Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 3
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The Art and Science of Literary Study / Jamie Carr
Abstract: The discipline of literary studies has recently gained powerful allies in the sciences and popular media. Scholars in the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience and cognitive psychology, have newly taken up literature's defense, conducting empirical studies to prove that literature has value-particularly researching whether fiction reading produces empathy. Both the media reports, and the empirical studies themselves, however, fail to acknowledge a long history of literary criticism and theory that articulate similar claims. Implicit in this subtext, is the privileging of empirical over interpretive or theoretical ways of knowing. In this discourse, literary criticism is broadly criticized for its variability and ambiguity. This essay explores convergences between the claims of literary theory and findings in cognitive research regarding the reading process and its effects, particularly immersive fiction reading and the experience of empathy, and points to the potential limits of scientific study for apprehending the full experience of immersion in a text.
Keywords: Literature; Culture Studies; Science and Technology
"Reading literary fiction improves empathy, study finds" - The Guardian
"For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov" - The New York Times blog
<1> The discipline of literary studies has recently gained powerful allies in the sciences and popular media. Scholars in the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience and cognitive psychology, have newly taken up literature's defense, conducting empirical studies to prove that literature has value-particularly researching whether fiction reading produces empathy. These studies have received a great deal of public attention, with articles appearing in international media outlets from The New York Times to The Malaysian Insider. Frequently cited is York University psychologist Raymond Mar, whose work inspires such articles as: "Why reading fiction may just make you a better person" (The Globe and Mail) and "Can fiction stories make us more empathetic?" (medicalexpress.com). Similarly, the work of cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley has received much attention, with his blogs and articles on the emotional affects of reading, including empathy, appearing in such sources as The Huffington Post and Scientific American. Perhaps the most noteworthy news in this vein appears in this headline in Scientific American: "Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy," which reports on the study by social psychologists Emanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd who found, importantly, that reading literary fiction fosters cognitive empathy, or 'Theory of Mind.'
<2> The work of Mar, Oatley, Castano and Kidd, among other cognitive scientists, as well as that of literary scholars who advocate for a scientific approach to literary study, is useful for what it contributes to the field of literary studies, particularly at a time when the humanities more generally have lost significant funding and support due to a presumed lack of "practical" value against high costs of a college education and resulting professionalization of programs. To produce empirical evidence that fiction reading is 'good for you' is, arguably, a good thing for the field of literary studies. To have evidence that there is such a thing as 'literariness' is, also arguably, a good thing as the majority of U.S. states have adopted the Common Core curriculum, which, as Castano and Kidd point out "controversially calls for less emphasis on fiction in secondary education" (4). Too, for those critical of literary studies' seeming shift from formalist questions in favor of poststructuralist concerns with subjectivity and con/textuality, literary fiction - or "the classics" or canon - and thus its study, is regaining a former distinctiveness that has, presumably, been distilled by the discipline itself. As literary scholar David Miall puts it, "Given the rejection of literariness by recent literary theorists, these two questions ["What is literary reading, and is it possible to distinguish it from other kinds of reading?"] are critical for the future of literary studies" ("Empirical Approaches" 291). Miall's work is central to this discussion as he is a prolific proponent of scientific studies of literature; has undertaken to analyze such a thing called 'literary language' and its effects on the reading process and the reader; and is a critic of postructuralist theory's impact on the discipline. Miall's concerns are shared by literary scholar Paul Armstrong who claims that neuroscience can help literary studies return to the types of 'core' questions from which the discipline has moved since the 1960s with the critical theory and subsequent cultural studies 'turns.'
<3> What reports of empirical studies in mainstream media convey, however, is the belief that these are indeed 'novel' discoveries. Both the media reports, and the empirical studies themselves, fail to acknowledge a long history of literary criticism and theory that articulate similar claims. Implicit in this subtext, is the privileging of empirical over interpretive or theoretical ways of knowing. That is to say, scientific or experimental methods with quantifiable outcomes are given more validity in the public imagination than are centuries of reflective thought, theorization and debate about the definition and function of literature and interpretations of individual works, authors, genres and language.
<4> Mainstream media is not solely to blame for the privileging of experimental over interpretive scholarship, then. Since the 1980s, what has come to be called the "cognitive turn" in literary studies, or neurocriticism (the terms neurohumanities and neuroaesthetics are broader markers of this turn), has produced promising, but nevertheless problematic, interdisciplinary work. Cognitive literary criticism values the integration of the sciences into literary study and further seeks to utilize empirical methods to analyze reader's experiences of literature. Of concern here is not the interdisciplinarity of literary study and scientific study; indeed, each has the potential to provide new insights to the other into human emotions, thought patterns, behaviors, and the like. But much of this work is not multidirectional. Literary theory has long concerned itself with the interior or subjective experience of reading, what happens in the mind of the reader and how reading literature affects our emotions, beliefs and attitudes. Literary theory, and reader response theory in particular, provide a foundation for the above approaches to literary study, and there are several correspondences between the findings of literary theory and empirical research. Nevertheless, the contributions literary theory might make to understand a reader's experiences are overlooked in the empirical approaches by those outside the discipline of literary studies, and certainly by the popular media. Moreover, literary scholars who wish to advance a scientific approach to literature are skeptical of the interpretive approach to literary studies, which is broadly criticized for its variability and ambiguity. What is of concern here, then, is the devaluation of literary studies in empirical studies of reading; in media reports of these findings; and in cognitive approaches to literary criticism, often by literary scholars themselves.
