Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular MindThis book is a study of the relation between cognitive linguistics and literary theory. Theory of literary interpretation is reinterpreted in terms of current debate in cognitive science. While research in the humanities and social sciences is reasonably concerned with charting the power of culture to structure and constrain, Spolsky suggests that it is worthwhile to investigate the role of biological materialism as co-legislator of human life and understanding. The inevitable slippage we have come to acknowledge between words and the world has at least an analogue, and presumably also a source, in the workings of the human brain. |
Contents
Minds Modules and Models | 19 |
The earliest and strongest version of the modularity hypothesis | 20 |
Jackendoffs modularity theory | 23 |
The visual and the language modules | 26 |
Gardners modularity theory | 30 |
The crucial recognition of failure | 31 |
Parallel distributed processing models | 32 |
Edelmans Neural Darwinism | 34 |
Advantages and risks of multiple coding | 127 |
Immobile and Immortal in the Monument of Literary History | 133 |
The conservatism of the experienced reader | 147 |
The link between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance | 148 |
Spearings dignity conditions and alterity conditions | 150 |
The Bloom connection | 153 |
Writing Literary History Neoclassicism Modularity and the New Histories | 159 |
Viewercentered and objectcentered understanding | 161 |
Dennetts gappy consciousness | 37 |
Summing up and hedging | 39 |
New Genres American Autobiography | 43 |
Western American autobiography | 47 |
The category fits the time | 54 |
New Inferences Reading Hamlet and the Politics of Genre | 61 |
Resisting genre | 67 |
Categorization and inference | 73 |
Women Readers and Womens Rules | 83 |
Fetterleys reading and Fetterleys rule | 84 |
Gilberts reading without Fetterleys rule | 93 |
Leaving room for the improbable | 104 |
Intermodular Competition Transformation and Inference | 111 |
Metaphor and vision | 116 |
Preference rules | 120 |
Speakercentered vs public language | 165 |
Interaction of the objectcentered and the viewercentered | 172 |
Leaving space for the other | 174 |
New historical criticism | 177 |
Listening to others | 184 |
The Dynamic of Freedom and Compulsion | 191 |
The inevitability of contradiction | 194 |
A Summary of the possibilities for change in the modular mind | 201 |
Building culture into the survival of the species | 204 |
Resisting reading | 205 |
Notes | 209 |
221 | |
241 | |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic rule American autobiography analogy Antony and Cleopatra argues argument assertion Bloom's brain Cambridge canon Canterbury Tales categorization judgments Cavell Chaucer claim Cleopatra cognitive conceptual conditions of significance context Cox's creativity crucial cultural describe distinction Dover Wilson edited Eleanor Rosch essay evidence example feminist criticism Fetterley Fetterley's Fodor function gaps genre Gilbert gradient necessary condition Hamlet Harold Bloom historians historical rule human ideology inevitable inferences innovation interpretation Jackendoff kind Krupat language linguistic literary criticism literary history literary system literary texts literary theory literature logical match meaning medieval metaphor mind modularity hypothesis modularity of mind Moran Muscatine Neural Darwinism object-centered perspective poet poetry possibilities produce Ray Jackendoff readers reading relationship Renaissance representation resistance revenge tragedy Robertson Silas Marner social Spearing Spolsky structure suggests theory tion tragedy transformation typicality conditions understanding University Press viewer-centered vision visual module women writing
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