24480622 Literature Literariness and the Brain by Vladimir E Alexandrov

7/28/2019 24480622 Literature Literariness and the Brain by Vladimir E Alexandrov

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SPRING 2007Volume 59, Number 2

VLADIMIR E. ALEXANDROV

Literature, Literariness9and the BrainM UCH CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH in cognitive psychology and neuro-

science focuses on how the human brain processes language. What rel-evance, if any, does this work have for those of us who study what is customarilycalled "literature"?' I formulate this question in a way that is intended to reflecthow uncertain the concept "literature" has become for many scholars in recentdecades. A widespread, and perhaps dominant, view today, at least in the English-speaking world, is that "literature" is a social construct or a reader's projectionand thus a mystification-in the sense of being a signifier attached to phenom-ena that do not deserve the exclusivity that the signifier's genealogy bestows.Theorists who differ markedly on their principles, aims, and procedures haveoften agreed on this point. For example, E.D. Hirsch,Jr. claims it is "a mistake toassume that poetry is a special substance whose essential attributes can be foundthroughout all those texts that we call poetry. These essential attributes havenever been (and never will be) defined in a way that compels general accep-tance." Furthermore, he states, "such rough, serviceable notions as 'literature'and 'poetry' do not have any nature beyond a very complex and variable systemof family resemblances" (150). Terry Eagleton insists that "there is no 'essence' ofliterature whatsoever" and that "literature" is "constituted" by "value -judgments"that are "historically variable" and that "have a close relation to social ideologies"(9 , 16). Stanley Fish makes a related argument: "It is not that the presence ofpoetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a cer-tain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities" (qtd. in Mialland Kuiken, "The Form of Reading" 330). In the context of discussing decon-


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concludes that the category of "literature" is so "deeply compromised" that it has"to be challenged in toto" (Fekete 733).As these formulations imply, there is a great deal at stake, both theoretically

and practically, in whether or not we understand "literature" as an essentialist ora relativist concept. Indeed, one could argue that a significant part of the historyof European and American twentieth-century literary theory traces a shift fromone to the other. Russian Formalism, the different structuralisms of the PragueLinguistic Circle, Roman Jakobson, and Claude LUvi-Strauss, which are geneti-cally linked and bear some resemblance to American New Criticism, all shared abelief in the inherent "literariness" of the works that have traditionally been called"literary." However, as the century wore on, these approaches gave way to varioushypostases of "post-structuralism," a common denominator of which is a rejec-tion of most if not all essentialist claims, be they literary, linguistic, psychological,sexual, or cultural.' The practical effects of this shift have been two-sided and vast.

One consequence, or complement, of the dethronement of "literariness" inAmerican and British academe during the past forty-odd years has been the growthof cultural studies, with its reorientation of scholarly attention from "traditional,"hierarchically marked texts to a broad range of other human artifacts and prac-tices, especially those associated with "popular" culture. A related consequenceis that, because the term literaturecame to be seen as a kind of deceptive short-hand for phenomena that need to be understood primarily in terms of sociologi-cal, political, philosophical, economic, and other kinds of cultural forces, manyscholars turned to projects that inevitably foregrounded their interest in, andcommitment to, such forces. In short, much scholarship became self-consciouslyideological (see During).

The dethronement of "literature" has also resulted in a sense of disorientationin English and language and literature departments at American institutions ofhigher education. Many scholars in such departments still engage in "intrinsic"analyses of "canonical" texts, especially in undergraduate teaching. But such ap-proaches seem lost in an academic backwater when compared to the array ofpractices and methodologies that vie for scholarly prominence and that oftenprivilege contemporary "mass" culture over the "classics" from the past (for ex-ample, post-structuralism, Marxism, new historicism, gender studies, and post-colonial studies, as well as newer approaches such as ethnic studies, disabilitystudies, ecocriticism, ethical criticism, economic criticism, and aesthetic criti-cism). This abundance could be viewed as a welcome pluralism and as evidenceof the richness of academic pursuits were it not coupled with a general sense ofmalaise in the humanities, especially in comparison to the ascendancy and in-creasing prestige of the social sciences and the natural sciences. Because there islittle agreement among members of academic departments that used to deal

IThe reasons for this are in large measure philosophical, ethical, and political; they stem from


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LITERATURE AND THE BRAIN/99

with "literature" about what to study or how to do it, many scholars now findthemselves without a readily identifiable discipline or methodology and, conse-quently, on the defensive both inside and outside the academy. Indeed, an un-friendly observer might say that the success of literature professors in undermining"literature" as a defining concept has resulted in their cutting off the academicbranch they were sitting on.'

This is the cultural, academic, and intellectual background against which Iwould like to consider current evidence about how the human brain processeslanguage. The amount of data published in the scientific literature is vast, eventhough not all aspects of language processing have been examined or are fullyunderstood. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern some patterns in the data andto correlate these with the kinds of linguistic structures and textual features thathave been marked as "literary" in the past. In particular, these data appear tocorroborate the seminal definition of "literariness" that Roman Jakobson pro-posed nearly fifty years ago.' This correlation is actually not entirely surprisingbecause Jakobson's thinking appears to have been influenced in part by the neu-rological evidence that he surveyed in the late 1940s in connection with his studyof aphasia (see "Two Aspects of Language"). Thus, contemporary data aboutlanguage processing can be seen as supporting Jacobson's data as well as theconclusions that he made partially on their basis.

