SPRING 2007 Volume 59, Number 2

VLADIMIR E. ALEXANDROV

Literature, Literariness9 and the Brain

UCH CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH in cognitive psychology and neuroscience focuses on how the human brain processes language. What relevance, if any, does this work have for those of us who study what is customarily called "literature"?' I formulate this question in a way that is intended to reflect how uncertain the concept "literature" has become for many scholars in recent decades. A widespread, and perhaps dominant, view today, at least in the Englishspeaking world, is that "literature" is a social construct or a reader's projection and thus a mystification-in the sense of being a signifier attached to phenomena that do not deserve the exclusivity that the signifier's genealogy bestows. Theorists who differ markedly on their principles, aims, and procedures have often agreed on this point. For example, E.D. Hirsch,Jr. claims it is "a mistake to assume that poetry is a special substance whose essential attributes can be found throughout all those texts that we call poetry. These essential attributes have never been (and never will be) defined in a way that compels general acceptance." Furthermore, he states, "such rough, serviceable notions as 'literature' and 'poetry' do not have any nature beyond a very complex and variable system of family resemblances" (150). Terry Eagleton insists that "there is no 'essence' of literature 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 of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities" (qtd. in Miall and Kuiken, "The Form of Reading" 330). In the context of discussing deconstruction and other facets of post-structuralism, Jonathan Culler postulates that the "essence of literature is to have no essence, to be protean, indefinable, to encompass whatever might be situated outside it" (182). Finally, Raymond Williams

SI am grateful to Mark Bruhn and two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions and corrections.

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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 or a relativist concept. Indeed, one could argue that a significant part of the history of European and American twentieth-century literary theory traces a shift from one to the other. Russian Formalism, the different structuralisms of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Roman Jakobson, and Claude LUvi-Strauss, which are genetically linked and bear some resemblance to American New Criticism, all shared a belief in the inherent "literariness" of the works that have traditionally been called "literary." However, as the century wore on, these approaches gave way to various hypostases of "post-structuralism," a common denominator of which is a rejection 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" in American and British academe during the past forty-odd years has been the growth of cultural studies, with its reorientation of scholarly attention from "traditional," hierarchically marked texts to a broad range of other human artifacts and practices, especially those associated with "popular" culture. A related consequence is that, because the term literature came to be seen as a kind of deceptive shorthand for phenomena that need to be understood primarily in terms of sociological, political, philosophical, economic, and other kinds of cultural forces, many scholars turned to projects that inevitably foregrounded their interest in, and commitment to, such forces. In short, much scholarship became self-consciously ideological (see During). The dethronement of "literature" has also resulted in a sense of disorientation in English and language and literature departments at American institutions of higher education. Many scholars in such departments still engage in "intrinsic" analyses of "canonical" texts, especially in undergraduate teaching. But such approaches seem lost in an academic backwater when compared to the array of practices and methodologies that vie for scholarly prominence and that often privilege contemporary "mass" culture over the "classics" from the past (for example, post-structuralism, Marxism, new historicism, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as newer approaches such as ethnic studies, disability studies, ecocriticism, ethical criticism, economic criticism, and aesthetic criticism). This abundance could be viewed as a welcome pluralism and as evidence of the richness of academic pursuits were it not coupled with a general sense of malaise in the humanities, especially in comparison to the ascendancy and increasing prestige of the social sciences and the natural sciences. Because there is little agreement among members of academic departments that used to deal
I The reasons for this are in large measure philosophical, ethical, and political; they stem from the increasing tendency to see universalism as a potential form of oppression because claims regarding universals lend themselves to being used to impose ideas or practices that are often merely contingent Western norms. While recognizing this danger, however, it is still possible to distinguish between what Patrick Colm Hogan usefully calls "empirical universalism," which is the identifica-

tion of "genuine cross-cultural invariants," and "normative absolutism," or the "cross-imposition of

a culturally nonuniversal idea or practice" ("Literary Universals" 224-26).

