literary text
does not diminish its aesthetic value. As Scarry has argued in response to the fear that
science would “unweave the rainbow” of artistic creation, “[T]he fact of the matter is
that when we actually look at the nature of artistic creation and composition, understanding it does not mean doing it less well. To become a dancer, for example, one must
Notes to I: 8
do the small steps again and again and understand them, if one is to achieve virtuosity.
Right now we need virtuosity, not only within each discipline, but across the disciplines
as well” (“Panel Discussion,” 253).
I: 8
1. For a discussion, see Easterlin, “Voyages in the Verbal Universe.”
2. As Blakey Vermeule observes, “[L]iterature-fiction-writing is so powerful because
it eats theories for breakfast, including cognitive/evolutionary approaches” (personal
communication, November 20, 2002).
3. For a useful most recent review of the field of cognitive approaches to literature,
see Richardson, “Studies in Literature and Cognition.”
4. Hogan, “Literary Universals,” 226. For a discussion of embodied cognition, see
also Hart, “Epistemology.”
5. Herman, “Regrouping Narratology.”
6. Butte, 237.
7. For a related discussion, see Spolsky, “Preface,” ix.
8. Benjamin, 97.
9. For a related discussion, see Hogan, “Literary Universals,” 242–43.
10. Hernadi argues that “literature, whether encountered in live performance or in
textual and electronic recording, can challenge and thus enhance our brains’ vital capacities for expression, communication, representation, and signification.” He further connects the fictional text’s capacity for developing our minds to the evolutionary history
of the literary endeavor. He points out that “the protoliterary experiences of some early
humans could, other things being equal, enable them to outdo their less imaginative
rivals in the biological competition for becoming the ancestors of later men and women”
(56).
11. Richardson and Steen, 3.
12. Michael Whitworth, 150.
13. Susan Dick, 51, 52.
14. Auerbach, 531. Strictly speaking, Auerbach’s question refers to To the Lighthouse,
but it is equally pertinent for our discussion of Mrs. Dalloway.
15. A valuable new study by George Butte, I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie, offers a fascinating perspective on a
writer’s interest in constructing a “present moment” as a delicate “connection” among
the characters’ subjectivities. Applying Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of interlocking consciousnesses (Phenomenology of Perception) to a broad selection of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century novels, as well as to the films of Hitchcock, Hawks, and Woody
Allen, Butte argues compellingly that something had changed in the narrative representation of consciousness at the time of Jane Austen: writers became able to represent the
“deep intersubjectivity” (39) of their characters, portraying them as aware of each
other’s perceptions of themselves and responding to such perceptions with body language observable by their interlocutors and generating a further series of mutual perceptions and reactions. Although Butte does not refer in his work to cognitive science
or the Theory of Mind, his argument is in many respects compatible with the literary
criticism that does.
Notes to II: 1
16. On Woolf ’s definition of narrative ventriloquism, see Maria DiBattista, 132.
17. Phelan, e-mail communication, May 23, 2005.
I: 9
1. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 413.
2. Ibid., 404, 409–10.
3. Anonymous reader for PMLA.
4. For a related discussion of cognitive scientists’ interest in literature and the arts,
see Hogan, Cognitive Science, 3.
5. For a discussion of Heliodorus’s influence, see Doody, The True Story of the Novel.
6. Compare to my argument in the last chapter about a compelling love story that
knows how to push our emotional buttons because it is built on the bones of millions
of forgotten love stores that didn’t. Note that even the most difficult experimental modernist or postmodernist text would still have to engage the reader emotionally, and, in
doing so, it does not depend on preserving “omniscient narration, structured plots, the
orderly introduction of characters, and general readability.”
7. Palmer, Fictional Minds, 53.
8. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 170.
9. Compare to Richardson’s programmatic assertion that cognitive literary criticism
“rejects naïve realism. It refuses to dismiss (for example) important twentieth-century
avant-garde traditions as unnatural or misguided, but rather seeks to understand their
appeal to serious artists and informed audiences. Nor does it typically designate certain
forms of literary activity . . . as ‘natural’ or normative in order to devalue others” (“Studies in Literature and Cognition,” 24).
10. James Phelan, personal communication, April 17, 2003.
NOTES TO PART II
II: 1
1. For a useful introductory discussion of the term, see Sperber, “Metarepresentation,” in The MIT Encyclopedia.
2. Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the Source,” 60–61.
3. Compare to David Herman’s discussion of Jerome Bruner’s argument that when
“an interlocutor tells me a story incriminating a mutual acquaintance, I am likely to
construe specific details in the light of what I know about the storyteller’s past history
with the person who is the focus of the story” (“Stories as a Tool for Thinking,” 164).
4. For a further discussion of our ability to carry our inferences on information that
we know to be false or that we do not (fully) understand, see Sperber, “The Modularity
of Thought.” Also, compare to Wittgenstein’s observation that one “can draw inferences
from a false proposition” (41; emphasis in original).
5. Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the Source,” 69.
6. For a discussion of episodic and semantic memories, see Tulving.
7. Klein et al., “Is There Something Special about the Self ?,” 491.
Notes to II: 4
8. Ibid.
9. Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the Source,” 53, 57.
10. Ibid., 54.
11. Ibid., 58.
12. Ibid., 60.
13. Ibid., 105.
14. Ibid., 104. See also Sperber, Explaining Culture, 146–50.
15. Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the Source,” 77.
16. Ibid., 104.
17. Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye,” 52.
18. Ibid., 55.
19. Compare to a discussion of metarepresentationality by Antonio Damasio, who
sees “constructing metarepresentations of our own mental process” as “a high-level operation in which a part of the mind represents another part of the mind. This allows us to
register the fact that our thoughts slow down or speed up as more or less attention is
devoted to them; or the fact that thoughts depict objects at close range or at a distance”
(Looking for Spinoza, 86).
