Abstract:This introductory essay examines the questions that recent cognitive approaches to reading and literature have raised about modern fiction’s so-called inward turn and reviews the ways in which the contributions to the issue respond to them. The plural Cognitive Modernisms in the issue’s title calls attention to the epistemological multiplicity of modernism’s cognitive turn. A unifying theme of the contributions, across their methodological and theoretical differences, is that a focus on cognitive processes, guided by scientific terms and concepts, can illuminate the epistemological, aesthetic, and social workings of style.
{"title":"Cognitive Modernisms: An Introduction","authors":"P. Armstrong","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0043","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This introductory essay examines the questions that recent cognitive approaches to reading and literature have raised about modern fiction’s so-called inward turn and reviews the ways in which the contributions to the issue respond to them. The plural Cognitive Modernisms in the issue’s title calls attention to the epistemological multiplicity of modernism’s cognitive turn. A unifying theme of the contributions, across their methodological and theoretical differences, is that a focus on cognitive processes, guided by scientific terms and concepts, can illuminate the epistemological, aesthetic, and social workings of style.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85817396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Focusing on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, this essay historicizes the treatment of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, demonstrating how Conrad anticipated our current understanding and treatment of the illness. The second part of the essay addresses Nostromo’s treatment of historiography. Part three is concerned with epistemology and the relationship between neurological discoveries concerning the gap between perception and consciousness, relating those discoveries to Conrad’s use of delayed decoding.
{"title":"History, Cognition and Nostromo: Conrad’s Explorations of Torture, Trauma, and the Human Rage for Order","authors":"Richard J. Ruppel","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0050","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Focusing on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, this essay historicizes the treatment of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, demonstrating how Conrad anticipated our current understanding and treatment of the illness. The second part of the essay addresses Nostromo’s treatment of historiography. Part three is concerned with epistemology and the relationship between neurological discoveries concerning the gap between perception and consciousness, relating those discoveries to Conrad’s use of delayed decoding.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90888207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article compares Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! in terms of what their experiments with narrative telling can reveal about the impact of race on cognition. Bringing these novels into conversation with recent neuroscience on the predictive brain, and the pioneering cognitive, phenomenological work of Black feminist critic Sylvia Wynter, the essay addresses the current lack of attention to race in cognitive literary criticism. It argues that Faulkner and Morrison not only use telling to portray the cognitive habits of racism, but also to experiment with new ways of imagining beyond them.
{"title":"What Is Telling? The Racial Dimensions of Narrative and Cognition in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy","authors":"Austin Lillywhite","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0049","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article compares Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! in terms of what their experiments with narrative telling can reveal about the impact of race on cognition. Bringing these novels into conversation with recent neuroscience on the predictive brain, and the pioneering cognitive, phenomenological work of Black feminist critic Sylvia Wynter, the essay addresses the current lack of attention to race in cognitive literary criticism. It argues that Faulkner and Morrison not only use telling to portray the cognitive habits of racism, but also to experiment with new ways of imagining beyond them.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77465953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Interrogating concepts of memory at the interfaces of literary and cultural studies and the cognitive sciences, this essay calls on the paradigmatic modernist Gertrude Stein. Stein’s sense of cognitive processes as repetition with variation—or insistence, as the author put it—not only highlights the value of the term seriality for an understanding of memory in both fields. Quite surprisingly, the author’s very resistance to memory closely relates to current notions, in cognition research, of how memory works: as a mode of perception that remembers forward rather than backward and that is highly dependent on forgetting.
{"title":"Memory as Seriality: Re-cognizing Gertrude Stein","authors":"S. Sielke","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0047","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Interrogating concepts of memory at the interfaces of literary and cultural studies and the cognitive sciences, this essay calls on the paradigmatic modernist Gertrude Stein. Stein’s sense of cognitive processes as repetition with variation—or insistence, as the author put it—not only highlights the value of the term seriality for an understanding of memory in both fields. Quite surprisingly, the author’s very resistance to memory closely relates to current notions, in cognition research, of how memory works: as a mode of perception that remembers forward rather than backward and that is highly dependent on forgetting.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85032506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, consciousness occurs as a dynamic cognitive event in such sensorimotor and psychophysical interactions as stumbling on uneven cobblestones, swallowing a dunked madeleine, or shaking hands with a member of the Guermantes clan. Gestures, such as a handshake, are a paramount focus of attention in La Recherche. Owing to Proust’s intensely kinesic style, they are multimodal and involve readers’ kinesthetic knowledge, kinesic intelligence, and active cognitive participation.
