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Work in cognitive neuroscience over the past two decades suggests that
psychic structures and functions may show a significant degree of uniformity
across cultures and over time. However, an equally significant role
has been left for the shaping and attunement of the human psyche within
a specific sociocultural environment, not to mention the effect that the
dominant understanding of the psyche within a given cultural moment would
have upon the interpretation of mental life (whatever its given or invariant
aspects). Literary historians have as yet made only scattered attempts
to begin gauging the significance of this interplay of cognitive universals
and cultural difference, as can be seen in the work of Revuen Tsur and
David Hermann, though Ellen Spolsky has made a more thorough attempt to
relate findings and speculation from cognitive neuroscience to the discipline
of literary history itself. Psychologists like David Rubin and psychiatrists
like Kay Jamison have made contributions of their own, but with little
or no reference to poststructuralist work in literary history. Looking
at work-in-progress by Mary Crane on Shakespeare (particulary her forthcoming
article on Measure for Measure) and describing my own book-in-progress
on British Romantic culture and the brain, I will outline two related attempts
to pursue literary scholarship with both historicist and cognitive-neuroscientific
research and paradigms in mind.
Alan
Richardson is Professor in the Department of English at
Boston College.