II: 2
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the Source,” 101.
Klein et al., “A Social-Cognitive Neuroscience,” 111.
Ibid., 127.
Frith, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia, 116, 133–34.
Ibid., 115.
Ibid, 127, table 7.1.
Ibid., 126.
Ibid., 122.
II: 3
1. Compare to Mitchell’s argument in “The Psychology of Human Deception,”
837.
2. Spolsky, “Iconotropism”; Satisfying Skepticism, 7; “Darwin and Derrida,” 52.
3. See Tooby and Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” 53–55;
“Origins of Domain Specificity,” 87; “From Evolution to Behavior,” 293.
II: 4
1. For a suggestive related analysis of Darcy and Elizabeth’s conversation, see
Nicholas Dames, 26.
2. For a useful background discussion of the literary phenomenon of “idiom of the
group,” see Brian McHale, 270.
Notes to II: 7
3. Of course, as Hilary Schor reminds us, the story’s outcome bears out the truth of
the former belief—“there are no wealthy bachelors at the end of Pride and Prejudice”—
“but that does not mean that no experimentation went on in between” (97).
4. Belton, “Mystery without Murder,” 55–56; emphasis added.
5. Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the Source,” 61.
6. Ibid., 58.
II: 5
1. Cosmides and Tooby, “Consider the Source,” 91–92.
2. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms, 67.
3. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148.
4. Cosmides and Tooby, 92.
5. Ibid., 90.
6. Quoted in Mayer, 2, 224.
7. Compare to Lanser’s discussion of “the readers’ outrage” in the cases of Famous All
Over Town, The Education of Little Tree, and Alan Socal/Social Text Affair (“The ‘I’ of
the Beholder”).
8. For further discussion, see Zunshine, “Eighteenth-Century Print Culture.”
9. Lloyd, 6.
10. Ibid., 16.
11. Cosmides and Tooby, 58.
12. Compare to the discussion of progressive modalization in Bruno Latour’s Science
in Action and Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life, especially as adapted by
Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, 104–7.
13. Compare to Lanser’s discussion of “the rather flimsy and accidental form of a narrative’s placement within categorical space . . . [such as] the ‘fiction’ or ‘nonfiction’
shelves in a bookstore” (“The ‘I’ of the Beholder”).
14. Lloyd, 17.
II: 6
1. Compare to Tabbi’s assertion that the “cognitive framework,” while including
“the main features of modernist reflexivity,” also introduces “a more supple materialism,
one that preserves literature’s capacity for achieving common understanding in terms
that remain specific to each text and true to the moment by moment operations of the
reading mind” (168).
2. Compare to Hogan’s development of Chomsky’s point that “the normal use of
language is constantly innovative” (Cognitive Science, 62).
II: 7
1. For a suggestive related discussion, see Francis Steen.
2. Another such character is Ian McEwan’s Briony (Atonement). Briony, incidentally,
Notes to II: 10
writes a play, The Trials of Arabella, in which she intends to star herself as the “spontaneous . . . but inexperienced” title heroine (15–16)—McEwan’s nod, perhaps, to the
“troublesome adventures” (Lennox, 87–88) of that other eighteenth-century Arabella,
whose source-monitoring has gone seriously awry. For a discussion of McEwan’s construction of Briony’s unreliability, see Phelan, “Narrative Judgments.”
II: 8
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 157. Quoted in Nunning, 59–60.
Fludernik, The Fictions of Language, 349. Quoted in Nunning, 66.
Margolin, “Cognitive Science,” 284.
Phelan, Living to Tell about It, 219.
Ibid., 52.
For discussion, see ibid., 34–35, 51–52.
Ibid., 51.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 219.
Ibid., 53.
II: 9
1. Prince, 42; quoted in Palmer, Fictional Minds, 17.
2. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 73.
3. Nunning, 55–57.
4. Palmer, Fictional Minds, 17.
5. The stricter source-monitoring here, as Phelan points out, would be, “Austen has
her narrator claim that Lydia ran away with Wickham” (personal communication, May
23, 2005). I am tempted here, however, to stretch Lanser’s argument that “readers have
very little incentive to distinguish the narrator of Northanger Abbey from Austen” (“The
‘I’ of the Beholder”) to make it apply to Pride and Prejudice as well.
6. Lanser, The Narrative Act, 49–50.
7. Ibid., 46. For Lanser’s most recent discussion of the term implied author, see “The
‘I’ of the Beholder.”
II: 10
1. As Fludernik observes, the “rise of the consciousness novel would be unthinkable
without Clarissa” (Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 171). For a suggestive discussion of
Richardson (but also Fielding!—a claim that Butte may disagree with [see I Know That
You Know, 74–79]) as representing the beginnings of what she calls “‘the high theory of
mind tradition’ in the English novel,” see Vermeule, “God Novels,” 148.
2. This interpretation is owed to Warner’s Reading Clarissa, especially chapter 4.
3. Blythe, xiv.
Notes to II: 11
4. Compare to Mitchell’s argument that “by introducing safeguards against deception, victims influence deceivers to introduce further deceptions to quash the skepticism
and satisfy the new evidence requirements, and, thus, deception escalates” (853).
5. Christopher Frith, 122.
6. Mitchell, 832; emphasis in original.
II: 11
1. See Eaves and Kimpel, “The Composition of Clarissa.” But also see Sabor on
Richardson’s occasional “startling defense of certain aspects of his hero” (36) and Barchas on Richardson’s confession that he liked playing “‘the Rogue’ with his readers,
‘intending them to think now one way, now another of the very same Characters’”
(Richardson, Selected Letters, 248; quoted in Barchas, 121).