{"title":"Marcel Proust: Kinesic Styles and Consciousness as Interaction","authors":"G. Bolens","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0044","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, consciousness occurs as a dynamic cognitive event in such sensorimotor and psychophysical interactions as stumbling on uneven cobblestones, swallowing a dunked madeleine, or shaking hands with a member of the Guermantes clan. Gestures, such as a handshake, are a paramount focus of attention in La Recherche. Owing to Proust’s intensely kinesic style, they are multimodal and involve readers’ kinesthetic knowledge, kinesic intelligence, and active cognitive participation.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75379470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay analyzes aesthetic response in Leïla Sebbar’s Shérazade, using cognitive analyses of the sister arts and processes of visual perception to describe how ekphrasis enacts a drama of self-fashioning for an Algerian girl in a French museum. Sebbar’s rendering of Matisse’s Odalisque à la culotte rouge [Odalisque in Red Trousers] foregrounds the emulative and transformative aspects of imagery. Rather than casting Shérazade’s gaze as a purely oppositional one (a refusal of Orientalist fantasy), this essay shows how Sebbar’s heroine redeploys the painting as a charged space of cohered artistic vision that draws its power from the moving images produced by kinesis.
{"title":"Moving Visions: Matisse’s Odalisques, Sebbar’s Shérazade, and Imagery as Emulation","authors":"M. Hulstyn","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0048","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay analyzes aesthetic response in Leïla Sebbar’s Shérazade, using cognitive analyses of the sister arts and processes of visual perception to describe how ekphrasis enacts a drama of self-fashioning for an Algerian girl in a French museum. Sebbar’s rendering of Matisse’s Odalisque à la culotte rouge [Odalisque in Red Trousers] foregrounds the emulative and transformative aspects of imagery. Rather than casting Shérazade’s gaze as a purely oppositional one (a refusal of Orientalist fantasy), this essay shows how Sebbar’s heroine redeploys the painting as a charged space of cohered artistic vision that draws its power from the moving images produced by kinesis.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77707280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
of existence. The final fiction revolves around the slow demise and eventual death of the messianiclike child, David, who at the start leaves home to join an orphanage. Here, the figure of the orphan joins those of refugee and gypsy, as explored in the first two fictions, to further consolidate the sense of absolute homelessness. This condition is fundamental to Heidegger’s account of the meaning of being and the death as the source of our fundamental “‘Un-zuhause,’ not-being-at-home” (11) in the world. Although Pippin’s focus is thematic rather than formal, by eschewing bold claims for erudite excavations, he manages to avoid the pitfalls of an allegorical or “critical” (1) reading (a term much contested in recent literary studies). Although the reader might be left pondering what the politics or ethics may be of the final and elusive sense of “homecoming” (128), Pippin is an adept (and accessible) surveyor, and there is no doubting the solidity of the foundations he lays out. It will be for other scholars, however, to now attempt to contextualize the trilogy in relation to Coetzee’s other works (beyond Elizabeth Costello), and to give some further weight to Pippin’s claims regarding the existential seriousness of Coetzee’s writing (he briefly notes as a background context the Australian migrant crisis, but one wonders how it may be possible to connect the trilogy’s philosophical insights into a broader framework for thinking through Coetzee’s relation to the Global South). Minor quibbles aside, the book is testament to Pippin not only as a thinker but as a reader of distinguished quality.