If certain kinds of structured discourse are shown to engage the human brainin ways that others do not, then there may be justification for reestablishing aversion of the differential conception of the "literary." This possibility has poten-tially significant consequences for how a great deal of reading in the humanities iscarried out. In addition, investigating the relation between language and the braindemonstrates how the "two cultures" that increasingly divide not only Americancampuses but also society in general can be bridged in a way that is neither re-ductive nor defensive with regard to either side. On the one hand, it would be amissed opportunity if individuals who are professionally concerned with linguis-tic artifacts were to ignore the vast amounts of information about language pro-duction and perception that continue to emerge from the various disciplinesthat concern themselves with the human brain and its behavior.' On the other, it

' For a broadly ranging overview of these and related issues, see Delbanco. See also Chaouli,Easthope, Harpham, Leitch, and Water.

' See his "Linguistics and Poetics" (1960), which has been partially reprinted as "The Speech Eventand the Functions of Language."Jakobson's focus on "literariness," or on what makes an utterance"literary," both reflects and is a major contribution to the central idea of twentieth-century Slavicliterary theory, which begins with the Russian Formalists, includes the Prague Structuralists, andculminates in the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, especially its most visible representative YtriiLotman.

'The larger context here is that there is still widespread resistance in the humanities (and thesocial sciences) to accepting biological constraints on human thought and behavior. However, this


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seems possible to use what students of the brain have discovered without reduc-ing literary study to a mere appendage of cognitive science. 6

LiterarinessBecause Jakobson's ideas are relatively familiar to students of literary theory

and are part of a coherent system, whereas the scientific data about languageprocessing are derived from numerous individual studies and need to be assem-bled like a mosaic, I begin by reviewing whatJakobson means by "literariness." Ashe argues in his well-known article from 1960, any act of verbal communicationcan be analyzed in terms of six basic aspects or "functions" of language that tellus something about the addresser, the addressee, the context, the message itself,the contact between the speakers, and the code within which the given communi-cation is taking place ("The Speech Event").Jakobson conceives of these six func-tions as universally true-as intrinsic in and therefore applicable to all languagesat all times (Waugh 145). Although in principle all six can be found in any givenutterance, usually fewer are actually present and one dominates. The significanceof each function in an utterance is the result of its relations with the others.

According to Jakobson, the kinds of complex utterances traditionally called"literary" are dominated by a focus on the message itself, or what he also calls the"poetic function" of language. As he puts it in his famously concise formulation,the "poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selec-tion into the axis of combination." He also phrases this as "equivalence is pro-moted to the constitutive device of the sequence" ("The Speech Event" 78). Theseformulations can be better understood in light of another of Jakobson's classicessays, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances" (1956),in which he identifies selection and combination as the two processes that under-lie the creation of linguistic meaning. In other words, what we call "meaning"emerges as a result both of the selection of words that can substitute for eachother and the combination of smaller linguistic elements, such as words, intolarger or longer ones, such as phrases and sentences. All the different kinds ofutterances that human beings produce manifest these two fundamental processesin varying ratios.7

Jakobson based his conclusions in part on clinical studies (published in 1948)of brain damage in subjects suffering from different forms of aphasia. He in-ferred from the data that there are two polar types of aphasic impairment, whichare caused by damage to particular regions of the brain. The first involves a "simi-larity disorder," or an inability to select and.substitute for each other words thatare drawn from different semantic fields (this can be thought of as a disorder ofevolutionary theory and biology do so at the cost of the increasing irrelevance of their disciplines.


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the ability to construct metaphors). The second type of aphasia is a "contiguitydisorder," which involves an inability to combine smaller linguistic elements intolarger or longer ones (in short, a disorder involving metonyms). A complete"sliding scale" of all intermediate types of impairment between these two polesalso exists. The data on which Jakobson relied further suggest the far-reachingpossibility that the two poles of language are "hard wired" in the human mind orbrain. (I distinguish here between the brain as a physical organ and the mind aswhat that organ does.)

Therefore, from the perspective of Jakobson's study of aphasia, the "poeticfunction" maximizes the ways in which meaning is constituted in language byutilizing both polar types in one utterance: maximally developed similarity is su-perimposed on fully developed contiguity. For example, many everyday utter-ances rely largely on contiguous relations among words (as in "I + saw + the +dog + run."). However, in an utterance that is dominated by the poetic function,in addition to such contiguous relations, words and other linguistic units are alsoput into differing kinds of (partial) equivalences with regard to each other.Simpleexamples are meter (which forces a local equivalence onto the otherwise differ-ent words), sound repetitions (which establish links between different words),and rhyme (which repeats the same sound in different words, thus creating apartial equivalence between them). But how is this a focus on the "message it-self," a key characteristic in Jakobson's view of the "poetic function"? The answerlies in the recognition that the effect of the poetic function is a complex anddense network of relations among the work's constituent words (as well as bothsmaller and larger units of language such as phonemes, morphemes, phrases,sentences, stanzas, paragraphs, etc.)-relations that are both syntagmatic or lin-ear (functions of strings of words) and paradigmatic or spatial (functions of meta-phoric links among words and larger units of language that are not contiguousin the text). Another way of putting this is that in verbal art metaphoric relationsamong linguistic elements are superimposed on and integrated into the sequen-tial, metonymic structure of discourse (this can perhaps be visualized as a combi-nation of the X and Y axes of a graph). Because of the resulting network, thewords exhibit two additional kinds of relations: to the world at large and to thework itself. In Jurij Striedter's formulation, a word in a literary work "refers thereader to an extraliterary reality, which it signifies." At the same time, because ofthe specific way that the language is arranged in the work, each word also "ac-quires meaning for the reader through its specific function in the work." This"second direction of meaning" can be seen as "refract[ing] the first, deflectingas it were every individual statement from its orientation to a preexisting realityback to the work itself [to the structure of relations among its constituent ele-ments, and] only entering back into relationship to external reality via the work'soverall structure. In this respect the work as a whole is the genuine carrier of