2. A new modern edition of Clarissa is currently being prepared by John Richetti
and Toni Bowers, based on the 1751 revision. It will be interesting to see if a back cover
of that edition will reflect a darker view of Lovelace.
3. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, 230.
4. Ibid., 232.
5. Rabinowitz, “Lolita: Solipsized or Sodomized?” 326, 327.
6. Compare to Rabinowitz’s argument in “Lolita: Solipsized or Sodomized?,” especially on p. 327.
7. The concept of distributed social cognition in fictional narrative has been compellingly explored by Alan Palmer and by David Herman. In his discussion of Eliot’s
Middlemarch, Palmer points out that Tertius Lydgate’s “identity is socially distributed
before we meet him, and there are a number of discussions of him throughout the novel
that continue the town’s exploration of his identity. It is striking that the early part of
the novel contains far more information on the ‘Lydgates’ that exist in the minds of
other characters than it does the ‘Lydgate’ that emerges from direct access to his own
mind” (“The Lydgate Storyworld,” in press). See also chapter 5 (part 5.5: “The Mind
beyond the Skin”) of Palmer’s Fictional Minds. Similarly, Herman argues that cognition
“should be viewed as a supra- or transindividual activity distributed across groups functioning in specific contexts, rather than as a wholly internal process unfolding within
the minds of solitary, autonomous, and de-situated cognizers,” and he demonstrates
compellingly the workings of this “distributed social cognition” in Edith Wharton’s
1934 story “Roman Fever” (“Regrounding Narratology,” in press).
8. Of course, this is not an altogether unpleasant mental vertigo. Compare to Fludernik’s argument about the “delight” experienced by readers faced with unreliable narrators (“Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters,” 257).
9. For a useful discussion, see Rabinowitz, Before Reading, 96. Although Rabinowitz
does not deal with Lolita in his study, his analysis of “narrative audience” and “authorial audience” is highly pertinent to the present argument about Humbert’s construction
of his reader.
10. Though, as Rabinowitz reminds us, the scene might be “quite funny even from a
non-pedophilic perspective.” As he points out, “[A]fter all, anyone who’s ever attempted
a tryst at a hotel—or imagined attempting a tryst at a hotel—has experienced the same
‘trouble’; and even those who haven’t can certainly imagine themselves in Humbert’s
Notes to III: 2
position” (Reader’s Report). I agree with Rabinowitz and, in fact, see his point as illuminating certain limitations of my “metarepresentational” reading of Lolita. Once you
start applying the missing source tags to Lolita, it is very easy to lose sight of the comic
side of the text.
11. Same as note 10 above.
12. Compare to Crane’s useful discussion of how “claims to knowledge based on
embodied feelings can [be] easily be falsified, simplified, and used as a rhetorical tool”
(“‘Fair Is Foul,’” 120).
13. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 96.
14. Sterne, Tristam Shandy, 1–2.
15. Phelan, Living to Tell about It, 51.
16. Ibid., 121.
17. Ibid., 129.
18. Ibid., 120.
19. Ibid., 119.
20. Ibid., 120.
21. Ibid., 121.
22. Ibid., 121–22.
23. Ibid., 129.
24. Ibid., 127.
25. Cohn, “Discordant Narration,” 312.
26. See Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Detecting Texts.
NOTES TO PART III
III: 1
1. Sayers, “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” 31.
2. Belton, 50.
3. Routley, 176.
4. For example, we can consider a bildüngsroman a safe-setting exploration of the
real fears and anxieties of both adolescent children and their parents.
III: 2
1. Compare my argument here to Palmer’s discussion of what narrative theorist
Menakhem Perry calls the “primacy effect.” As Palmer points out, when we begin to
read a fictional story, “the initial reading frames that are set up at the beginning of a text
have long-lasting effects, and they tend to persist until the reader is compelled by the
accumulating weight of contrary evidence to abandon them and set up new frames”
(“The Lydgate Storyworld”). For a related discussion, see Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan,
who builds on the work of Perry and Jonathan Culler to observe that the “dynamics of
reading can thus be seen not only as a formation, development, modification, and
replacement of hypothesis . . . , but also—simultaneously—as the construction of
Notes to III: 3
frames, their transformation, and dismantling” (123–24).
2. However, as Phelan correctly observes, weightlifting is not really “decoupled from
reality” for “competitive athletes and people who lift to rehabilitate injuries.” For them,
weightlifting is crucial part of their reality. Similarly, “people who write detective stories
or who write about and teach them find them integral to their reality” (“Reader’s
Report,” 6).
3. The argument about the instructive value of a detective novel or the pointed lack
thereof can be expanded to doubt the instructive value of any fictional narrative. I thus
strongly agree with Hogan’s critique of Pinker’s argument that “fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the
outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them.” Using as an example Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Pinker suggests that we consider the following question: “What are the options
if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my
mother?” (How the Mind Works, 543; quoted in Hogan, Cognitive Science, 211). As
Hogan observes, “Hamlet does not actually teach us how to respond in that situation . . .
The very best it could be said to do is to teach us to check someone’s identity before
killing him (due to the Polonius accident)” (211). Along the same lines, Hogan points
out in The Mind and Its Stories that although literature “humanizes us in the sense that
it tends to develop certain sorts of compassionate identification, [it is] not at all clear
that this sort of identification extends beyond the literary work to the real world” (206).
See Spolsky (“Purposes Mistook”) for a related response to Hernadi’s argument that “the
creation and consumption of fictional narratives provide evolutionary advantages to a
group that prepares them to anticipate challenges they may some day face by familiarizing its young with a range of hypothetical scenarios.” Finally, see David Lodge for the
discussion of the ambiguous feeling that we have after reading a novel that we have
“‘learned’ something” (30–32).