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with "literature" about what to study or how to do it, many scholars now find themselves without a readily identifiable discipline or methodology and, consequently, on the defensive both inside and outside the academy. Indeed, an unfriendly observer might say that the success of literature professors in undermining "literature" as a defining concept has resulted in their cutting off the academic branch they were sitting on.' This is the cultural, academic, and intellectual background against which I would like to consider current evidence about how the human brain processes language. The amount of data published in the scientific literature is vast, even though not all aspects of language processing have been examined or are fully understood. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern some patterns in the data and to correlate these with the kinds of linguistic structures and textual features that have been marked as "literary" in the past. In particular, these data appear to corroborate the seminal definition of "literariness" that Roman Jakobson proposed nearly fifty years ago.' This correlation is actually not entirely surprising because Jakobson's thinking appears to have been influenced in part by the neurological evidence that he surveyed in the late 1940s in connection with his study of aphasia (see "Two Aspects of Language"). Thus, contemporary data about language processing can be seen as supporting Jacobson's data as well as the conclusions that he made partially on their basis. If certain kinds of structured discourse are shown to engage the human brain in ways that others do not, then there may be justification for reestablishing a version of the differential conception of the "literary." This possibility has potentially significant consequences for how a great deal of reading in the humanities is carried out. In addition, investigating the relation between language and the brain demonstrates how the "two cultures" that increasingly divide not only American campuses but also society in general can be bridged in a way that is neither reductive nor defensive with regard to either side. On the one hand, it would be a missed opportunity if individuals who are professionally concerned with linguistic artifacts were to ignore the vast amounts of information about language production and perception that continue to emerge from the various disciplines that 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 Event and 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 Slavic literary theory, which begins with the Russian Formalists, includes the Prague Structuralists, and culminates in the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, especially its most visible representative Ytrii
Lotman.

' The larger context here is that there is still widespread resistance in the humanities (and the social sciences) to accepting biological constraints on human thought and behavior. However, this resistance is now tUnder increasing pressure from such fields as evolutionary psychology, linguistics, sociobiology, and, most recently, literary theory informed by cognitive science. See, for example, Cosmides and Tooby; Crane and Richardson; Miall and Kuiken, "The Form of Reading" 329. See also Easterlin, who argues that despite Darwinian theory's preeminence in biology, "literary theorists and many other academics are reluctant to embrace evolutionary epistemology because it requires recognition of natural constraints on human thought and behavior" (134). Easterlin warns that "humanists and social scientists, including literary theorists, who ignore the implications of

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seems possible to use what students of the brain have discovered without reduc6 ing literary study to a mere appendage of cognitive science.

Literariness Because Jakobson's ideas are relatively familiar to students of literary theory and are part of a coherent system, whereas the scientific data about language processing are derived from numerous individual studies and need to be assembled like a mosaic, I begin by reviewing whatJakobson means by "literariness." As he argues in his well-known article from 1960, any act of verbal communication can be analyzed in terms of six basic aspects or "functions" of language that tell us something about the addresser, the addressee, the context, the message itself, the contact between the speakers, and the code within which the given communication is taking place ("The Speech Event").Jakobson conceives of these six functions as universally true-as intrinsic in and therefore applicable to all languages at all times (Waugh 145). Although in principle all six can be found in any given utterance, usually fewer are actually present and one dominates. The significance of 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 selection into the axis of combination." He also phrases this as "equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence" ("The Speech Event" 78). These formulations can be better understood in light of another of Jakobson's classic essays, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances" (1956), in which he identifies selection and combination as the two processes that underlie 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 each other and the combination of smaller linguistic elements, such as words, into larger or longer ones, such as phrases and sentences. All the different kinds of utterances that human beings produce manifest these two fundamental processes in 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 inferred from the data that there are two polar types of aphasic impairment, which are caused by damage to particular regions of the brain. The first involves a "similarity disorder," or an inability to select and.substitute for each other words that are drawn from different semantic fields (this can be thought of as a disorder of
evolutionary theory and biology do so at the cost of the increasing irrelevance of their disciplines. To be meaningful, discussion of the artifacts of human culture must be framed by our knowledge of human beings, not by artificial or incomplete notions of our world and our social experience." " The possibility of this connection has not escaped the notice of scholars; see the extensive bibliography on the web site "Literature, Cognition and the Brain," maintained by Richardson.

7For a contrary view, see Johnson, whose argument, however, is based on debatable readings of
Saussure's conception of the sign, ofJakobson's "poetic function," and of his article on aphasia.

