Article ID: CBB606937396

"[Don't] Leave the Science Out": An Argument for the Necessary Pairing of Cognition and Culture (2018)

unapi

This article arises from the experience of having presented research from my literature PhD and being told, by an eminent critic at a literature conference, that he liked my paper but it would be better if I were to "leave the science out." My thesis was interdisciplinary with experimental psychology, reading research on the cognitive workings of memory alongside the poetic engagements with memory offered by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. Though not formally cosupervised, I was often found bending the ears of those in the psychology department or questioning them by email. In the conference paper, I was drawing from the field of social cognition for two reasons: scientific studies demonstrate that people remember others by reducing them to stereotypical features related to their profession; and Thomas Hardy had a career-long habit of individuating characters who might otherwise be consumed into an undifferentiated category, such as "labourers."1 For the literary critic in question, these two modes of thinking through the same questions bore no relation to one another.

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Authors & Contributors
Green, Elspeth
Anderson, Penelope
Laetitia Rimpau
Guichard, Luis Arturo
Shaw, Lytle
Chico, Tita
Journals
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Victorian Studies
Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period
Publishers
Universitätsverlag Winter
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Colorado at Boulder
St. John's University (New York)
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
Northern Illinois University
Concepts
Science and literature
Poetry and poetics
Literary analysis
Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge
Physics
Natural philosophy
People
Hardy, Thomas
Mayer, Bernadette
Richards, Ivor Armstrong
Coolidge, Clark
Brontë, Charlotte
Williams, William Carlos
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
Early modern
Ancient
18th century
Modern
Places
Hellenistic world
Mediterranean region
United States
Egypt
Alexandria (Egypt)
Great Britain
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