Surface, depth, and the spatial imaginary: A cognitive reading of the political unconscious

Representations

Volumn 108, Issue , 2009, Pages 76-97

  Crane, Mary Thomas ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 70350360004     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.76     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York, 1999)
2. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus, 2006)
3. Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New York, 1996)
4. For a useful survey of cognitive approaches to literature, see Alan Richardson, "Studies in Literature and Cognition: A Field Map," in Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky, eds., The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (Aldershot, 2004), 1-30
5. Richardson and Spolsky, preface to The Work of Fiction, vii-ix
6. Bruce Smith, review of Word vs. Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare's England by Ellen Spolsky, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (Winter 2008): 509-13, here 510
7. In The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, 1981), Fredric Jameson speaks of "a method whereby the 'false' and the ideological can be umasked and made visible" (53). His theoretical argument attributes this power to unmask to the critical method, but, as we shall see, his language often speaks as if it is the reader who has the power
8. Richardson and Spolsky, The Work of Fiction, 1
9. For an account of this historical trajectory in cognitive science, see Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, 1997)
10. See also the introduction to Mary Crane, Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, 2001), esp. 10-13
11. See John R. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1995)
12. See Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley, 1969)
13. Eleanor Rosch, "Principles of Categorization," in Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd, eds., Cognition and Categorization (Hillsdale, NJ, 1978)
14. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization, 40-47
15. Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1994)
16. See Jean Mandler, "How to Build a Baby: II. Conceptual Primitives," Psychological Review 99, no. 4 (1992): 587-604
17. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago, 1987), 271-86
18. Mandler, "How to Build a Baby," 591-92. I'm paraphrasing from Crane, Shakespeare's Brain, 8
19. Mandler, "How to Build a Baby," 598; quoted from Crane, Shakespeare's Brain, 9
20. Lakoff, Women, Fire, xiv
21. Crane, Shakespeare's Brain, 9
22. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980), 46-48; 101-5
23. For a history of cognitive approaches to the unconscious, see John F. Kihlstrom, "The Cognitive Unconscious," Science 237, no. 4821 (September 18, 1987): 1445-52
24. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York, 2000), 228
25. Kihlstrom, "The Cognitive Unconscious," 1448. I'm relying on a summary of Kihlstrom's three stages, which clarifies and condenses his argument
26. in Joel Weinberger and Joshua Weiss, "Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Conceptions of the Unconscious," in Dan J. Stein, ed., Cognitive Science and the Unconscious (Washington, DC, 1997), 45
27. Weinberger and Weiss, "Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Conceptions," 45
28. See Jean Aitchison, Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1994), 24-25, for descriptions of such "priming" experiments
29. For an early attempt to reconcile cognitive and psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious, see Jean Piaget, "The Affective Unconscious and the Cognitive Unconscious," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 21 (1975): 249-61
30. Dan J. Stein and Jeffrey E. Young, "Rethinking Repression," 147-75, in Stein, Cognitive Science, have argued that Freud's concept of repression is, in fact, based on a "folk theory" of mind that is both productive and erroneous
31. George Lakoff, "How Unconscious Metaphorical Thought Shapes Dreams," in Stein, Cognitive Science, 89
32. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (1901) rev. ed. (London, 1960), 6:61
33. Aitchison, Words in the Mind, 18-19
34. Arthur Reber, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (Oxford, 1993), 23
35. See, for example, readings of cognitive metaphor such as Donald C. Freeman, "'Catch[ing] the Nearest Way': Macbeth and Cognitive Metaphor," Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995): 689-708
36. Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Integration and the Mind's Hidden Complexities (New York, 2003), as well as the works by Scarry, Zunshine, and Spolsky already cited
37. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 5, emphasizes the lack of "sensuous content" in a literary text whose "tactile features are limited to the weight of its pages, their smooth surface, and their exquisitely thin edges."
38. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley, 1967), who argues that the realistic novel is "distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually affords both to the individualization of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment" (18)
39. Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago, 1998), traces the social conditions that contributed to a new sense in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that literary characters should have interior depth. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, in Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton, 1983), argues that novelistic realism is dependent on the representation of identity from multiple perspectives, revealing "a hidden dimension of depth" (4)
40. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "The Character in the Veil: Imagery of Surface in the Gothic Novel," PMLA 96 (1981): 255-70, argues that the gothic novel uses imagery of surfaces to suggest that "individual identity, including sexual identity, is social and relational rather than original or private" (256)
41. A doctoral dissertation by Jules Law, "Surface and Depth: Metaphors for Meaning in Dickens, Conrad, and Joyce" (PhD diss., The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1983), argues that Romantic poetry and Victorian novels use metaphors of surface and depth to convey significant aspects of character and feeling
42. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 28
43. Philip Rollinson, Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture (Pittsburgh, 1981), 3
44. and also Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 263
45. The dative feminine of allos forms an adverb, alle, which means "in another place, elsewhere" Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, 1871), s.v. "Allos."
46. From On the Trinity 15.9, as cited in Rollinson, Classical Theories of Allegory, 52. Rollinson argues that Augustine does not view allegorical interpretation as involving the discovery of hidden meanings because he believed that God caused the events of the Old Testament to happen as they did in order to convey spiritual meanings relevant to Christianity. These meanings were not hidden, but were manifest in the text
47. Whitman, Allegory, 63. Whitman associates Origen's concept of textual depth with the Neoplatonic belief that existence itself has levels (64)
48. Latin text of Aquinas is from Summa Theologiae (Ottawa, 1953), 1.1.9-10. English translation is from Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York, 1946), 1.1.9-10
49. From Erasmus, De Copia, in Craig R. Thompson, trans., Literary and Educational Writings 2: De Copia/De Ratione Studii, in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, 1978), 24:639
50. John Foxe, Pandectae locorum communium (London, 1585), A2v
51. See my discussion of these passages and this metaphor in Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993), 58-59
52. See Crane, Framing Authority, for a more extended account of this educational method and its centrality to concepts of reading and writing in sixteenth-century England
53. Walter J. Ong, SJ, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, 1958), argues that both logic and rhetoric underwent spatialization and visualization during the late middle ages and early Renaissance
54. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, 1980), 737-38
55. Enrique Lima, "Of Horizons and Epistemology: Problems in the Visuality of Knowledge," Diacritics 33 (2003): 1. Lima links the concept of the "horizon" in Renaissance painting and twentieth-century German thought
56. Ermarth, Realism and Consensus, 17-19
57. See Henry Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580-1630 (Oxford, 2006), 155-65
58. for an analysis of the ways in which a changing use of stage space was implicated in a shift from "emblematic" to "realist" drama. See Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1995)
59. G. B. Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1996)
60. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition of the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1978), who argues that the rear of the stage was the location for representational scenes, while the front of the stage was the location for a presentation mode of drama
61. See Alice Jenkins, Space and the "March of Mind": Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850 (Oxford, 2007), 214-32
62. For images of chaos and void space as a means of representing depth and sublimity in early nineteenth-century epic poetry. See Law, "Surface and Depth," 1-114
63. On the connections among the sublime, depth, and intensity in Romantic poetry. Deidre Lynch, "Matters of Memory: A Response," Victorian Studies 49, no. 2 (2007): 237, notes that Victorian readers often viewed Romantic poetry as "a privileged locus for a depth of feeling without counterpart in the contemporary [Victorian] world."
64. Lynch, Economy of Character, 135-37
65. Lynch cites Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford, 1991), 223-24, who argues that critics began to look for motivations for Shakespearean characters "concealed from and mystified by its surface."
66. Law traces the demise of this sense of depth in the modernist novel - he argues that Joyce's fiction is "an extended critique of the notion of depth" (215), but sees a concomitant rise in images of depth found in philosophical and psychological writing. See J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality (Cambridge, MA, 1965), 9, for the argument that "dimensions of depth" disappeared in twentieth-century art
67. Frederic Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject," Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 338-95
68. Lima, "Of Horizons," 19, connects the horizon in Renaissance pictorial perspective with the concept of horizon in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and reader-response theory in twentieth-century German thought. Although he doesn't mention Jameson, Jamesonian horizons are clearly related to this tradition