4. Womack, 266.
5. Two of these examples are taken from Charney, 101; Oedipus has been suggested
by James Phelan.
6. The issue of genre has been a topic of a productive inquiry by several literary critics interested in cognitive approaches. See Spolsky, Gaps in Nature and “Darwin and
Derrida,” and Hart, “Embodied Literature.”
III: 3
1. The phrase comes from Ronald Blythe’s Introduction to the 1966 Penguin edition of the novel and is quoted in Catherine Kenney, “The Mystery of Emma . . . ,” 138.
See also P. D. James, “Emma Considered as a Detective Story,” an appendix to A Time
to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of an Autobiography, 243–59. For an analysis of mindreading in Emma, see Alan Richardson, “Reading Minds and Bodies in Emma.”
2. I use the word internal to emphasize again that, apart from what is going on inside
the fictional story, we store the story as a whole as a large metarepresentation with an
implicit source tag, such as, “Austen says” or “Conan Doyle says.”
3. Ronald R. Thomas, 4.
4. Ibid., 9.
5. Similarly, we can tweak the terms of Cawelti’s observation that when we are read-
Notes to III: 3
ing a detective story, “in addition to the attempt to figure out the crime, we are also confronted with the puzzle of the detective’s [mental] activity” (190). The puzzle of another
person’s (here, the detective’s) mental activity is not something we figure out “also,” or
“in addition to,” the main puzzle of the crime. Instead, the puzzle of crime is a handy
pretext to let us fall to our favorite activity of mind-reading. For a related discussion, see
Vermeule, “Theory of Mind,” in which she offers a valuable analysis of mind-reading
behind clues-reading as a correction to Franco Moretti’s recent groundbreaking work on
detective fiction (“Slaughterhouse of Literature”). For a broader discussion of mindreading and fiction, see also Vermeule, “Satirical Mind Blindness” and “God Novels”
6. Howard Haycraft, 130.
7. W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage,” 21.
8. Quoted in John T. Irwin, 28.
9. Haycraft, 239.
10. Symons, 138.
11. Routley, 177.
12. Ousby, 187.
13. One could say that it is this intuitive acknowledgment that a detective story
focuses on one particular kind of mind-reading and is not amenable to others that has
fueled the traditional criticism of the genre as “wasteful of time and degrading to intellect” (Robin W. Winks, 1). For a famous articulation of this view, see Edmund Wilson’s
essay, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”
14. Damasio, Descartes Error; quoted in Hogan, Cognitive Science, 170.
15. Hogan, Cognitive Science, 170.
16. Ibid., 185.
17. See Hogan’s The Mind and Its Stories and Cognitive Science, Literature, and the
Arts: A Guide for Humanists.
18. Compare Hogan’s argument here to that of Uri Margolin, who points out that
“folk psychology itself is a part of psychological reality! On occasion, upon reading a literary representation of some aspect of cognitive mental functioning, a reader also feels
something akin to Buhler’s Aha-Erlebnis (‘Aha! experience’) . . . , realizing all of a sudden that this is how she herself perceives, categorizes, or recalls, that the fictional representation has made her aware of the very nature of mental activity in which she constantly engages, but of which she had not been aware ever before, or which she had not
been unable to describe so effectively. This point is reinforced by the claim of cognitive
science that many of our cognitive processing activities are indeed ‘unconscious,’ not
accompanied by any self-awareness of self-consciousness. The reading of literary representations of mental functioning is also a major source of another undeniable common
psychological fact, namely, readerly engagement with fictional figures, caring for their
fortunes, and sometimes empathizing with their mental states and episodes” (“Cognitive Science,” 285).
19. Hogan, Cognitive Science, 185.
20. For a discussion of this “slaughterhouse of literature,” see Moretti, 207–10.
21. See, for example, the discussion of various hybrid forms of the detective story in
the volume edited by Merivale and Sweeney.
22. Rabinowitz, Before Reading, 211.
23. Of course, my evaluation of “success” and “failure” is open to debate. Sayers’s
experimentation with romance in Gaudy Night has led one critic to pronounce that
Notes to Conclusion: 2
novel “less than successful” (Haycraft, 138) and another to assert that Sayers “has now
almost ceased to be a first-rate detective writer and has become an exceedingly snobbish
popular novelist” (John Strachey; quoted in Haycraft, 138).
24. Jacques Barzun, 150.
25. Compare to Rabinowitz’s excellent discussion of detective-story readers’ “presumption that diverse strand of action will in some way be linked” (Before Reading,
132).
26. Compare to Rabinowitz’s view of the genre “as preformed bundles of operations
performed by readers in order to recover the meanings texts” (ibid., 177).
III: 4
1.
2.
3.
4.
Cawelti, 134.
Ibid., 135.
Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism, 4.
Ibid., 10.
NOTES TO CONCLUSION
Conclusion: 1
1. Iser, 2–3.
2. Booth, “The Ethics of Forms,” 120.
3. Rimmon-Kenan, 117.
Conclusion: 2
1. Palmer, Fictional Minds, 19. Compare to Margolin’s argument in “Cognitive Science,” 272.
2. For a related analysis of the “environment of information” created by cultural representations, see Tabbi, 174.
3. Phelan, Living, 143.
4. For a useful discussion of emergent meaning and cognition, see Mark Turner,
Cognitive Dimensions, 9, 138–43
~
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———. “Satirical Mind Blindness.” Classical and Modern Literature 22.2 (2002):
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———. “Theory of Mind.” Presented as part of the panel, “Who Cares about Literary
Formalism.” New York: MLA, 2002.