<5> In what follows, I explore convergences between the claims of literary theory, particularly reader response theory, and findings in cognitive research regarding the reading process and its effects, particularly around the experience of empathy. Historically, empathy was of central concern to both aesthetics and social science. I illustrate that despite this shared interest, the two fields early on diverged in their understanding of what defines the empathetic experience. Interest in empathy, then as now, centers on transportation into a narrative, what in literary studies is called 'immersion' or absorption and is popularly referred to as getting "lost in a book."[1] I problematize approaches to immersion, pointing to the limits of scientific study for apprehending the full experience of immersion in a text.
<6> Further, I examine the implications of the shift toward, and indeed, privileging of science in the field of literary studies and arguments such as Jonathan Gottschall's in Literature, Science and a New Humanities (2008), "that saving the field of literary study requires moving closer to the sciences" (12). At a time when the discipline of literary studies, like the humanities more generally, has to defend its continued existence, the project undertaken here seems necessary. Scholarship in 'literature and science' and studies of fiction reading may very well have at heart the motivation of at least saving literature, if not of "saving the field of literary study," but their discourse at times speaks otherwise. Indeed, in quantifying the function of literature, empirical study has as other possible effects the reduction of heterogeneity, not only in readers' responses to literature but in which or whose literature is found to produce that function (here empathy). That is to say, the core questions literary studies have long considered: What does literature do? and What is literature?, are indeed being answered by science, in ways that literary studies has previously found problematic.
1. Immersive Reading: The Art and Science of Empathy
"The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
. . . ."
(from: Wallace Stevens, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm")
<7> Wallace Stevens' poem, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," speaks to an experience akin to what empathy once was, Einfühlung, or 'feeling into.' So wholly immersed is the reader in the book in Stevens' poem that the surrounding environment stills and quiets. A transition takes place as the reader 'feels into' the book. The physicality of the book disappears "as if there was no book." In this immersive experience, the night, which has taken on human-like qualities, becomes a broader consciousness inclusive of reader, book and world. The words the reader 'hears' spoken in this consciousness belong neither to book nor to reader but to both. In this empathetic 'exchange,' meaning is thus constituted. The poem thus concludes: "The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: / The access of perfection to the page" (11-12).
<8> What empathy is and how it is produced is not a new discussion among humanists and empiricists. As a formalized concept, the first discussions of empathy are attributed to sources in aesthetic theory in the late 18th century as a form of "feeling into," referred to then as Einfühlung -though it has been argued that the sensations Einfühlung expresses can be traced back as far as Aristotle (Pinotti 93-94; Edwards 269, 271; Nowak 302). The German philosopher and literary critic Johann Gottfried Herder is understood to be the first to write explicitly ofEinfühlung as an aesthetic experience that indicated knowing or a form of knowledge (Koss 139; Edwards 270-271). As a Romantic concept, Einfühlung first applied to the contemplation of the landscape. 'Feeling into' entailed the projection of human qualities onto nature by recognizing similarities between the perceiving subject and the observed object, as Herder argued:
'. . . the more thoughtfully we observe . . . effective forces in nature, the
less we can avoid everywhere feeling similarity with ourselves,
enlivening everything with our sensation. . . The sensing human being
feels his way into everything, feels everything out from out of himself.'
(qtd. in Edwards 272).
The self 'feels into' the object through the senses and emotions as an embodied experience. Einfühlung was also a cognitive experience, however, particularly in the transition from experiencing nature to immersion in works of art; 'feeling into' was held by Herder to be necessary to the act of "interpretation of texts, cultures, history" (Nowak 303).[2] Einfühlung thus involved a complex immersive sensorial, affective, cognitive and aesthetic response to an object in a hermeneutic method of understanding.
<9> Herder's theory was nevertheless critiqued contemporaries for its subjectivity and relativism as well as its potential for sentimentality and sympathy, though it did influence other aesthetic theorists (Edwards 273). By the mid-nineteenth century the focus of Einfühlung thus shifts from knowledge of the object to the subject (the viewer) as art viewing came to be understood as an embodied experience in which the viewing subject 'feels into' an image kinesthetically (Koss 141; Edwards 274). By the end of that century, embodied perception was of interest to philosophers and social scientists alike, and the viewing subject soon became an object of empirical analysis. It was a psychologist who translated and indeed transformed Einfühlung into 'empathy' in 1909 (the American Edward Titchener) (Edwards 276).
<10> Studies were subsequently conducted on how viewers perceived a work of art. As with the current trend in the scientific study of literature, psychologists a century ago sought evidence to arrive at a universal truth of what Einfühlung is and how it was produced, critiquing the foundation of a theory of empathy based on individual aesthetic experiences - the experience of a single viewer/theorist with the luxury to contemplate an art object in solitude. David Miall's recent call for an empirical turn in literary studies makes a similar critique with regard to literary theory. "What distinguishes empirical studies, as the name suggests," Miall writes,
is a serious commitment to the examination of reading and the testing
of hypotheses about reading with real readers; and this differentiates
it clearly from the reader-response studies of the last thirty years.