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the ability to construct metaphors). The second type of aphasia is a "contiguity disorder," which involves an inability to combine smaller linguistic elements into larger or longer ones (in short, a disorder involving metonyms). A complete "sliding scale" of all intermediate types of impairment between these two poles also exists. The data on which Jakobson relied further suggest the far-reaching possibility that the two poles of language are "hard wired" in the human mind or brain. (I distinguish here between the brain as a physical organ and the mind as what that organ does.) Therefore, from the perspective of Jakobson's study of aphasia, the "poetic function" maximizes the ways in which meaning is constituted in language by utilizing both polar types in one utterance: maximally developed similarity is superimposed on fully developed contiguity. For example, many everyday utterances 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 also put into differing kinds of (partial) equivalences with regard to each other. Simple examples are meter (which forces a local equivalence onto the otherwise different words), sound repetitions (which establish links between different words), and rhyme (which repeats the same sound in different words, thus creating a partial equivalence between them). But how is this a focus on the "message itself," a key characteristic in Jakobson's view of the "poetic function"? The answer lies in the recognition that the effect of the poetic function is a complex and dense network of relations among the work's constituent words (as well as both smaller and larger units of language such as phonemes, morphemes, phrases, sentences, stanzas, paragraphs, etc.)-relations that are both syntagmatic or linear (functions of strings of words) and paradigmatic or spatial (functions of metaphoric links among words and larger units of language that are not contiguous in the text). Another way of putting this is that in verbal art metaphoric relations among linguistic elements are superimposed on and integrated into the sequential, metonymic structure of discourse (this can perhaps be visualized as a combination of the X and Y axes of a graph). Because of the resulting network, the words exhibit two additional kinds of relations: to the world at large and to the work itself. In Jurij Striedter's formulation, a word in a literary work "refers the reader to an extraliterary reality, which it signifies." At the same time, because of the specific way that the language is arranged in the work, each word also "acquires meaning for the reader through its specific function in the work." This "second direction of meaning" can be seen as "refract[ing] the first, deflecting as it were every individual statement from its orientation to a preexisting reality back to the work itself [to the structure of relations among its constituent elements, and] only entering back into relationship to external reality via the work's overall structure. In this respect the work as a whole is the genuine carrier of meaning" (93). Thus, from this perspective, the dominant characteristic of works that are called literary is the multiplication of the "inner" relations among the words and the other linguistic elements that constitute them. And having to deal with these means having to deal with the form of the work itself, whencejakobson's "focus on the message."

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It is essential to realize that the "poetic function," like the other five functions that Jakobson identified, is not absolutely unique to works we call literary. As Jakobson explicitly argued, all six functions are present in everyday discourse to varying degrees, just as they are in literary works. From this perspective, a literary work is one in which the poetic function dominates the other five but does not necessarily eliminate any of them. Consequently, there are possible degrees of literariness, just as there can be degrees of referentiality, or degrees of dominance of an utterance by the other functions. For example, an utterance can be dominated almost exclusively by the "phatic function," which deals with establishing and keeping open a channel of communication between speakers, but not saying much beyond that. In the United States, this is often done via talking about the weather. Although the ostensible subjects of such conversations are the meteorological events that are impinging on the interlocutors (the referential function), frequently the actual purpose is simply to establish human contact between them. Because there are degrees to which any of the six functions can be present in any utterance, an absolutist argument that attacks the idea of "literariness" by insisting that a text has to be either "poetic" or "non-poetic" is both misleading and a betrayal ofJakobson's ideas.8 Nevertheless, even though the poetic function 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's Jaws, and not at all in most newspaper accounts of shark fishing), it is still inherent in language and thus in the works themselves. To demonstrate the presence of the poetic function in utterances that most people would not consider literary,Jakobson himself used the 1950s American election slogan "I like Ike," which has rhyme, sound repetition, and rhythm ("The Speech Event" 76-77). Some recent experimental data also show how readily individuals will use "literary" devices in everyday speech. Subjects who were asked to complete a sentence they had heard or read preferred a word that rhymed with a preceding one in the same or in a previous sentence. The psychologists who carried out the study neither invokeJakobson nor consider why this would be the case, although they comment that their results suggest that "poetry, puns, and other forms of wordplay should not be viewed as exceptions to normal language use" (Rapp and Samuel 570). Their conclusion thus accords with Jakobson's claim that the poetic function is inherent in human speech, as well as his belief that speakers show an unconscious preference for "a well-ordered shape for the message" ("The Speech Event" 76). Adding rhyme or any other device that increases the number of connections among an utterance's constituent elements, makes it both more meaningful 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 difference between literary language and ordinary language" and that this is "entirely in keeping with cognitive scientific views"; on the other, he argues that the difference between "genius" and "ordinary creativity," or between "literature" and "ordinary thought," is "at most, a difference in their extent or degree" (Cognitive Science 89). The latter formulation accords withJakobson's conception of the "poetic function," although in my view the "extent or degree" to which the poetic function is expressed in an utterance makes a significant quantitative difference that also becomes qualitative. "See also Gee, who argues that the poetic function's ubiquity in human utterance may be explained by its "sense making capacity that goes beyond literal fact or observation" (67).

