Ellen Spolsky

Curators at museums all over have been working to activate the resources of their museums’ collections with the aim of encouraging change: to both expand the number of visitors and expand their visitors’ minds. I discuss three museums and three models of cognitive processing, hoping to offer perspective and vocabulary for thinking about whether these goals are achievable. The first exhibit is Mining the Museum, created in 1992 in Baltimore at the Maryland Historical Society. A discussion of autobiographical consciousness will follow. The second exhibit, called Slavery, mounted at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2021, will lead to a discussion of the predictive processing hypothesis. To illuminate the redesigned hanging of a collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City in 2025, called Toward Joy; New Frameworks for American Art, I call upon a third theory, one which encompasses the others, and that is the default network theory.

Abstract:Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet – an almost continuous rave of interconnected love and desire, anger and violence – is also a story of the protagonist’s struggle to make sense of her life by writing it. She turns a traditional genre of a young person’s coming of age into a neurologically realistic portrait of the growth of an artist by multiplying narrative voices and by ignoring conventional bounds of narrative probability. Her story of the growth of a creative mind adumbrates well the picture of brains and their processes currently being described and developed as a “predictive processing” model. Work in neurobiology and neurophysiology has been producing empirical demonstrations of the centrality of failure to successful human cognition.

The essays gathered here demonstrate and justify the excitement and promise of cognitive historicism, providing a lively introduction to this new and quickly growing area of literary studies. Written by eight leading critics whose work has done much to establish the new field, they display the significant results of a largely unprecedented combination of cultural and cognitive analysis. The authors explore both narrative and dramatic genres, uncovering the tensions among presumably universal cognitive processes, and the local contexts within which complex literary texts are produced. Alan Richardson's opening essay evaluates current approaches to the study of literature and cognition, locating them on the map of recent literary studies, indicating their most compelling developments to date, and suggesting the most promising future directions. The seven essays that follow provide innovative readings of topics ranging from Shakespeare (Othello, Macbeth, Cymbeline, The Rape of Lucrece) through Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, to contemporary authors Ian McEwan and Gilbert Sorrentino. They underscore some of the limitations of new historicist and post-structuralist approaches to literary cultural studies while affirming the value of supplementing rather than supplanting them with insights and methods drawn from cognitive and evolutionary theory. Together, they demonstrate the analytical power of considering these texts in the context of recent studies of cultural universals, 'theory of mind, ' cognitive categorization and genre, and neural-materialist theories of language and consciousness. This groundbreaking collection holds appeal for a broad audience, including students and teachers of literary theory, literary history, cultural studies, and literature and science studies.

Focusing on early modern Europe, Spolsky (English, Bar-Ilan U., Israel) considers the structure and detail of the local cultural world in which the brain constructs itself and how the individual negotiates the demands of that world. She argues against the inevitability of a tragic interpretation of the conditions of human knowing, suggesting instead that evidence of complex cultural texts demonstrates that the benefits derived from human creativity more than adequately compensates for any satisfaction an idealize knowing might provide. c. Book News Inc.