("Empirical Approaches" 307; emphasis added)
Miall's differentiation between the presumably less "serious" commitment and examination of reader-response studies to empirical studies that make use of "real readers" echoes that of his scientific predecessors. Despite their work with 'real' readers, however, these early researchers encountered inconsistent results, and empathy was not pursued as an area of research for much longer. (Koss 144) Specifically, researchers discovered that one could experience empathy without being immersed in an aesthetic object or that one could have an aesthetic experience without feeling empathy. (Koss 145)[3]
<11> In the early decades of the 20th century, Einfühlung was criticized in psychology circles as too introspective and subjective a method, as Laura Hyatt Edwards notes:
The Einfühlung concept, now empathy, became synonymous with an amalgam of
terms for unscientific subjective methods, including intuition, understanding,
sympathy, Verstehen, and insight. (277)[4]
Perhaps not surprisingly, a resurgence of interest in empathy occurred after the Second World War when psychologists sought to understand what made some choose to help Jewish victims escape Nazi persecution. The aesthetic conception of empathy as a method - a way of experiencing a text - thus gave way to empathy as a human quality in psychological discourse, a conception still largely in place today (Edwards 270).
<12> Contemporary empirical studies of fiction reading are concerned not with Einfühlung as a way of knowing but with empathy as a quality of both the reader and the text. Fiction thus gets defined as a vehicle through which we can 'simulate' action and emotion.[5] When fictional characters experience something, we can imagine it, or even feel it. Since the discovery of "mirror neurons" in the brain, which allow us to simulate a perceived action by another, neuroscientists have been able to show that fiction reading produces empathy.[6] Through such technologies as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), mirror neurons and neurons in the language and motor cortex can be seen to 'fire' when we encounter language that evokes actions, feelings or touch. These results lay a foundation for the types of measurements cognitive psychologists use to assess empathy and Theory of Mind, which, as Patrick Colm Hogan points out, are "two of the most influential concepts in literary neurocriticism" (301). Theory of mind is an area of research in developmental psychology that involves "perspective-taking and mentalizing," in which "our own mind imagines - becomes an aspect of - someone else's mind" (Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams " 40). Theory of Mind is considered cognitive empathy, sometimes called "mind reading." Affective empathy may be inferential, inferring what someone else is feeling; a form of emotional contagion such as feeling what someone else is feeling; or empathic concern, feeling for another or concern for another's well-being. Cognitive psychologists utilize a number of scales to measure the emotional and imaginal effects of reading, including the Empathic Concern Scale (Davis, 1980), the Transportation Scale (Green and Brock, 2000), and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Baron-Cohen, 2001), as well as the Big Five Inventory (dimensions of personality; John and Srivastava, 1999) and the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), among others. Participants' self-reporting on these questionnaires are tabulated to illustrate the enhancement, or not, of mind-reading or empathic concern as an effect of reading certain types of texts. Both affective and cognitive empathy are considered simulative, that is, "imagining oneself in the other person's place" (301), perhaps well exemplified by Walt Whitman's claim in Song of Myself: "I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person." Recent findings have demonstrated that it is fiction, and particularly literary fiction, that can effect Theory of Mind and empathy, more so than non-fiction or popular fiction (genre fiction).
<13> The implications of making value judgments from these findings aside for the moment, the studies involved in this research have drawn importantly on the psychological concept of 'transportation,' which bears affinities with empathy's earlier figuration as Einfühlung, though this concept is not acknowledged. Rather, understanding of transportation draws heavily on psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock's work on transportation into narrative. Green and Brock conceptualize transportation as "a distinct mental process, an integrative melding of attention, imagery, and feelings" ("The Role of Transportation" 701). It is, more specifically, "a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative" (701). Green, Chatham and Sestir further describe transportation as "a state of cognitive, emotional, and imaginal [sic] immersion in a text" in which readers "may lose track of time, fail to notice events going on around them, and experience vivid mental images of settings and characters" (37-38), and Bal and Veltkamp indicate, "a loss of self-awareness may take place" (3). In transportation, the reader loses "access" to reality both physically and psychologically - not noticing what is going on around them, for instance, losing track of time, and even becoming "less aware of real-world facts that contradict assertions made in the narrative" (702). Cognitive psychology recognizes transportation then as an embodied experience as much as an emotional and cognitive one, not unlike Einfühlung.
<14> Transportation is nevertheless understood in cognitive psychology as having a simulative and affective function. For example, the Transportation Scale devised by Brock and Green includes statements such as: "While I was reading the narrative, I could easily picture the events in it taking place"; "I could picture myself in the scene of the events described in the narrative"; and "I had a vivid mental image of [character name]." These statements encourage the reader to imagine or to identify with plot, setting and characters, but it is far from clear how these mental images are evoked, whether they depend on descriptive or figurative language, other elements of style, the reader's preceding experiences with literature to say nothing of life, the work's context, and so on. In other words, scientific studies reduce individual difference in the ways readers respond to literature and delimit the nature of what literature is. Though the reference to imagery in the above empirical definition suggests a focus on aesthetic elements, the studies conceptualized here do not attend to the full range of aesthetic features that constitute a literary work. Literature is reduced to a work that produces "simulation," at least for those readers transported into the work.
