IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB606937396

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

Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Volume: 26
Issue: 3
Pages: 303-310
Publication date: 2018
Language: English

DOI: 10.1353/con.2018.0026

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/698846

Outside Links

WorldCat

JSTOR

Science and literature Poetry and poetics Literary analysis Psychology Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge Frost, Robert Hardy, Thomas

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.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB606937396

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Thesis Elizabeth Badolato; (2018)
Identity and Morality in a Finite-Infinite World: Redefining Infinity in Nineteenth Century Novels

Thesis Waters, Mark V.; (2002)
Relativity and quantum paradigms in the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost

Thesis Seimiya, Michiko; (2006)
Darwinism in the Art of Thomas Hardy

Article Rafał T. Prinke; Mike A. Zuber; (2020)
'Learn to Restrain Your Mouth': Alchemical Rumours and their Historiographical Afterlives

Book Peter Middleton; (2015)
Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After

Article Tita Chico; (2017)
Putrefaction as Optical Technology

Book Laetitia Rimpau; (2021)
Visionen Neuer Wissenschaft: Zur Dialogischen Dichtung Von Dante Alighieri Und Johannes Kepler

Thesis Kristen Tapson; (2017)
Joint Experiments: Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, and the Coproduction of Knowledge

Thesis Whitney Sperrazza; (2017)
Perverse Intimacies: Poetic Form and the Early Modern Female Body

Thesis Matthew Robert Sherrill; (2016)
Forms of Life: Evolution and Poetic Form in the British Long Nineteenth Century

Thesis Julie Mccormick Weng; (2016)
Irish Modernism and the Machine

Thesis Kurtis Hessel; (2017)
Poetry and Chemistry, 1770-1830: Mingling Exploded Systems

Thesis Elspeth Green; (2019)
Popular Science and Modernist Poetry

Article Daniel Aureliano Newman; (2018)
Narrative: Common Ground for Literature and Science?

Article Jameson Kısmet Bell; (2024)
A Literary Landscape of Istanbul: Possibilities of Interdisciplinary Criticism

Article Henchman, Anna; (2008)
Hardy's Stargazers and the Astronomy of Other Minds

Thesis Malane, Rachel Ann; (2004)
“Sex in Mind”: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences

Thesis Frederickson, Kathleen; (2008)
The Content of Instinct: Fiction, Liberalism, and the Sciences of Sexuality,1870--1900

Chapter Laura Miguélez-Cavero; (2014)
Nonnus' Natural Histories: Anything to do with Dionysus?

Chapter Mariarosa Pugliarello; (2015)
"Ad rivum eundem". Paesaggio e spazio nelle favole fedriane