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It is essential to realize that the "poetic function," like the other five functionsthat Jakobson identified, is no t absolutely unique to works we call literary. AsJakobson explicitly argued, all six functions are present in everyday discourse tovaryingdegrees, just as they are in literary works. From this perspective, a literarywork is one in which the poetic function dominates the other five but does notnecessarily eliminate any of them. Consequently, there are possible degrees ofliterariness, just as there can be degrees of referentiality, or degrees of domi-nance of an utterance by the other functions. For example, an utterance can bedominated almost exclusively by the "phatic function," which deals with estab-lishing and keeping open a channel of communication between speakers, butnot saying much beyond that. In the United States, this is often done via talkingabout the weather. Although the ostensible subjects of such conversations arethe meteorological events that are impinging on the interlocutors (the referen-tial function), frequently the actual purpose is simply to establish human contactbetween them.

Because there are degrees to which any of the six functions can be present inan y utterance, an absolutist argument that attacks the idea of "literariness" byinsisting that a text has to be either "poetic" or "non-poetic" is both misleadingand a betrayal ofJakobson's ideas.8 Nevertheless, even though the poetic func-tion can be present to varying degrees in works that have been called "literary"(for example, it is developed strongly in Melville's Moby-Dick, weakly in Benchley'sJaws,and not at all in most newspaper accounts of shark fishing), it is still inher-ent in language and thus in the works themselves. To demonstrate the presenceof the poetic function in utterances that most people would not consider liter-ary,Jakobson himself used the 1950s American election slogan "I like Ike," whichhas rhyme, sound repetition, and rhythm ("The Speech Event" 76-77). Somerecent experimental data also show how readily individuals will use "literary"devices in everyday speech. Subjects who were asked to complete a sentence theyhad heard or read preferred a word that rhymed with a preceding one in thesame or in a previous sentence. The psychologists who carried out the studyneither invokeJakobson nor consider why this would be the case, although theycomment that their results suggest that "poetry, puns, and other forms of word-play should not be viewed as exceptions to normal language use" (Rapp andSamuel 570). Their conclusion thus accords with Jakobson's claim that the po-etic function is inherent in human speech, as well as his belief that speakers showan unconscious preference for "a well-ordered shape for the message" ("TheSpeech Event" 76). Adding rhyme or any other device that increases the numberof connections among an utterance's constituent elements, makes it both moremeaningful and more memorable.'

'See Attridge 3, 4, 129-30, for an example of this kind of argument. Hogan provides a hybrid view:on the one hand, he states that a "commonplace of recent critical theory is that there is no differ-ence between literary language and ordinary language" and that this is "entirely in keeping with


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MethodologiesThe methods used to investigate where and how language is processed in the

human brain include techniques of cognitive science that have been in existencefor decades. One especially widespread methodology is split visual field studies,which exploit the lateralization of the human visual system in order to investi-gate the major structural feature of the brain: its division into hemispheres. Atypical experimental situation involves a subject being asked to fix his gaze on acomputer screen that is directly in front of him, and then to respond to variouswords or short phrases that are flashed briefly some distance to the right or leftof the central visual fixation point. Because this happens too quickly for the sub-ject to move his eyes or head, the flashed words impinge on only one side of hisretinas: if the words appear to the left of the central fixation point, they areregistered by the right side of the retinas in both eyes, and vice versa. However,because of the way the optic nerves are connected to the brain, what the righthalves of the retinas register goes to the left cerebral hemisphere, and vice versa.Split visual field experiments often use sequences of words or phrases that areknown as "primes" and "targets." The "target" is a word on which the investigatorfocuses to determine its presumed relation to a mental network of concepts. Hedoes so by showing the subject other words, called "primes," and measuring ifthe subject grasps the "target" more quickly as a result. Thus, if a subject is shownnurse and reads doctor more quickly than he does after being shown the wordbutter,nurse is a "prime" for doctor,which is the "target," while butter is not. Newerexperimental techniques include "electroencephalography" and "event-relatedpotential" (which involves taking electrophysiological readings of the brain at work),"positron emission tomography" (or PET, which entails injections of radioactiveisotopes into the blood stream to measure changes in metabolic blood flow inparts of the brain as they carry out different tasks), and "functional magneticresonance imaging" (fMRI, which is non-invasive, but which also registers themetabolic increase in blood flow in the brain, producing the well-known color-ful images of the brain "lighting up" during various cognitive tasks). The last twotechniques are distinctive because they produce fine-grained three-dimensionalimages of the living brain at work. Even though there are extensive neuronallinks between the hemispheres that allow for the transfer of signals between them(via the thick bundle of nerves known as the corpus callosum as well as otherconnections), investigators have discerned major differences between the waythe hemispheres process language and other kinds of information and sensorydata."'

While these new technologies provide unprecedented insight into the brain-mind-language nexus, it is important to acknowledge that much remains un-clear about how the brain processes language. Moreover, most neuroscientists


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and von Cramon 326). This obviously limits the extent to which their findingscan be applied to literary studies.