<15> In addition to assessing effects on the imagination, transportation is likewise assessed for its effects on a reader's emotions. Research illustrates that fiction elicits emotion, which facilitates transportation, which elicits emotion, often, empathic concern (see Green et al., and Bal and Veltkamp). As Bal and Veltkamp explain of transportation, "it is not the activity of reading itself that transforms the self, but the emotional involvement in a narrative" (9). Some studies have shown that readers may alter beliefs or attitudes as an effect of transport (Green and Brock; Appel and Richter). Bal and Veltkamp maintain that it is "primarily through emotional transportation that people change" (3). They found that fiction reading, where transportation or emotional involvement takes place, effected "personal change" - the experience of empathy - as compared to non-fiction reading. Alternatively, the study found, low transportation led to less empathy. Similarly, Dan Johnson's study found that, "individuals who were more transported into the story experienced greater affective empathy for the story's characters" (154) and indeed, those "who experienced high levels of affective empathy while reading were nearly twice as likely to engage in prosocial behavior as individuals experiencing low levels of affective empathy" (154). As Miall summarizes,
The absorption we experience while reading may occur in relation to a vividly
imagined setting . . . or the sense of a character's presence . . ., and at times it
may enable us to empathize with the feelings and motives of a character and to
share his or her goals. ("Neuroaesthetics" 240-42)
Transportation, in empirical research, then, broadly gets assessed as a 'mediator' or causality of empathy, effecting 'perspective taking' or 'mind reading' or empathic concern. Neuroscience can call on mirror neurons, motor functions or memory to explain the mind's simulation of a perceived action in a text, and cognitive psychologists can assess readers' emotional involvement and ability to picture characters, scenes and action in a text, but can these mechanisms capture the language and voice of 'the other' that becomes our consciousness when we read? How might science measure the reading experience elaborated in Stevens' poem, in which the reader's consciousness gives way to the book's 'consciousness'? Reader response theory's account of immersive reading has something to offer science's understanding of transportation into a literary work.
<16> The experience of immersive reading articulated by literary theorists shares qualities with that characterized by the cognitive sciences as transportation. Indeed, what reader response theorist Louise Rosenblatt refers to as 'aesthetic reading,' immersion in a text, is much in alignment with Green and Brock's theory of psychological transportation and with early theories of Einfühlung. In aesthetic reading, Rosenblatt writes, "the reader's primary concern is with what happens during the actual reading event" (24).[7] That is to say, the reader's focus is on "the associations, feelings, attitudes and ideas that these words and their referents arouse within him," or, in other words, " on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text" (emphasis original; 25). During this "living through," Rosenblatt notes that one may be "completely oblivious of everything except the printed page. . . Anything else that might enter into awareness-a physical sensation, a noise, will be shut out, as [the reader] attends only to what the symbols before him bring into consciousness" (53). To borrow Stevens' metaphor, the house becomes quiet and the world becomes calm. Rosenblatt's reader is transported into the text. Aesthetic reading is transportation, or immersive reading, the "fusion of thought and feeling, of cognitive and affective, that constitutes the integrated sensibility," that constitutes, that is, an embodied, cognitive and emotional experience or 'feeling into' the work (Rosenblatt 46; emphases added). It is through this 'transaction,' Rosenblatt famously asserts, that 'the poem' is thus constituted.
<17> Literary scholar Sven Birkerts likewise recognizes the physical changes that body and mind undergo when immersed in a literary work, arguing that "[r]eading is not on a continuum with the other bodily or cognitive acts" (80). Physically, Birkerts points out, immersive reading is similar to meditation, in which "the pulse rate and the breathing seems to alter; the interior rhythms are modified in untold ways" (81).[8] No longer are codes in the outside world processed but codes in the world of the book become the focus and reality. Rosenblatt and Birkerts, as much as psychologists Green and Brock and the scientists who draw on their work, share a similar understanding of what 'transportation' is. Where they diverge is in pursuing transportation's effects.
<18> Literary theory elucidates the metaphysical aspects of immersive reading or transportation, asking what happens as the materiality of the book, what once was paper, becomes "a series of words, of images, of ideas" that exist, as French phenomenologist Georges Poulet puts it, in "my innermost self" and are "dependent on my consciousness" for their continued existence and for meaning (42-43). During immersive reading, Birkerts notes, "the buzz of consciousness" or "our own subthreshold murmuring continues but is pushed into the background" (82). Birkerts describes that state in which the voice of the book becomes the voice of one's own consciousness. This notion is different from one's inner voice and the 'voice' or voices we hear when we read silently to ourselves.[9] Poulet puts it this way: "You are inside it; it is inside you. There is no longer either outside or inside" (42). This "feeling into" would seem to unify subject and object - a shared consciousness - in an empathetic gesture. Or, as Poulet further explains, "I am thinking the thoughts of another . . . I think it as my very own" (44)-but there is a distancing effect that takes place as well.
