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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

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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.

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