The Cerebral HemispheresThe insight that the human cerebral hemispheres are dominated by different

kinds of functions first appeared in the early 1860s, when the French pathologist,specialist on aphasia, pioneer in neurosurgery, and anthropologist Paul Brocaidentified a portion of the left hemisphere as the center of speech production (itis known to this day as "Broca's Region"). Carl Wernicke, a German neurologistand psychiatrist, complemented this discovery in 1874 when he described an-other area in the left hemisphere that is crucial for language comprehension("Wernicke's Region"). The view that the left hemisphere was the locus of lan-guage persisted through the 1940s. In the 1970s, some oversimplified and mis-leading versions of the idea that a particular hemisphere controls specific humanabilities were popularized in Western media-the notion that artists have domi-nant right hemispheres while engineers have dominant left hemispheres amongthem (Kane 21-22). However, the widespread dissemination of such reductivenotions in the past should not deter us from using the findings of contemporarycognitive science. There is now a broad consensus that, although in the majorityof human beings the left hemisphere is primarily responsible for the expression,reception, and reading of language, important linguistic processes also occur incomplex networks in both hemispheres. The division of the brain remains fun-damental because numerous studies demonstrate that the hemispheres processsemantic information in qualitatively different ways.1"

Metaphors and Hemispheric LexiconsOne of the differences between the hemispheres is how they process meta-phors. 2 A number of studies conclude that comprehending metaphors activates"Iee Va n Lancker; Waldie and Mosley; Keller et al.; and Moro et al. It is important to note that

although the roles of the hemispheres may be specialized in some ways, their behavior may alsoultimately depend on the kind of task in which they are engaged. For example, it may not always bejustified to generalize from experimental data about pairs of words to sentences and then to para-graphs and longer texts (Faust and Weisper 186). It is also noteworthy that the dominance of lefthemispheric lateralization for language appears to emerge with the end of childhood, on the onehand, and with print literacy, on the other (Kane 42-43, 45-46). Opinions differ about whether ornot there is any significant difference between men and women regarding the neural organizationof language processing. For a statement that the sexes are similar, see Frost et al.; for an argumentfor difference, see Rossell et al., who found that men have a marginal left hemisphere advantageover women and that men also have stronger left lateralization. Se e Kane 25n.2 for citations fromother studies.

IS Researchers differ significantly with regard to what constitutes a "metaphor." Kircher et al. use


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sites in the right hemisphere in addition to the left (Bottini et al.; Kircher et al.).A related finding is that patients whose right hemispheres do not function nor-mally tend to prefer literal interpretations of metaphors and idiomatic expres-sions even when the context calls for figurative meanings (Richards and Chiarello;Brownell et al.; Van Lancker 4).l1

Another difference between the hemispheres is the kinds of words that theyprocess. Because even a completely disconnected right hemisphere can compre-hend some kinds of written material, it is generally believed that each hemi-sphere has an independent lexicon or hypothetical store of words (Waldie andMosley 117). However, researchers disagree about whether the hemispheres treatgrammatical parts of speech differently in comparison to other lexical catego-ries. One study suggests that the right hemisphere lexicon may consist of "con-crete, imageable nouns" (Abernathy and Coney 941); another finds that there isno such asymmetry when nouns and verbs had similar degrees of "imageability"(Chiarello et al. 1460); yet another shows that verbs are processed more quicklyin the left hemisphere, while nouns are processed equally in both (Sereno).14

There is a consensus, however, about the kinds of relations that characterizethe lexicons or semantic fields in the hemispheres. The right hemisphere quicklyactivates a loose or "coarse" range of meanings associated with a word that ispresented to it, while the left focuses on the most probable meaning of a wordin the given context and is characterized by relationships that are hierarchicaland logical."1 Supporting this conclusion are findings that the right hemispheredoes not recognize the links between semantically related pairs of nouns, a phe-

Richards and Chiarello state that patients with right hemisphere injury "tend to prefer literal inter-pretations of phrasal metaphors and idioms" (160; italics added). By contrast, Brownell et al. arguethat right hemisphere damaged patients show "pervasive insensitivity" to alternative interpretationsof linguistic units and do so more than half the time (375, 379). In my references to various studiesbelow, I follow the individual researchers' ow n evaluations and ways of characterizing the signifi-cance of the data they discuss without trying to interpret or standardize their terminology.

1 It is important to note that there are also studies that contradict this conception of the righthemisphere's role in processing metaphors. For example, Rapp et al. conducted fMRI experimentsthat showed left hemisphere activation for metaphors. As a result, they suggest that "the right hemi-sphere theory of metaphor comprehension needs to be critically reevaluated. Recent research withfunctional imaging strongly suggests that the right hemisphere plays an important role in languageprocessing oil a sentence level; however, other factors than metaphoricity per se may trigger righthemisphere recruitment" (401). A similar conclusion is reached by Gagnon et al. and by St. Georgeet al. The latter argue that "right hemisphere engagement during sentence comprehension is notspecific to the processing of figurative aspects of language" and "appears to be a more generalphenomenon that occurs routinely" when readers attempt to construe a text's meaning and thewriter's intent (1322-23)."Jakobson ("Brain and Language" 507) cites experimental data that show that the temporaryinactivation of the left hemisphere via electric shocks affects verbs (except for simple imperativessuch as "stop, walk, help") and auxiliary words, while nominative forms of nouns are somewhatmore tunder the control of the right hemisphere (because they depend less on context). See also


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nomenon which implies that nouns in the right hemisphere lexicon are not or-ganized in a way that would allow activation between what are known as "cat-egory exemplars" (such as in the category "fruit" and the exemplars "apple,""pear," and "plum"). However, when words are presented to the left hemispherethey do activate other words in the same semantic category (Abernathy and Co-ney 941). Split visual field experiments using primes and targets show similarresults. When a target word is primed by several words that are related to it onlyweakly, the right hemisphere shows stronger activation than the left. But whenthe target is primed by one strongly related word, there is greater activation withinthe left hemisphere (Beeman et al., cited in Coney and Evans 274). An analo-gous result appears on the orthographic level. During reading, the right hemi-sphere recognizes relations among words that share letters of the alphabet whereasthe left does not. This implies that on the visual level of orthographic representa-tion more processing occurs in the right hemisphere, whereas in the left hemi-sphere processing moves quickly from orthography to semantics and phonology.6This conclusion would seem to be applicable to reading the kinds of texts thatrely on sound repetitions (even though orthography and phonetics are not iden-tical), such as poetry or certain kinds of artistic prose.1 7