<19> This process of feeling into the work, of feeling into the consciousness of the other, comes "at the reader's expense" as the consciousness of the reader is displaced and even usurped by the text (45). It as if "I did not exist," Poulet thus notes. The book constitutes a "thought which is alien to me and yet in me" and "since every thought must have a subject to think it," this thought "must also have in me a subject which is alien to me" (44). This subject "forms the temporary mental substance which fills my consciousness," making it the "I-subject" (47). Poulet describes here an objectification of the self and a subjectification of "the book," an experience of feeling into the text and according it human qualities and feeling out to reflect back on the self. There is, continues Poulet, "[a]nother I, who has replaced my own, and who will continue to do so as long as I read" (45). Poulet admits the difficulty of understanding this phenomenon of displacement, but it provides a language for understanding how we come to feel for another through transportation:
Reading, then, is the act in which the subjective principle which I call I,
is modified in such a way that I no longer have the right, strictly
speaking, to consider it as my I. I am on loan to another, and this other
thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me. (45)
Poulet can certainly be said to be describing an empathetic experience here-"this other thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me." But in order for that experience to take place, an objectification of the self, a loss of the "I" has to take place-"I no longer have the right . . . to consider it as myI" (45). Poulet's immersion in reading acknowledges, that is, an alienation of the self: "a second self takes over, a self which thinks and feels for me" (45; emphasis added). At the same time, the "work of literature becomes . . . a sort of human being," that is, it comes into existence (45; emphasis added). It is now "a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects" (45). Poulet does not describe here an empathetic experience equivalent to placing one's self in someone else's shoes or feeling for another. Rather, he describes an immersive experience in which reader and book 'live through' one another, a transactional experience similar to that of Rosenblatt's. The reader becomes an object of the book unable fully to express or define the book's subjectivity, which "is exposed in its ineffability and in its fundamental indeterminacy" (49). One can make meaning for a work through formal, biographic, or historical elements, Poulet notes-and I would add, cognitive-but one cannot fully apprehend this other consciousness that lives its life in the mind of the reader. An aspect of immersive reading remains unquantifiable.
<20> In his perception of a shared consciousness of reader and author, Poulet, like Birkerts, characterizes a temporary loss of agency in the experience of immersed reading, which corresponds to findings of neuroscience. Miall points to the work of experimental psychologists Martin H. Fischer and Rolf A. Zwaan's suggestion that, "The mirror neuron appears indifferent to whether an action or feeling is located in another or in the self" ("Enacting the Other" 292). This work correlates as well to that of Becchio and Bertone's, who found that mirror neurons can be activated through a shared representation ("Neuroaesthetics" 243). These scientific explanations help to account for a loss of agency while reading. The implication is that experience "is presented disinterestedly, without being associated either with the self or with the other. . . . In other words, mirror neurons suggest that an action or feeling, at least during the first few hundred milliseconds [of reading], is understood independently of agency" (292). Miall concludes that such work "provides an important new perspective on empathy that may play a role in reader's response to narrative: a reader's sense (albeit fleeting) of a given feeling as prototypical and without agency" ("Enacting the Other" 292). This temporary loss of agency may open a space for empathy.[10]
<21> Why do we choose to experience this loss of agency though? Transportation is effected when, as Birkerts puts it, we willingly "hand over our groundedness in the here and now in order to take up our new groundedness in the elsewhere of the book" (81). What is striking about this 'willing,' Birkerts claims, is that "we must in some way need" this experience-we need immersion; we need the 'elsewhere' because of some "insufficiency either of one's life or of one's orientation toward it" (80). But does this 'need' exist in our conscious or our unconscious state? And, can it be quantified?
<22> Birkerts acknowledges "traditional wisdom about reading" that rationally defines this insufficiency. We read to educate ourselves; to learn moral lessons; to improve our vocabulary; to inspire our imagination; to 'escape' reality; to become "more empathetic" (79). But, Birkerts claims, "the truth lies elsewhere-in a context of self-making that far transcends the imperatives of self-improvement" (79). This self-making "involves a change of state and inner orientation" (80). Here, then, are the significant metaphysical effects of reading, Birkerts asserts, in which we undergo a change in our soul, a secular concept, meant, "to stand for inwardness . . . self-reflectiveness, our orientation to the unknown" (212). This orientation to the unknown resonates with the ineffable experience of living through another's consciousness that Poulet describes.
<23> More than the constitution of the text as an ability to imagine it or even to see another's point of view, immersive fiction reading is "a unique mode of experience, an expansion of the boundaries of our own temperaments and worlds, lived through in our own persons" (Rosenblatt 68). Just as 'the poem' or 'the book' is constituted through the immersive reading experience, so too is the self made and remade. Empirical science can assess self-reported changes in any of the above 'insufficiencies' or effects of reading, such as changes in empathy, but Birkerts' "self-making" may prove less measurable and reproducible. While one may self-consciously undertake to reflect on or remake the self, there is an aspect of which may not be fully intelligible to that self. Literary scholar Cristina Visher Bruns puts it this way: reading "can provide a tangible form for an inner state that may be otherwise inaccessible to conscious experience" (28). What Birkerts identifies as "reposition[ing] the self in order to see differently" (80), or Rosenblatt characterizes as 'expansion,' may move us toward empathy as well as any number of sensorial, affective or cognitive effects evoked by a specific work but may also change us in less identifiable, objective or measurable ways.