Warner, William Beatty. Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1979.
Whitworth, Michael. “Virginia Woolf and Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to
Virginia Woolf. Eds. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000. 146–63.
Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robin W. Winks. Woodstock, VT: The Countryman
Press, 1988. 35–40.
Winks, Robert. “Introduction.” Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed.
Robin W. Winks. Woodstock, Vermont: The Countryman Press, 1988. 1–14.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1971.
Wodehouse, P. G. Author! Author! New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.
Womack, Jack. “Some Dark Holler.” Afterword to William Gibson, Neuromancer. New
York: Ace Books, 2000.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Penguin,
1977–84. Five volumes.
———. Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth, 1976.
———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicholson. London: Hogarth Press,
1975–80. Volume Two.
———. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1981.
Zunshine, Lisa. “Eighteenth-Century Print Culture and the ‘Truth’ of Fictional Narrative.” Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (Fall 2001): 215–32.
———. “Rhetoric, Cognition, and Ideology in Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s 1781 Hymns
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———. “Richardson’s Clarissa and a Theory of Mind.” The Work of Fiction: Cognition,
Culture, and Complexity. Eds. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2004. 127–46.
———. “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness.” Narrative 11.3 (2003): 270–91.
~
Index~
Abbott, Porter, 37
Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart, 61
Aldama, Frederick Luis, 37
Allen, Woody, 171n15
Allingham, Margery, 142; Sweet Danger,
142, 150; The Fashion in Shrouds, 142,
150; Traitor’s Purse, 142, 150
Auden, W. H., 141–42, 179n7
Austen, Jane, 37, 67, 171n15, 178n2;
Emma, 129–30, 159, 178n1; Northanger
Abbey, 175n5; Pride and Prejudice, 5,
18–20, 61–63, 66, 72, 80, 82; 90,
131–32, 173n1, 173n3, 175n5; Mansfield Park, 113; Persuasion, 63–64, 66,
146–47
Asperger syndrome, 7, 12, 167n2, 168n6.
See also autism
Auerbach, Erich, 19, 39, 169n16, 171n14
autism, 4, 7–12, 167n24, 168n1, 168n2,
168n3, 168n4, 168n5; spectrum of, 8,
12; and fictional narrative, 8–12. See
also Asperger syndrome
awareness of our cognitive functioning,
17–18; and jokes, 18
Barrett, Clark H., 166n12
Barthes, Roland, 66, 71, 174n3
Barzun, Jacques, 125, 180n24
Belton, Ellen R., 63, 64, 121, 174n4, 177n2
Benjamin, Walter, 38, 171n8
Beowulf, 5, 66, 72, 73–75
Bleuler, Eugen, 166n9
Bloom, Paul, 166n11, 169n12
Blythe, Ronald, 86, 175n3, 178n1
Booth, Wayne, 20–21, 80, 161, 169n17,
169n18, 169n19, 175n2, 180n2
Bowers, Toni, 176n2
Boyd, Brian, 101–2, 103, 167n18, 176n3,
176n4
Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 37
Brook, Andrew, 166n81, 168n9, 168n10
Bruner, Jerome, 172n3
Butte, George, 28, 37, 171n6, 171n15,
175n1
Byrne, Richard, 166n3
Carey, Susan, 170n3
Carroll, Lewis, 105
Carruthers, Peter, 17–18, 167n22, 168n1,
168n2, 168n3, 168n4, 168n5
Cawelti, John, 123, 153–55, 178n5, 180n1,
180n2
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 19,
75–77, 82
Barchas, Janine, 176n1
Baron-Cohen, Simon, 4, 7, 9, 53, 54,
166n4, 166n6, 166n8, 166n10,
166n14, 168n1
Index
Chandler, Raymond, 159, 169n2; “Pearls
Are a Nuisance,” 132; The Long GoodBye, 140, 152; The Big Sleep, 140, 152;
Playback, 140; Poodle Springs (with
Robert B. Parker), 140–41, 149
Charney, Joyce, 126, 178n5
Chekhov, Anton: Tri Sestry, 23, 170n3;
Chaika, 23, 170n4, 170n5
Christie, Agatha: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 123, 124, 138; Murder on the Orient Express, 132, 148
Clark, Andy, 167n24
cognitive approaches to literature, 5,
153–55, 172n9; and their relationship
with other critical paradigms, 5, 25,
36–40, 100, 165n4; and interdisciplinarity, 43–44, 165n6; and historicizing,
126–28, 154–55, 159, 161–62
cognitive constraints, 14, 16, 59–60; as a
guarantee of ongoing literary experimentation, 149, 155; in culture, 154–55
cognitive uncertainty (or cognitive vertigo),
31, 56, 82, 86, 92, 104, 124, 176n8
Cohn, Dorrit, 117–18, 169n6, 169n2,
177n25
Colley, Linda, 71
Conan Doyle, Arthur, 178n2
Cosmides, Leda, 4, 48, 51, 52–54, 60, 66,
67, 68, 69–70, 170n3, 172n2, 172n5,
173n9, 173n10, 173n11, 173n12,
173n14, 173n15, 173n1, 173n3,
174n5, 174n1, 174n11. See also John
Tooby
Crane, Mary Thomas, 37, 177n12
Cuddon, J. A., 174n2
Culler, Jonathan, 77, 175n1, 177n1