Based on these studies, it seems reasonable to hypothesize thatJakobson's "meta-phoric" pole of language-which is associated with the process of selection orsubstitution and with paradigmatic or "spatial" relations among words-may bemore a function of the right hemisphere than of the left. As Coney and Evansput it, the right hemisphere "plays a supporting role in language processing, arole defined by its capacity to cast a wider net than the left in the elaboration ofword meaning" (281).1 Moreover, the "metonymic" pole-which involves com-bination or syntagmatic and "linear" relations among words, including linkagesvia time, space, and causality-may be more a function of the left hemispherethan of the right. Consequently, it seems reasonable to speculate that mundaneand pragmatic utterances are largely a function of left hemisphere processing,although it would be false to claim that the right plays no role in them (see"Coherence Building" below). It also follows that a more prominent role for theright hemisphere would presumably cause an utterance to be structured differ-ently. Why? Because the right hemisphere's apparent propensity for metaphors

"'Lavidor and Ellis 71-72. Waldie and Mosley cite several studies that suggest an additional differ-ence between the hemispheres: when processing written material, "the right hemisphere is thoughtto access the meaning of words 'directly' from orthography without intermediate phonological de-coding ... whereas the left hemisphere is specialized for phonological and grammatical process-ing." They conclude that the right hemisphere supplements left hemisphere language processing.However, they also note that a number of split visual field studies have shown that "for normal right-handers, the right hemisphere is as competent as the left provided that words are relatively short(three- and four-letter) concrete nouns" (109).

"7Waldie and Mosley cite a study suggesting that the right hemisphere may be especially impor-


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and metaphoric relations between distal words, together with its stronger activa-tion than the left when target words and primes are related weakly, imply not alinear, syntagmatic structure, but a spatial, paradigmatic one. In short, it is pos-sible to hypothesize that creating or reading a sonnet requires the full abilities ofboth hemispheres, while reading or writing something mundane, like a set ofdirections, requires the left hemisphere but only limited aspects of the right.,9

Hemispheric Cooperation and TimeTime is another category relevant for understanding the differences betweenhow the hemispheres process language. There is evidence that the right hemi-

sphere's role may be secondary to that of the left. One study finds that the righthemisphere appears to make an important contribution to normal reading byreceiving most of its information from the left hemisphere, which carries outinitial analysis and decoding (Coney 34). There is also possible support for thisresult in studies that find that the right hemisphere is involved in processingwords more slowly than the left (Waldie and Mosley 17; Koivisto 667)."'

Explanations for how this time delay occurs have also been proposed. One isthat the left hemisphere maintains the dominant meaning of a word and sup-presses the subordinate meanings; by contrast, the right hemisphere increasesactivation for these meanings. However, if the left hemisphere cannot use theword's dominant meaning successfully, then the right hemisphere makes avail-able to it the range of subordinate meanings it has maintained (Coney and Evans280-81). Another researcher suggests a congruent scheme: initially, all the mean-ings of a word are activated in the left hemisphere, which then rapidly chooses ameaning appropriate for the given context and integrates it into the current dis-course model; at the same time, other plausible meanings are actively suppressed.Multiple word meanings are also initially activated in the right hemisphere, but,rather than being actively suppressed, these meanings are maintained for a pe-riod of time and then decay.2" Whether or not the alternate word meanings withinthe right hemisphere are maintained may depend upon whether or not mean-ing is selected successfully within the left hemisphere.2 2 Moreover, the length of

"'See Kane for a related argument. However, she presents a long list of features common inpoetry as being functions of the right hemisphere.

'('Results reported by Abernathy and Coney are more ambiguous because they suggest that seman-tic information is relayed from the left hemisphere to the right and vice versa, as are "the secondaryproducts" of activation "rather than the primary stimulus itself" (944)."2 ited in Faust and Chiarello 828. Faust and Gernsbacher (234, 252-53) find that, although bothhemispheres suppress inappropriate forms of homophones (words that sound alike but are spelleddifferently), the left hemisphere is more effective than the right in suppressing inappropriate ho-mographs (words spelled alike but differing in derivation, meaning, or pronunciation) during sen-


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the linguistic sample may further affect the relation between the hemispheres. Ifthe sample is a sentence rather than a pair of words, the metaphoric meaningsthat arise in the right hemisphere may become available to the processing mecha-nisms in the left hemisphere (Faust and Weisper 190). In general, however, allthese explanations correlate with the right hemisphere's lexicon consisting ofloose semantic associations, in contrast to those in the left.

