10/22/07 Zunshine, “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of FictionalConsciousness”• no new readings Wednesday; come prepared to define your own position on the issueswe’ve been discussing. Do bring Richter, because I’ll probably talk about what a survey ofsources is using examples from the anthology.• paper 2: what kind of topic?• start with your interests and/or with what bothers you• try to get as quickly as possible to a question or a problem rather than just a topic.“Ideology” is such an huge and amorphous thing that it’s impossible to know whereto begin with it; “how is it possible to analyze ideology, given that any analysis ofideology would itself be ideological?” gives you some direction.• the narrower the better, so long as it’s big enough for you to find sources. “What isa valid interpretation?” is too big; “Is it legitimate or necessary to try to determineauthorial intention in a reading of a text?” is at least narrow enough for a startingpoint, although even that would be something you would want to narrow down.• at this point you want to be thinking primarily about your general topic rather thanthe specific sources you will use. But you do need to look ahead far enough toconsider whether you can fulfill the assignment with the topic you choose. Theassignment calls for your argument to be based upon “a survey of relevant theoreticalwritings on the topic.”• So, first, off, there have to BE relevant sources on your topic, which is to say thatyou shouldn’t choose a topic that’s so esoteric that no one has written about it.• And, second, you need to choose something about which there are “sources,”plural, not just a single source. In other words, this should be a research paper,NOT a response paper using a single source.• That doesn’t mean that you can’t write about a topic that is generallyassociated with a single source, just that if you do, it has to be something thathas been discussed outside that single source.• On the other hand, you don’t want to pick a topic that has so many relevantsources that it will be impossible to do justice to them in a summary. If you findyourself in this position, the solution is usually not to abandon the whole topic,but rather to narrow your focus.• One way to think about what you’re aiming for: a paper which makes an originalcontribution to an ongoing discussion. You want to put enough sources in play toshow the general parameters of what’s been said about a topic, in such a way as toleave yourself room to make an original contribution.• For the first day of this thread, I had you read Richter on the traditional way ofcategorizing theories: mimetic (relation of text to world), expressive (author), rhetorical(reader) and formalist (text itself). In Plato, we had a theory that purported to be mimetic(in that it assessed poetry on its accuracy of representation of the world), although it is alsostrongly rhetorical (in that it deplores poetry’s effects on the reader. Freud’s theory isexpressive, in that it is concerned primarily with why authors write, but also slightlyrhetorical, in that it talks about how readers can enjoy fantasies in the writing of others.Lukács’ theory is rhetorical in its focus on the effects literature has on society (readers), butmimetic in its emphasis on texts being able to represent society in a certain way. In otherwords, we’ve covered all the bases except the formalist, and we’ve seen that before as well:Cleanth Brooks, even Derrida.• Today, however, we have something different: call it a “biological” theory. Zunshine isan example of a theorist working with cognitive science and literature. Cognitivescientists are interested in how brains, or sometimes other thinking things, function; socognitive literary theorists start with the presumption, as Mark Turner puts it in ReadingMinds, “A human being has a human brain in a human body in a physical environmentthat it must make intelligible in order to survive” (17). Cognitive theorists then go on toask how literature fits into that fundamental picture. How do brains work such that theycan make and understand literature? What part has literature, or its component parts likemetaphor and narrative, played in the survival of the species, and therefore what have ourbrains evolved to do?• In calling this a different kind of theory, I’m not saying that it doesn’t fit into the model.Actually, it has something to say about all of them. But I do think that in general its viewof the purpose of literature is somewhat different. Expressive theorists tend to think thatthe purpose of literature is to allow the author to release something or to work somethingout emotionally. Rhetorical theorists tend to think the purpose of literature is to makereaders better in some way, or to make society better. Cognitive theorists assume that thefundamental purpose of literature is to help human beings survive. See 1100, Hernadi: “Hargues…men and women.”• Cognitive science is a huge terrain with immense gaps between fields, and as such canbe seen as having layers, with the bottom layer being the most physical and brain-basedand the top layer being the most abstract and mind-based. At the bottom, you havepeople working on the physical structures and processes of the brain--figuring out howneurons work, how they connect, on so on. At this level a lot is known about physicalproperties, but there’s no clear tie to any particular thought process. Higher up you havestudies on what parts of the brain are involved in what cognitive processes. This levelstraddles the line between the mind and the brain. Higher up you have empiricalobservations about how minds work. The presumption at this level is that these processesare anchored in the brain somehow, but no one really knows how. Still more abstract aretheories about how minds work that aren’t necessarily based upon empiricalobservations—essentially this is a species of philosophy.• What Zunshine is trying to do is to apply research at the upper middle levels toliterature. It is demonstrable that normal brains have the ability to “mind-read”--that is, toform ideas (which may or may not be accurate) about what other people are thinking--theories of mind. That there are particular brain mechanisms for doing this isdemonstrated by the fact that some brains--the brains of autistics--can’t do