its credo of “suspecting everybody,” 131,
133; Emma (Austen) as a detective
novel, 129–30; its treatment of material
clues, 133–38; its treatment of liars,
130–133; its emergence in the nineteenth century, 133–34; history of, 138;
and strategic mind-concealment,
138–41; and romance, 141–53
Dewey, Margaret, 167n2
DiBattista, Maria, 172n16
Dick, Susan, 171n13
Dickens, Charles: Our Mutual Friend, 131
domain specificity, 170n3
Doody, Margaret Anne, 172n5
Dostoyevski, Fedor: Crime and Punishment,
56–58, 61, 75, 76
Dreher, Sarah, 149–50; Stoner McTavish,
143, 152; Something Shady, 143, 150,
152
Duckworth Publishers, 38
Dunbar, Robin, 4, 11, 28–29, 41, 43, 44,
166n13, 170n1, 170n2, 170n3, 179n7
Easterlin, Nancy, 14, 37, 168n4, 171n1
Eaves, T. C. Duncan, 176n1
Edwards, Derek, 174n12
Eliot, George: Middlemarch, 131, 176n7
Fforde, Jasper: The Eyre Affair, 143
fictional narrative as a cognitive experiment,
22–27, 41–43, 74–75, 125, 127,
148–49
Fielding, Helen: Bridget Jones: The Edge of
Reason, 169n11
Fielding, Henry, 175n1; Tom Jones, 169n13
Firth, Colin, 169n11
Fish, Stanley, 14–16, 168n7, 168n8,
168n11
Fludernik, Monika, 37, 42–43, 77, 169n2,
172n8, 175n2, 175n1, 176n8
Foucault, Michel, 66, 81
Friends, 11, 30–31
Frith, Christopher, 55, 90, 173n4, 173n5,
173n6, 173n7, 173n8, 176n5
Frith, Uta, 167n2, 167n3, 168n2
Damasio, Antonio, 146, 173n19, 179n14
Dames, Nicholas, 173n1
Dannay, Frederick, 142
Dasser, Verena, 166n3
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders, 37; Robinson
Crusoe, 68, 70
Dennett, Daniel, 8, 12, 28, 39, 41, 44,
166n4, 168n2
detective narrative, 5, 121–53; and
metarepresentational framing, 128–153;
Genette, Gerard, 169n2
Index
Gilgamesh, 38
Gomez, Juan, C., 166n3
Goncourt, Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de,
and Jules Alfred Huot de, 142
Gopnik, Alison, 166n1, 168n2
Grafton, Sue, 140, 149; “P” Is for Peril, 143
Grandin, Temple, 9, 11–12
Grazer, Gigi Levangie: Maneater, 144, 145
Grisham, John, 35
Grosz, Elizabeth, 36
Dove, 20–21, 24, 161, 169n17, 169n18;
The Awkward Age, 23–24; The Golden
Bowl, 24; What Maisie Knew, 24; The
Portrait of a Lady, 163, 164
James, P. D., 73; An Unsuitable Job for a
Woman, 139, 149; Shroud for a Nightingale, 139–40; The Black Tower, 162; A
Time to Be in Earnest, 178n1
Johnson, Samuel, 42, 43, 160
Kanner, Leo, 166n9
Kaplan, Bruce Eric, 29
Kenney, Catherine, 178n1
Kijewski, Karen: Alley Kat Blues, 143, 152
Kimpel, Ben D., 176n1
Klein, Stanley, 172n7, 172n8, 173n2, 173n3
Kuiken, Don, 168n4
Haddon, Mark: The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time, 12, 168n5
Hammett, Dashiel, 142, 149; Maltese Falcon, 4, 150–52, 169n2
Happe, Francesca G. E., 167n2, 168n6
Harris, Paul, 41, 44, 166n9
Hart, F. Elizabeth, 36, 171n4, 178n6
Haycraft, Howard, 126, 138, 142, 179n6,
179n9, 179n23
Hayles, H. Katherine, 14, 168n5
Hecataeus, 69
Heliodorus: An Ethiopian Romance, 41,
172n5
Hemingway, Ernest, 37, 169n2; A Farewell
to Arms, 22–23
Herman, David, 37, 167n20, 171n5,
172n3, 176n7
Hernadi, Paul, 38, 166n18, 168n1,
171n10, 178n3
Hirschfeld, Lawrence, 166n12
Hitchcock, Alfred: Vertigo, 152, 171n15
Hoffman, E. T. A.: Kater Murr, 41, 44
Hogan, Patrick Colm, 37, 146–47, 166n18,
168n6, 171n4, 171n9, 172n4, 174n2,
178n3, 179n14, 179n15, 179n16,
179n17, 179n18, 179n19
Hogarth Press, 38
Homer: The Iliad, 38, 60
Hughes, Claire, 166n9
Lanser, Susan, 80–81, 174n7, 174n13,
175n5, 175n6, 175n7
Latour, Bruno, 174n12
Leblanc, Maurice: “The Red Silk Scarf,”
128, 134–38, 164
Lee, Hermione, 165n1
Lee, Manfred B., 142
Lennox, Charlotte: The Female Quixote,
75–76, 77, 174n2
Leslie, Alan, 167n22, 168n1
Little Red Riding Hood, 20, 66
Lloyd, G. E. R., 69, 174n9, 174n10,
174n14
Lodge, David, 178n3
Margolin, Uri, 37, 78, 169n6, 170n4,
175n3, 179n18, 180n1
Mayer, Robert, 174n6
McCourt, Frank: Angela’s Ashes, 78
McEwan, Ian: Atonement, 174n2
McHale, Brian, 173n2
Meltzoff, Andrew, 168n2
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 171n15
Merivale, Patricia, 177n26, 179n21
metarepresentationality, 4–5; its possible
evolutionary history, 7; definition of, 47;
and inferential processes, 48–51;
144–46, 172n4; and distinction between
episodic and semantic memories, 51–52,
implied author, 79–82
Iser, Wolfgang, 161, 180n2
Ishiguro, Kazuo: The Remains of the Day,
78–79
James, Henry, 11, 167n23; The Wings of the
Index
55; and constant monitoring and
reestablishment of boundaries of truth,
52–53; and distinction between “history” and “fiction,” 5, 65–73; its relationship with ToM, 53, 54; and amnesia, 54–55; and autism, 54–55; and
schizophrenia, 54–55, 90, 91, 112; and
degrees of metarepresentational framing,