EstrangementThe relations between the hemispheres posited in these studies suggest theadditional (and not unexpected) hypothesis that the brain is more actively en-

gaged when trying to make sense of an utterance that consists offamiliar wordstaken out of their habitual contexts and placed in unfamiliar juxtapositions thanwhen it makes sense of everyday words in everyday utterances. This is also theeffect of "defamiliarization" that the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky positedas the distinguishing trait of the "literary" in his classic essay 'Art as Device" (1917)and that can be seen as prefiguring Jakobson's concept of the "poetic func-tion."23 One of the ways that language can be "defamiliarized" or "estranged" isby structuring an utterance in such a way that the dominant and habitual mean-ings of the words in it do not readily contribute to a straightforward global meaning.For example, the phrase "the iron gates of the castle" relies on the straightforwardmeanings of the words. However, "the iron gates of life" requires not only thedominant meanings of the words but also their secondary associations, all ofwhich have to be correlated if this metaphor's meaning is to emerge. This meta-phoric phrase is in fact a small-scale illustration ofJakobson's "poetic function."In fashioning the metaphor, the speaker eschews the everyday "castle" (or "fence,"or "prison," or "bank," etc.) and chooses "life" instead because this word's mean-ings are, in the special sense that interests her, similar to, as well as differentfrom, those that can be adduced for "iron gates." Thus, the speaker finds "equiv-alence" between seemingly dissimilar terms ("iron gates" and "life"), which isthe process of "selection" (and which entails rejecting "fence," "prison," "bank,"etc.), and arranges these terms into a syntactical unit according to the laws ofEnglish grammar, which is the process of "combination." In other words, thespeaker superimposes or "projects" the "axis of selection" onto the "axis of com-bination." The process of interpreting this metaphor is similar. The reader has toconsider not only the familiar, literal meanings of the words involved and theirarrangement into a linear sequence (which, according to the studies cited above,occurs primarily in the left hemisphere), but also the array of attendant figura-tive meanings (which entails the involvement of the right hemisphere as well).been suggested by Collins, who argues that an ambiguous word directed to either hemisphere acti-


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Moreover, she needs to maintain these while they are "trial fitted" until a satisfac-tory overall meaning is achieved (a process that involves the movement of infor-mation between the hemispheres).

Coherence BuildingThe right hemisphere appears to have a special role with regard to construct-

ing the overall meaning of utterances. Whereas the left hemisphere deals withsuch features of language as phonemes, grammar, and syntax, the right is con-cerned with processes such as connecting sentences into paragraphs, appreciat-ing irony, and, it would seem, recognizing metaphors. Damage to the righthemisphere impairs an individual's ability to understand humor (he or she can-not connect the punch line to the preceding part of the joke), to make infer-ences, to understand the relevance of contexts, and to understand emotion inspoken language (Van Lancker 4; Kircher et al. 806-807; Bottini et al.; Marie St.George et al.; Kane 29). Evidence from patients with right hemisphere damagealso indicates that "global coherence"-the connection of individual sentencesto an overarching "text macrostructure" or to information earlier in a text-istypically achieved by the right hemisphere24

Much about how the right hemisphere achieves global coherence is still un-clear, and even an adequate definition of "discourse coherence" is still lacking(St. George et al. 1324). Nevertheless, it is possible to hypothesize a connectionbetween the right hemisphere's involvement in processing figurative languageand its role in building non-syntactical types of global coherence, activities thatcan be seen as variants of each other and that are central to the kind of linguisticstructuring inherent in "literariness." As St. George and her colleagues suggest,the presence in the right hemisphere of semantic fields that are looser and largerthan those in the left may lead to "a greater potential for overlap (and integra-tion through spatial and temporal summation) of many different, but related,concepts" such as "semantically distant words needed to understand metaphors,draw inferences and appreciate the many nuances of discourse" (1324).

Differences in how the hemispheres process sentences may be related to howthe right hemisphere achieves "global" coherence. The left hemisphere is drivenby a "top down" search for meaning. This entails the integration of all the infor-mation in the sentence, with a greater emphasis on "higher-level regularities" in

24St. George et al. 1318. The experiments employed in this study used paragraphs that differed asto whether or no t they had titles that made the content of the paragraphs intelligible. See also thecomplementary results in Coney and Evans 274. Ferstl and von Cramon dispute St. George, et al.'sconclusion on the basis of experimental fMRI results that do not support a special role for the righthemisphere in building coherence (338). However, it should be noted that Ferstl and von Cramonused pairs of sentences rather than paragraphs, that they were concerned with "local" rather than


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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/ 110

sentence-level constructions than on relations among individual words. When ameaningful word is encountered, each successive word is integrated into the sen-tence in a way that makes sense given the prior context. By contrast, the righthemisphere functions in a more "bottom up" fashion, because for it the mean-ings of individual words are much more important than "sentence constraint"when interpreting a given message. The only kind of "top down" constraint usedby the right hemisphere is "general world knowledge," such as would allow con-structing a courtroom scenario from the sequence "angry, jury, confront," nomatter how the words are ordered in the sequence (Chiarello et al. 1461).25 Inshort, the left hemisphere functions in "predictive" fashion by activating wordsthat are likely to appear next, whereas the right hemisphere engages in "integra-tive" processing, comparing new words to those encountered previously. As aresult, the left hemisphere may be more efficient than the right in everyday lan-guage processing when it encounters expected words, but less efficient when itsinitial expectations have to be revised (Federmeier and Kutas 373, 388). Theright hemisphere's ability to maintain multiple meanings would clearly be anadvantage when ambiguous meanings arising from unexpected juxtapositions ofwords need to be interpreted and when initial interpretations need to be re-vised (Faust and Chiarello 832-33)26

These findings again suggest a connection with "literariness" understood as aform of linguistic structuring that maximizes the generation of meaning via bothsyntagmatic (metonymic) and paradigmatic (metaphoric) relations among theconstituent words. The left hemisphere's reliance on sentence-level mechanismswould seem to correlate with the former, while the right hemisphere's ability tofashion meaning from scrambled sentences (and via word-level mechanisms)would seem to correlate with the latter. These two processes exhaust the ways inwhich language can generate meaning and presumably begin to function whenthe text is structured in a way that requires both."7 As Faust and Chiarello state,"no specific interhemispheric 'control' mechanism is required and the uniquecapabilities of each hemisphere are drawn upon as needed based upon alterations ninformation salience and relevance that modulate the use of multiple processorsdistributed throughout the brain" (833; italics added).