{"title":"Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century by Pallavi Rastogi (review)","authors":"Lucky Issar","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0037","url":null,"abstract":"of existence. The final fiction revolves around the slow demise and eventual death of the messianiclike child, David, who at the start leaves home to join an orphanage. Here, the figure of the orphan joins those of refugee and gypsy, as explored in the first two fictions, to further consolidate the sense of absolute homelessness. This condition is fundamental to Heidegger’s account of the meaning of being and the death as the source of our fundamental “‘Un-zuhause,’ not-being-at-home” (11) in the world. Although Pippin’s focus is thematic rather than formal, by eschewing bold claims for erudite excavations, he manages to avoid the pitfalls of an allegorical or “critical” (1) reading (a term much contested in recent literary studies). Although the reader might be left pondering what the politics or ethics may be of the final and elusive sense of “homecoming” (128), Pippin is an adept (and accessible) surveyor, and there is no doubting the solidity of the foundations he lays out. It will be for other scholars, however, to now attempt to contextualize the trilogy in relation to Coetzee’s other works (beyond Elizabeth Costello), and to give some further weight to Pippin’s claims regarding the existential seriousness of Coetzee’s writing (he briefly notes as a background context the Australian migrant crisis, but one wonders how it may be possible to connect the trilogy’s philosophical insights into a broader framework for thinking through Coetzee’s relation to the Global South). Minor quibbles aside, the book is testament to Pippin not only as a thinker but as a reader of distinguished quality.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74123959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"American Exceptionalism as Religion: Postmodern Discontent by Jordan Carson (review)","authors":"C. Douglas","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87474606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
achieving the American dream and individual self-realization through material and economic gain by suggesting “the more a Chicanx believes in American exceptionalism, the further she is from spiritual fulfillment” (94). Twenty-nine works are abbreviated in the beginning of the book, which gives one the sense of the broad overview scope of a book that often spends only several pages on individual novels. If there is a downside to this approach, the brevity comes at the cost of sustained argument about individual texts and contributes to the sense we have by the end of the book that its illuminating discussions about American exceptionalism, the American dream, and Manifest Destiny are sometimes only somewhat loosely connected. The lack of a separate conclusion at the end of the book likewise weakens its larger sustained argument about its overall project. But the individual readings are rewarding and fair-minded throughout, contributing to our sense that the literature of what Charles Taylor calls our “secular age” (qtd. in Carson 23) should best be thought of in Taylor’s terms of pluralization of belief options rather than the older notions of decay or disappearance.
{"title":"Metaphysical Exile: On J. M. Coetzee's Jesus Fictions by Robert Pippin (review)","authors":"M. Farrant","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0036","url":null,"abstract":"achieving the American dream and individual self-realization through material and economic gain by suggesting “the more a Chicanx believes in American exceptionalism, the further she is from spiritual fulfillment” (94). Twenty-nine works are abbreviated in the beginning of the book, which gives one the sense of the broad overview scope of a book that often spends only several pages on individual novels. If there is a downside to this approach, the brevity comes at the cost of sustained argument about individual texts and contributes to the sense we have by the end of the book that its illuminating discussions about American exceptionalism, the American dream, and Manifest Destiny are sometimes only somewhat loosely connected. The lack of a separate conclusion at the end of the book likewise weakens its larger sustained argument about its overall project. But the individual readings are rewarding and fair-minded throughout, contributing to our sense that the literature of what Charles Taylor calls our “secular age” (qtd. in Carson 23) should best be thought of in Taylor’s terms of pluralization of belief options rather than the older notions of decay or disappearance.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88644782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets, a comic novel that traces how the global financial crisis contributes to the dissolution of an American family, illustrates an ideological transition from neoliberalism to economic nationalism. The novel explores how both neoliberalism and economic nationalism privatize financial risks for individuals and families by promoting homeownership, reallocating the blame for the financial crisis toward individual consumers, and asserting that financial security and restoration lie in further privatization through disentanglement from the global economy. Ultimately, the novel reveals that both philosophies share emphasis on the responsibility of the private economic actor.
{"title":"\"You Have Fiscal Ebola\": The Privatization of Risk in Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets","authors":"T. Stephens","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets, a comic novel that traces how the global financial crisis contributes to the dissolution of an American family, illustrates an ideological transition from neoliberalism to economic nationalism. The novel explores how both neoliberalism and economic nationalism privatize financial risks for individuals and families by promoting homeownership, reallocating the blame for the financial crisis toward individual consumers, and asserting that financial security and restoration lie in further privatization through disentanglement from the global economy. Ultimately, the novel reveals that both philosophies share emphasis on the responsibility of the private economic actor.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85650476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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