Cognitive Approaches to Victorian Studies
Science and Literature Session, 2003 NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association) Annual Convention
Organized by Suzanne Keen, Washington and Lee University
- "Wave-Theories and Affective Physiologies: The Cognitive Strain in Victorian Novel Theories," Nicholas Dames, Columbia University.
An account of the origins of Anglo-American and French novel theory in mid-Victorian experimental physiology, which provided literary critics of the time (G.H. Lewes, E.S. Dallas, Hyppolite Taine) with a theory of the novel genre based on the cognitive responses of its readers; and an account of the gradual dissociation of novel theory from scientific psychology, which entailed the disappearance of the reader from later canonical theories of the novel. [N.D.]
- "George Eliot's Embodied Mind," Kay Young, University of California, Santa Barbara.
If the finitude of experience necessarily divides one mind from another, the expanses of the imagination open a space of transport to carry one mind to another, to make one mind not only knowable to another but subject to metamorphosis by virtue of that knowing. My paper explores how George Eliot uses metaphor in Daniel Deronda to embody a space for the imaginations of her characters, readers, and herself to meet, mingle, and metamorphose. Metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson assert in their Philosophy in the Flesh and Metaphors We Live By, create concrete spaces of understanding for our abstractions to dwell and reveal the embodied nature of our minds. I've discerned something like ten ways in which Eliot uses metaphor in Deronda to move one mind to another. I'll present these categories of what I call "modal slide" in order to assert my fundamental claim: Eliot comes to metaphor in Daniel Deronda, which means comes to embody minds through the imagination, in response to the deepest longing of her writing--to transcend the terror of separateness. [K.Y.]
- "Victorian Reading Comprehension," Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
This paper opens a dialogue between two fields that have remained largely isolated: the scientific study of reading comprehension and the history of reading. Although major trends in contemporary work on reading comprehension cannot simply be injected into the history of reading, they provide a vantage for assessing and modifying the historical examination of reading strategies. I will concentrate on what was for many Victorians the occasion for the most notorious breakdown in their comprehension strategies: the poetry of Robert Browning. Reactions to his poetry reveal how hegemonic reading strategies largely inherited from eighteenth-century pedagogy collided with new strategies fostered by the Victorian proliferation of print media. [A.E.]