15 See also Morris, cited in Faust and Chiarello 828. There are parallels with how the hemispherestreat space: the left focuses on discrete elements, while the right structures a holistic image (Ivanov418-19).

1 A possibly related finding is that a negative and thus linguistically more complex sentence takeslonger to process and causes greater and broader activation of the relevant parts of the brain thandoes an affirmative sentence (the average time to process an affirmative sentence is 3511 ms, whereasa negative sentence requires 4100 ms); see Carpenter et al. 219.

27 Based on similar data, Ivanov also argues that poetic creativity is the product of both hemi-spheres, but he makes the radically different claim that in this regard poetic creativity is no differ-ent from other types of conscious language use (437). Here it is useful to recall that Jakobson's


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Hemispheric Dominance, Creativity, SchizophreniaSeveral groups of researchers make overt connections between differences inhow the cerebral hemispheres process language and the kinds of practices im-plied by verbal creativity in our culture. Creative behavior can be defined provi-sionally as the ability to tolerate ambiguity and to relate in meaningful waysinformation that is varied, conflicting, or inconclusive (Atchley et al. 479, 482) .21According to this definition-and in accordance with the right hemisphere'srole in processing metaphors, maintaining multiple word meanings, and con-structing "global" coherence-creativity cannot occur without a significant in-volvement by the right hemisphere. The differences in the ways the hemispheresprocess language suggest that some part of the difference between individuals interms of creativity may be the extent to which they can maintain multiple ambi-guity in the right hemisphere (Atchley et al. 483). The authors of this study cau-tion, however, that generalizations of this sort must be used warily because thereis no widely accepted definition of "creativity."

A different set of associations relevant to the link between creativity and hemi-spheric dominance centers on schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder that entailsloss of contact with the environment and disintegration of the personality. Phi-losophers and writers have linked madness and creative genius for over two mil-lennia-from Plato and Aristotle to Ficino, Shakespeare, Diderot, Poe, Nietzsche,and Artaud, among many others. Contemporary neurologists do so as well. Theauthors of one study point to Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), the father of "eu-genics," which is the study of methods to improve inherited mental and physicalcharacteristics, and Cesare Lambroso (1836-1909), whose theories explore therelation between heredity and crime, as the initiators of speculation about "com-monalities between madness and genius" (Leonhard and Brugger 180). Theyalso summarize the work of other researchers who find that similarities betweenpsychotic and highly creative individuals hinge on "over-inclusiveness" or thetendency to perceive as related the kinds of things that are considered distinctby most others (Leonhard and Brugger 180)." The authors conclude that, al-though the popular idea of creative thought as localized exclusively in the righthemisphere is wrong, "some aspects of creativity do seem to be linked to [righthemisphere] associative processing." One example they cite is that healthy right-handed individuals made more associations among seemingly disparate visualpatterns-such as Rorschach inkblots and random patterns of dots-when thesewere briefly flashed to the left visual field (or the right hemisphere), than to theright visual field (or the left hemisphere) (180-81). These results are comple-mented by the authors' own experimental data, which show that a reduction in" ianotti et al. make a similar point (595). It should be noted, however, that the emphasis onartislic creativity as a form of innovation reflects a modern and generally Western cultural bias that


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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/ 112

left hemisphere dominance in lexical decision-making, together with a relativelyincreased role for the right hemisphere, correlates positively with proneness toschizophrenic thought (as well as paranormal belief). The authors also make anintriguing speculative leap when they suggest that the use of the right hemisphere'ssemantic system may constitute "a selective evolutionary advantage allowing thegenes predisposing to schizophrenia to proliferate despite the obvious disadvan-tages of this devastating disease" (Leonhard and Brugger 177) .30 In other words,the kinds of language processing associated with verbal creativity, or with "liter-ariness," may also provide a "selective evolutionary advantage" despite their pos-sible association with mental illness. This pushes the Romantic link of madnessand creativity to an intriguing level of speculation.

Hemispheric Specialization and EvolutionAnother connection between evolutionary advantage and hemispheric spe-

cialization has also been suggested. One study argues that dominant languagefunctions came to be located in the left hemisphere because it was already spe-cialized to some extent for sequential processing (Corballis et al. 113; Tallal etal.). This seems plausible if one assumes that quotidian language use takes placein time and relies on sequence; presumably, early humans communicated largelyin this way. The authors hypothesize that language developed in the left hemi-sphere by taking over tissues that had previously been involved in visuospatialprocessing. However, the right hemisphere retained this capability and became"specialized" for it "somewhat by default." This asymmetry increased over thecourse of human evolution and was thus caused not by the development of a newcapacity in the right hemisphere, but by the loss of one in the left. The authorsalso suggest that the benefit of human cerebral asymmetry is the ability to carryout different linguistic and cognitive processes, which can be shared via commis-sures between the hemispheres (Corballis et al. 113, 114).

The idea that there is a communicative benefit that accrues from the differ-ences between the hemispheres can be correlated with Jakobson's conceptionthat literary works possess a linguistic structure that maximizes both of the waysthat meaning is constituted in language. Writers, and especially poets, appearalways to have known this. AsJoseph Brodsky, Nobel Laureate and Poet Laureateof the United States, remarked after a public reading at Harvard University inthe fall of 1980, language is humankind's highest achievement and poetry is thehighest form of language.