<24> Psychologists Emanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd point out that, "there are surely many consequences of reading on cognitive and affective processes that are independent of its effects on ToM [Theory of Mind]" (3). It is not just that fiction is a tool for simulation (call it mimesis or verisimilitude) or a type of narrative that elicits emotions, though a definition of literature may well include both of those. Or, in Rosenblatt's words, "We are not vicarious or substitute Juliets or Leopold Blooms"; literature does not, that is, only provide us with simulative or virtual experiences (68). Castano and Kidd concur: "whereas literary fiction appears able to promote TOM, this capacity does not fully capture the concept of literariness" (3). Suzanne Keen suggests a way forward for the integration of literature and science in this regard. Referring to the work of Miall and Kuiken, which "brings formal traits into conversation with readers' behavior," Keen invites investigation into how and whether " unusual or striking representations in the literary text promote foregrounding and open the way to empathetic reading" (Keen 87; emphasis in original).[11] A more nuanced understanding of transportation might provide the connection between these two pursuits. Another way of putting this is that the effects of immersive reading exceed those that are currently receiving so much attention. And, in my estimation, those expansive effects may not be entirely quantifiable or reproducible.
2. "Literature and Science": An Interdisciplinary Pursuit?
"'This is why I love science,' Louise Erdrich, whose novel 'The Round House' was used in one of the experiments, wrote in an e-mail. The researchers, she said, 'found a way to prove true the intangible benefits of literary fiction.'
'Thank God the research didn't find that novels increased tooth decay or blocked up your arteries,' she added."
- "For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov," Pam Belluck, The New York Times, September 10, 2014
<25> Castano and Kidd are unique in empirical studies of reading because they integrate literary theory to understand the reader's role in the construction and effects of the literary work. The psychologists draw on Roland Barthes's concept of the 'writerly' text, texts that actively engage the reader to comprehend and make meaning for the work as opposed to the passive relation established by the 'readerly' (generally realist) text. Castano and Kidd cite as well Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of polyphonic discourse, the many voices and discourses that make up 'the novel' and which readers must make sense of as much as add their own 'voices' to. Though the researchers do not go on to incorporate readers' experiences of these concepts explicitly into their study, Castano and Kidd do posit these unique characteristics of literary fiction - as writerly and polyphonic - as part of what elicits reader engagement in "psychological processes needed to gain access to characters' subjective experiences" (1), that is to enhance Theory of Mind.
<26> Some of Castano's and Kidd's colleagues in the field of empirical studies of reading, however, neglect the long history of literary studies in asserting the value of reading fiction. Mar, Oatley and Peterson conclude their study thus, for instance:
There is growing evidence that reading narratives, even those explicitly labeled as fiction, is far from a meaningless leisure activity that ends when one closes the cover a book. . . . Several researchers have demonstrated that exposure to narrative fiction can influence attitudes toward various issues. . . . From these findings as well as those reported here and previously . . . , evidence is accumulating that the reading of narrative fiction can have important consequences, whose quality and underlying mechanisms require closer study. (424)
It may well be argued that other social scientists and a broader reading public are the audience for such conclusions and not literary scholars. Surely those audiences read fiction not solely for the purposes of leisure, however. Phrasing that indicates that such results "require closer study" and that "evidence is accumulating" - in the present - suggest that literary studies is not recognized as having contributed already, significantly, to research on the function of literature.[12]
<27> The above conclusions aside, much of the interdisciplinary work currently conducted on literature and cognition in the evolving field of 'cognitive literary criticism' does so, presumably, with the best of intentions, advising scientists and literary scholars to consult each other in the pursuit of knowledge, which they did not do at the start of their pairing thirty years ago. The recent collection Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative (2013) claims a more enlightened, reciprocal practice in the integration of literature and science:
Whereas the first wave of cognitive approaches to narrative mainly imported insights from the cognitive sciences, the second wave has displayed a stronger awareness of the unique qualities of (literary) narratives and their potential value for cognitive research. In other words, second-wave cognitive narrative studies can see more clearly how the study of narratives can enrich theories of the mind. (9)
Despite this acknowledgement, the discipline of literary studies is often rendered secondary, and moreover, in need of science to save it. Literary scholars interested in advancing an empirical agenda take issue with the variability and indeterminacy of interpretive literary criticism. Paul Armstrong argues, for instance, that a "distinguishing feature of literary criticism and literary art . . . is their variability," thus the challenge for neuroscience, is "to account for" this variability (2). Jonathan Gottschall puts it another way: "In my view, the origins of the crisis [in literary studies], and its dogged permanence, are principally traceable to one basic cause: literary scholars only rarely succeed in accumulating more reliable and durable knowledge" (7). Presumably unchanging, reliable and objective, science can provide more lasting, static truths where literary study has failed. This discourse is reminiscent of the charge of subjectivity psychologists once applied to aesthetic conceptions of Einfühlung.