65, 80, 82, 103, 129, 131; in detective
stories, 128–53; and emotions, 147,
163–64; and genre, 153. See also sourcemonitoring
Miall, David, 168n4
Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 85
mind-reading ability, 4, 6–10, 12, 15–16;
its possible evolutionary history, and the
issue of “effortless” mind-reading,
13–16; failure of, 13, 29, 59, 89; adaptations for, 16–18, 144–45, 152;
involved in courtship, 144–46, 148;
involved in avoiding predators, 144–46,
148; in Clarissa (Richardson), 84–85,
159; in Lolita (Nabokov), 103–12, 159;
in detective stories, 133–35, 138–39,
143–46; mind-reading hierarchies in
detective stories featuring romance,
145–53; and genre, 153. See also Theory
of Mind (ToM)
Mitchell, Robert W., 98–99, 173n1, 175n4,
176n6
modernism: in The Blank Slate (Pinker), 40;
as experimenting with our cognitive
adaptations, 42, 174n1
Moretti, Franco, 153, 179n5, 179n20
Mudrick, Marvin, 169n10
Murray, Stuart, 168n5
Origgi, Gloria, 7, 166n7
Ousby, Ian, 143,179n12
Palmer, Alan, 11, 19, 37, 42, 80, 159, 164,
166n5, 167n23, 169n6, 169n14,
169n15, 169n1, 169n2, 172n7, 175n1,
175n4, 176n7, 177n1, 180n1
Paretsky, Sara, 149; Bitter Medicine, 130,
140, 143, 152; Burn Marks, 140, 143;
Total Recall, 143
Parker, Robert B.: Poodle Springs (with Raymond Chandler), 140–41, 149
Pasternak, Mariana, 58, 59, 60
Perry, Menakhem, 177n1
Phelan, James, 19, 25, 40, 43; 78–79,
113–17, 169n8, 169n9, 170n7,
172n17, 172n10, 174n2, 175n4,
175n5, 175n6, 175n7, 175n8, 175n9,
175n10, 175n11, 175n5, 177n15,
177n16, 177n17, 177n18, 177n19,
177n20, 177n21, 177n22, 177n23m
177n24, 177n2, 178n5, 180n3
Piaget, Jean, 166n9
Pinker, Steven: The Blank Slate, 4, 40–41,
43–44, 172n1, 172n2; How the Mind
Works, 167n21, 178n3
Plain, Belva, 38; Evergreen, 21
Pleistocene, 7
Plomin, Robert, 166n9
PMLA, 41, 172n3
Poe, Edgar Allen, 142; “The Purloined Letter,” 125–26, 127
Potter, Jonathan, 174n12
Premack, David, 166n3
“primacy effect,” 177n1
Prince, Gerald, 80, 175n1
Nabokov, Vladimir, 11, 77; The Eye, 118;
Lolita, 5, 21, 76, 78, 82, 89, 100–118,
124, 132, 159, 161, 164, 176n9,
176n10; Pale Fire, 65, 75, 82, 118; The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 118; Strong
Opinions, 102
New Yorker, The, 29, 31, 58
Nunning, Ansgar, 77, 80, 175n1
Rabinowitz, Peter, 102, 150, 169n12,
170n6, 176n5, 176n6, 176n9, 176n10,
177n11, 179n22, 180n26
reader-response theory, 160–61, 165n1
Richardson, Alan, 37, 38, 165n4, 171n3,
171n11, 172n9, 178n1
Richardson, Samuel, 73; Clarissa, 5, 11, 76,
82–101, 105, 112–13, 124, 161, 164,
175n1, 176n1, 176n2; Pamela, 161
Richetti, John, 176n2
Oatley, Keith, 146
Index
Brodie, 21
Spelke, Elizabeth, 170n3
Sperber, Dan, 6, 7, 47, 48, 53, 54, 165n7,
166n7, 172n1, 172n4, 173n14
Spolsky, Ellen, 37, 59, 155, 165n5, 165n6,
167n22, 167n24, 168n4, 168n5,
168n1, 171n7, 173n2, 178n3, 178n6,
180n3, 180n4
Spring and Autumn Annals, 68
St. Augustine: Confessions, 60
Starr, Gabrielle, 37
Steel, Danielle, 38
Steen, Francis, 38, 171n11, 174n1
Sternberg, Meir, 165n3, 167n20
Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy, 41, 42,
43, 44, 177n14; A Sentimental Journey,
113, 177n13
Stewart, Martha, 58, 59
Stiller, James, 170n2
Strachey, John, 179n23
Sutton, John, 165n2
Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth, 177n26, 179n21
Symons, Julian, 179n10
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 177n1, 180n3
Ross, Don, 166n2, 168n9, 168n10
Roth, Philip: Portnoy’s Complaint, 21
Routley, Erik, 122, 177n3, 179n11
Ryan, Marie-Laure, 170n9, 170n10
Sabor, Peter, 176n1
Sacks, Oliver, 9, 53–54, 166n15, 166n16,
166n17, 168n3, 173n17, 173n18
Saved by the Bell, 11
Sayers, Dorothy, 121, 131, 177n1; Gaudy
Night, 132, 142–43, 150, 179n23
Scarry, Elaine, 37, 170n8
Schneider, Ralf, 170n10
Schor, Hilary, 173n3
Shakespeare, William: Romeo and Juliet, 9,
101
Shikibu, Murasaki: The Tale of Genji, 60
Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, The, 81
Sophocles: Oedipus, 127, 178n5
source-monitoring, 4–5; definition of, 47;
hypothesized lack of, 48–50; and storing
information under advisement, 50–54,
64, 123–24, 129, 132; and “Death of
the Author,” 66–67, 72, 81; and unreliable narrators, 76, 77–79, 86, 112–18;
and implied author, 79–82; and emotions, 163–64; in Pride and Prejudice
(Austen), 61–62; in Persuasion (Austen),
63–64; in Pale Fire (Nabokov), 65; in
Beowulf, 73–75; in Paradise Lost (Milton), 85; in detective narratives,
123–53; its failure of in patients with
autism, amnesia, and schizophrenia,
54–56; its everyday failures, 58–60; its
failure in Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevski), 56–58, 75; in Don Quixote