Conclusion


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specialization and cooperation. The left hemisphere appears to be the locus oflinear, sequential, syntactically and grammatically organized linguistic meaning;its lexicon is characterized by semantic fields based on proximal, hierarchical,metonymic, or logical relations; when making sense of language, it suppresses ancil-lary or secondary meanings of words. Language processing in the left hemisphereis thus organized temporally and syntagmatically, and it is concerned with local,sentence based coherence that is a function of the characteristics I have listed.

The right hemisphere's semantic fields are restricted in number and are char-acterized by a looser or coarser semantic focus. Via metaphoric linkages, theright hemisphere can construct meanings from distal words that may otherwiseseem unrelated to each other in the given language (and, one should add, at agiven cultural moment). Because ancillary and secondary meanings of wordslinger in the right hemisphere and are not actively suppressed, these secondarymeanings are made available to the left hemisphere when the individual is at-tempting to read an ambiguous text. In contrast to the left hemisphere, the rightis concerned with the "global" coherence of the entire text and is more sensitiveto orthographic repetitions; thus, the right hemisphere is organized paradigmat-ically and "spatially."

These broad generalizations are noteworthy because they appear to echojakob-son's ideas about the poetic function of language. However, it is important tonote that texts with these kinds of linguistic structures may also be called byother names in other cultures, and that they may have other functions in thesecultures than the ones that are, or were, associated with "literature" in the con-temporary West. For example, in various ancient traditions verse forms andother devices that we associate with "poetry" have been used for very differentkinds of writing-for example, Sanskrit ayurvedic medical treatises or MedievalArabic medical poetry, including works by the celebrated philosopher Ibn Sina("Avicenna"). Lucretius's epic of Epicurean philosophy De rerum natura (On theNature of Things) is written in hexameter. Religious chants, prayers, services,and sermons-indeed most sacred writings from all the world's religions-areoften composed using verse forms and other devices that are manifestations ofthe "poetic function," even though the cultural role of such texts is not the sameas literature has or had for us. Such examples could easily be increased. But thisdoes not detract from the apparent fact that human beings can choose to em-body distinctively constituted meanings in different kinds of utterances that theythen treat as exceptional according to particular cultural norms. Another impor-tant caveat is that although "literariness" is not primarily a gauge for a work'svalue and quality, it has some obvious implications for such criteria. Neverthe-less, because the density of meaning in a work such as a poem far exceeds whatcan be found in most ordinary utterances of the same length, Yurii Lotman hassuggested a succinct formulation that can serve as an approximate description


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tion against its immediate predecessors and its distrust of grand and essentialisttheories of any kind. However, the findings summarized above suggest thatJakobson may in fact have been ahead of his time in how he understood therelation between language processing and the brain, and that there is now suffi-cient reason to reconsider his legacy.

Missing from my account, of course, is the kind of experimental cognitive orneuroscientific data pertaining to actual literary texts that would be essential fora full assessment of "literariness." Thus far, I have not found any studies in whichinvestigators tried to understand what was happening in subjects' brains whilethey read entire works of poetry or artistic prose in comparison to simple discur-sive texts. (This kind of investigation would also need to be carried out in differ-ent cultural contexts in order to assess the influence of cultural expectations onreading.)31 In principle, such experiments are perfectly feasible, even if the com-plexity of the mental processes involved and the numbers of possible variantsthat would need to be controlled would make the experiments far from simple.

What difference would it make if it could actually be proven that when thehuman brain is reading, or perhaps even producing, a literary text it processeslanguage in accordance with a scheme that resembles Jakobson's conception of"literariness"? From one point of view, the consequences could be highly signifi-cant because the difference between "literature" and other kinds of utteranceswould be reinstated, even if this difference were manifested only on Jakobson's"sliding scale" of literariness. As a result, scholars could reclaim a unique area ofinquiry to which they would doubtless be tempted to reapply hierarchical crite-ria. The door might also open to other, much more fine-grained investigationsof the relations between the brain and verbal art than those summarized above.Another important consequence could be a renewed focus on the way the struc-ture of the text determines the meaning that emerges from it. If the brain can infact be shown to involve the automatic, unconscious correlation of distinct pro-cedures in the hemispheres, then it is reasonable to infer that meanings formu-lated by readers are a function of interrelated paradigmatic and syntagmaticrelations among the text's constituent elements (asJakobson assumed in his ar-ticle on aphasia and in "Linguistics and Poetics"). Consequently, a reader whobelieves in such things as scientific objectivity or the possibility of limiting one'sa priori biases during the act of reading might feel compelled to ascertain howthe work's immanent structure determines a configuration of meanings specificto it. In turn, this might limit the degree to which such a reader would feel freeto read the text from other ideological perspectives. A return to the text in theway that "literariness" implies might thus begin to provide a new (old) directionto literary studies in academe.

":' hokron and De Agostini have found that normal right-handed individuals who read from


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LITERATURE AND THE BRAIN/ 115

From another point of view, however, there would be no entirely compellingreason for anyone to change his reading practices. The relation between cultureand biology (or neurology) is fixed in some ways and completely open in others.Thus, a reader who is motivated by concerns other than objectivity would feelfree to interpret any work the way he chooses, no matter what may be going on inhis cerebral hemispheres. Within the realm of human beliefs there is no abso-lute ground that can be used to adjudicate what individuals choose to view astrue, good, and real. In the end, therefore, "literariness" could be seen as justanother ideology that the reader is free to accept or reject in light of other values.

Yale University

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24480622 Literature Literariness and the Brain by Vladimir E Alexandrov