<28> Miall thus argues that empirical studies of reading "have the capacity to take the primary place in defining literary studies, and that this is an approach that would help to clarify the aims and unify the divided nature of current scholarship" ("On the Necessity" 1). That debate and ambiguity ("the divided nature of current scholarship") are taken to be problems in disciplinary research seems ideologically restricting. Indeed, Miall's ideology is clear: science and empirical research can release literary studies from the subjective grip of the interpretive method. "Over the last two centuries," Miall proclaims,
the sciences have emancipated themselves from theological control or
superstition by subjecting themselves to validation by empirical
methods. As astrology was replaced by astronomy, or alchemy by
chemistry, or as evolutionary theory has replaced creationism, despite
last ditch defenses in several jurisdictions in the United States, our
understanding of literary reading will be recast in the light of evidence
gathered from real readers. (44)
That centuries of literary theorists and critics are not considered to be readers whose very theories are based on their experiences of reading is faulty reasoning. Miall's wish for literary study is that it cast off its "superstitious" methods of interpretation, which divide rather than unify the discipline. In his history of the scientific revolution and of western secularization there is little if any room for other ways of knowing - theological, aesthetic, phenomenological. Neuroscience can put an end to the ambiguity that has presumably undone literary study, never mind that what neuroscience cannot 'prove,' for instance, is "why a particular author has been more or less appreciated at particular times and places" (298). Never mind that there may be questions which are irreducible to scientific experiment.
<29> Though such studies claim explicitly or implicitly to be making innovative interdisciplinary forays, they nevertheless uphold traditional binaries privileging quantitative over interpretive methods wherein scientific study gets read as 'reason' and literary study is rendered equivalent to 'superstition.' Literary criticism's divided and presumably unreliable and unvalidated truth claims are deemed invalid as cognitive scientists and others have made of ambiguity and variability a problem to be resolved.
<30> What literary studies has traditionally valued - close attention to denotative and connotative meanings; to the impact of images; to the social, cultural and historical contexts of authors, characters, readers, language and genre; to sentence and narrative structure; to tone, particularly irony; to paradox and ambiguity; to imagined as much as real readers; to ethical effects - in essence, the interrelated questions of what, how and why we read - seem not to be valued in quantitative research. Variability and ambiguity are broadly treated as problems. Literature thus comes to be defined by comparative methods and by the scientists making those comparisons, thereby devaluing the 'particular' truths of literary history. Fiction matters, empirical studies report, and yet as individual works with distinctive stylistic, material and contextual features, they seem not to matter at the same time.[13]
<31> An empirical approach to literary study contracts the possibilities inherent in the interpretive method and reduces ambiguity in literary theory and criticism in an attempt to arrive at verifiable truths about the nature of literature. In the process, what literature is and does is delimited and ultimately devalued. Jonathan Culler provides insight into what may be at stake for the discipline of literary studies. "To ask 'what is literature?'" Culler points out, "is in effect a way of arguing about how literature should be studied" (276). Miall determines that "whether literature can be distinguished is, properly, an empirical question" ("Empirical Approaches" 307). Empiricism, he goes on to argue, will save literature and literary studies by helping it out of a "prison house" of its own making as a presumably "self-regarding" enterprise "cut off from the rest of the world" (309)-a world in which data prevails. To go down this path has the potential of returning to a more homogenous canon in which texts are determined to be of value if they are found to produce empathy-or any quality the cognitivists determine to be worthy.
Notes
[1] This phrase has been used, for example, by psychologist Victor Nell in an empirical study of the 'what,' 'how' and 'why' of pleasure reading, Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure.[2] Laura Hyatt Edwards notes, for instance, that, "The Einfühlung method for generating accurate interpretations was not emotional or sentimental, but involved careful research into the era, physical elements, culture, and many other features of an author's context" (272).
[3] In Empathy and the Novel, Suzanne Keen points to other problems with the association between empathy and aesthetics, particularly in fiction reading. Keen is critical of the reduction of empathy in scientific discourse to role-taking and "prosocial" behavior, pointing out inconclusive research on the relation between the two and several of the methodological flaws in such research. She further discusses the ways empathy can be used to manipulate others. Not all fiction produces good empathy, Keen argues. And, not all empathy leads to the prosocial behavior cognitive scientists want to prove. As Keen puts it, fiction "provides safe zones for readers' feeling empathy without experiencing a resultant demand on real-world action" (4). Bal and Veltkamp echo this finding, claiming that while "fiction is primarily aimed at eliciting emotions," including that of empathy, it is non-fiction that may impose "feelings of obligation" (2-3).
[4] Further, the idea that one may be wholly immersed in an artwork uncritically was another reason why scholars lost interest in empathy by the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on Nietzsche's late 19th-century conceptualization of Einfühlung as a "total immersion" into an art object, Bertholt Brecht disapproved of work that produced such a non-critical, immersive response to art (namely, realist theatre), that he viewed as similar to the absorption of mass audiences in the spectacle of political rallies in Nazi Germany. Abstraction thus became the privileged form for a critical relation to art. (Koss 153)
[5] In "Reading Other Minds: Effects of Literature on Empathy," Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley and Mihnea C. Moldoveanu claim that, "The conception of fiction as a kind of simulation is becoming accepted," (32), citing others who scientifically study literature in support of this definition. Simulation in turn can be defined as "complexes of several processes" akin, the researchers explain, to weather forecasting and climate prediction (31-32). Or, it can be defined as empathy and Theory of Mind, similar to learning to fly a plane through a flight simulator (33). To their credit, the researchers acknowledge that "these characteristics do not offer a definition of fiction, but they do offer a prototype" to investigate how fiction functions (34). Nevertheless, this analogy has the function of limiting the definition of what literature is and what it does.