(Cervantes), 75, 76; in Clarissa
(Richardson), 76, 85–86, 93–101; in
Female Quixote (Lennox), 75, 76; in Pale
Fire (Nabokov), 75, 76; in Lolita
(Nabokov), 76; in The Remains of the
Day (Ishiguro), 79; in Atonement (McEwan), 174n2. See also
metarepresentationality
Spark, Muriel: The Prime of Miss Jean
Tabbi, Joseph, 165n6, 174n1, 180n2
Theory of Mind (ToM), 4, 6–8, 10, 15–16,
59; and false-belief test, 8–9; and pretense, 8, 17; and literary narrative, 5,
12, 18–20; and literary genre, 5, 27,
161; and literary aesthetics, 20–21, 34;
and theater, 23; as stimulated by fictional representations, 24–25, 82, 99;
and fictional descriptions of nature,
26–27; and pathetic fallacy, 26–27; and
anthropomorphizing, 26–27, 77–78; as
a cluster of specialized adaptations
geared toward various social contexts, 8;
fictional experimentation with, 22–36,
141, 143, 148–49, 154–55; and levels
of intentionality, 28–33, 39, 73, 88–89,
130–31, 159, 170n2; and oral culture,
38; and its relationship with metarepresentationality, 53, 54, 60; and genre,
153, 161; of the reader, 20–21, 159,
161; of the author, 159–61; and readerresponse theory, 160–61; and emotions,
163–64; and “deep intersubjectivity”
Index
(Butte), 171n15. See also mind-reading
Thomas, Ronald R., 126, 133–34, 135,
178n3, 178n4
Thucydides, 69, 71–72
Tolstoy, Lev: War and Peace, 60
Toobin, Jeffrey, 58
Tooby, John, 4, 48, 51, 52–54, 60, 66, 67,
68, 69–70, 170n3, 172n2, 172n5,
173n10, 173n11, 173n12, 173n14,
173n15, 173n1, 173n3, 174n5, 174n1,
174n11. See also Cosmides, Leda
Torey, Zoltan, 53–54
Tsur, Reuven, 17–18, 169n6, 169n7
Tulving, Endel, 172n6
Turgenev, Ivan: On the Eve [Nakanune], 26
Turner, Mark, 166n18, 180n4
Vermeule, Blakey, 37, 170n8, 171n2,
175n1, 179n5
Volkmar, Fred, 176n1
Voltaire: Zadig, 127
Warner, William B., 175n2
Whiten, Andrew, 166n3
Whitworth, Michael, 171n12
Wilson, Edmund, 179n13
Winks, Robin W., 179n13
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 172n4
Wodehouse, P.G., 160
Womack, Jack, 125, 178n4
Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway, 3, 4, 11,
14, 22, 27, 31–35, 36, 39, 43, 47, 73,
130, 131, 159, 162, 164, 165n1,
171n14; Diary, 38–39; Jacob’s Room, 39;
To the Lighthouse, 171n14
Woolgar, Steve, 174n12
Wordsworth, William: Prelude, 26
unreliable narrator, 76–79; in Lolita
(Nabokov), 76, 101–18; in Pale Fire
(Nabokov), 76; in Clarissa (Richardson),
76, 86, 93–101
Zunshine, Lisa, 170n3, 174n8
Zuozhuan, 68–69, 72
Vanity Fair, 109
Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
JAMES PHELAN AND PETER J. RABINOWITZ ,
Series Editors
Because the series editors believe that the most significant work in narrative studies today contributes both to our knowledge of specific narratives and to our understanding of narrative in general, studies in the
series typically offer interpretations of individual narratives and address
significant theoretical issues underlying those interpretations. The series
does not privilege one critical perspective but is open to work from any
strong theoretical position.
Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject
ELANA GOMEL
I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll
Flanders to Marnie
GEORGE BUTTE
Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure
DEBORAH A. MARTINSEN
Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms
ROBYN R. WARHOL
Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist
Utopian Fiction
ELLEN PEEL
Telling Tales: Gender and Narrative Form in Victorian Literature
and Culture
ELIZABETH LANGLAND
Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject
DEBRA MALINA
Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames
EDITED BY BRIAN RICHARDSON
Invisible Author: Last Essays
CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE
Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy
KAY YOUNG
Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis
EDITED BY DAVID HERMAN
Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation
PETER J. RABINOWITZ
Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
DANIEL W. LEHMAN
The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel
DAVID H. RICHTER
A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity
SHLOMITH RIMMON-KENAN
Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology
JAMES PHELAN
Misreading Jane Eyre: A Postformalist Paradigm
JEROME BEATY
Psychological Politics of the American Dream: The Commodification
of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature
LOIS TYSON
Understanding Narrative
EDITED BY JAMES PHELAN AND PETER J. RABINOWITZ
Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the
Victorian Novel
AMY MANDELKER