[6] Giacomo Rizzolatti first identified mirror neurons in 1995 in a study of macaque monkeys who performed the same action, grasping an object that they saw another monkey perform. This imitative action has subsequently been linked to empathy and Theory of Mind (Winerman). On the connection between language comprehension and motor function, see, for example, Zwann and Zwann and Fischer.
[7] Rosenblatt distinguishes aesthetic reading from efferent reading, which might be said to characterize empirical studies of reading. Rosenblatt takes the term 'efferent' from the Latin word "effere," meaning "to carry away" (24). In efferent reading, "the primary concern of the reader is with what he will carry away from the reading" (24)-"the information to be acquired, the logical solution to a problem, the actions to be carried out" (23). Certainly texts read efferently may have what is conventionally accepted as aesthetic language - metaphors, symbols, imagery and the like. Nevertheless, the reader's focus is on what is to be taken away from the reading experience. The methods of empirical studies of fiction can be said to examine reading in this vein.
[8] Miall points out that, "to understand literary reading and the role of empathy in particular, an enactive account involving the body is required-enactive given that the human mirror neuron system appears to simulate in our motor systems and feelings the events, objects, actions, and emotions that we encounter while we read. In this bodily sense . . . the mirror neuron system puts the action on stage, as it were, making us bodily participants in what we read" ("Enacting the Other" 296). Language comprehension has been found to correlate with motor function during reading, but physical changes have also been found to take place while reading, such as increased heart rate and sweating while reading suspense novels. See, for instance, Auracher (2006.)
[9] Studies of silent reading have demonstrated, for example, corresponding activity in the visual and aural cortices of the brain, which help to explain why we 'hear' a voice when we read silently: "Silent reading not only engages language processes for evaluating meaning (semantics) and grammar (syntax), but also voice sensitive and affective regions in the brain" (Petkov and Belin).
[10] Another way of thinking about loss of agency is through Norman Holland's explanation that when we are transported into a literary work, "we shut down our action systems" because we know we cannot act on it; further, we "stop testing the reality or probability of the representations (346-48). Holland makes several assumptions about this process, however, including, "When we turn to literature, we expect to gain pleasure without doing anything to gain it," and "we enjoy literature because we have mimicked the kind of successful achievement of goal-SEEKING that we do in every day life," assumptions that homogenize readers' reasons for and responses to literary works.
[11] See for example, Miall and Kuiken's 1998 study, "Shifting Perspectives: Readers' Feelings and Literary Response."
[12] What is more, a remarkable trend in research on fiction reading is the absence of sustained reading experiences and the lack of print culture in favor of more fragmented reading experiences: reading excerpts and short stories and reading in digital environments. Researchers seek to evaluate the role of fiction reading on the brain's cognitive functioning, and yet the subject itself - reading - becomes a secondary activity. In the study "Becoming a Vampire Without Being Bitten: The Narrative Collective-Assimilation Hypothesis," for instance, psychologists Shira Gabriel and Ariana F. Young examined the ways that fiction reading produces connection to others through a merging of self with characters vis-à-vis a need for "collective identification." Specifically, the researchers sought to determine student readers' identification with vampires and wizards through reading passages from Harry Potter and Twilight to determine one's need to belong to a social group and whether reading fiction facilitates group affiliation. The method used to determine literature's usefulness consisted of reading only a single chapter from each of the novels, however.
Bal and Veltkamp's study similarly asked participants to read a chapter of a novel and a short story, this time from a computer screen, but the study does not question or account for whether and how transportation might occur differently when reading in a digital environment, that is, whether this medium can itself effect a loss of self-awareness, as Anne Mangen has shown in The Impact of Digital Technology on Immersive Fiction Reading. For Mangen, immersion in a print text depends on the reader's own mental and cognitive abilities-one's use of imagination, fantasy and interpretation, Mangen refers to this as phenomenological immersion, and is closely linked to the types of reading experiences outlined above. When reading digital texts, however, immersion is controlled - that is "created and sustained by" - the technology itself, by its features and devices, the graphical user interface - or that which "is being displayed on the computer screen" (21, 10). This technological immersion refers to that produced by computer simulations, virtual reality and video games in which the technology not only mediates the experience but often becomes foregrounded in the experience.
[13] Virginia Richter makes a similar and noteworthy point in, "I cannot endure to read a line of poetry," when she asks, "Is this turning away from the formal features of texts a symptom of an underlying dislike of literature, akin to the older Darwin's aversion against Shakespeare?" Richter goes on to suggest: "This is not simply a matter of personal predilection but reflects the changes in literary studies regarding its object of research. If researchers and teachers have lost their interests in texts, how can students be motivated to engage with complex and challenging readings? What needs to be addressed by the discipline is not only the question of methodology, but the issue of motivation and of affect, positive and negative, towards the object."
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