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Methodologies The methods used to investigate where and how language is processed in the human brain include techniques of cognitive science that have been in existence for decades. One especially widespread methodology is split visual field studies, which exploit the lateralization of the human visual system in order to investigate the major structural feature of the brain: its division into hemispheres. A typical experimental situation involves a subject being asked to fix his gaze on a computer screen that is directly in front of him, and then to respond to various words or short phrases that are flashed briefly some distance to the right or left of the central visual fixation point. Because this happens too quickly for the subject to move his eyes or head, the flashed words impinge on only one side of his retinas: if the words appear to the left of the central fixation point, they are registered 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 right halves 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 are known as "primes" and "targets." The "target" is a word on which the investigator focuses to determine its presumed relation to a mental network of concepts. He does so by showing the subject other words, called "primes," and measuring if the subject grasps the "target" more quickly as a result. Thus, if a subject is shown nurse and reads doctor more quickly than he does after being shown the word butter,nurse is a "prime" for doctor,which is the "target," while butter is not. Newer experimental techniques include "electroencephalography" and "event-related potential" (which involves taking electrophysiological readings of the brain at work), "positron emission tomography" (or PET, which entails injections of radioactive isotopes into the blood stream to measure changes in metabolic blood flow in parts of the brain as they carry out different tasks), and "functional magnetic resonance imaging" (fMRI, which is non-invasive, but which also registers the metabolic increase in blood flow in the brain, producing the well-known colorful images of the brain "lighting up" during various cognitive tasks). The last two techniques are distinctive because they produce fine-grained three-dimensional images of the living brain at work. Even though there are extensive neuronal links 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 other connections), investigators have discerned major differences between the way the hemispheres process language and other kinds of information and sensory data. "' While these new technologies provide unprecedented insight into the brainmind-language nexus, it is important to acknowledge that much remains unclear about how the brain processes language. Moreover, most neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have not conducted experiments involving the sustained reading of continuous texts that could be called "literary" and have focused instead on isolated words, linguistic tropes, and other features of language (Ferstl

"'For general discussions of the different specializations of the brain's hernispheres see Jakobson, "Brain and 1,anguage," and lvanov.

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

The Cerebral Hemispheres The 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 Broca identified a portion of the left hemisphere as the center of speech production (it is known to this day as "Broca's Region"). Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist and psychiatrist, complemented this discovery in 1874 when he described another area in the left hemisphere that is crucial for language comprehension ("Wernicke's Region"). The view that the left hemisphere was the locus of language persisted through the 1940s. In the 1970s, some oversimplified and misleading versions of the idea that a particular hemisphere controls specific human abilities were popularized in Western media-the notion that artists have dominant right hemispheres while engineers have dominant left hemispheres among them (Kane 21-22). However, the widespread dissemination of such reductive notions in the past should not deter us from using the findings of contemporary cognitive science. There is now a broad consensus that, although in the majority of human beings the left hemisphere is primarily responsible for the expression, reception, and reading of language, important linguistic processes also occur in complex networks in both hemispheres. The division of the brain remains fundamental because numerous studies demonstrate that the hemispheres process semantic information in qualitatively different ways.1 "

Metaphors and Hemispheric Lexicons One of the differences between the hemispheres is how they process metaphors. 2 A number of studies conclude that comprehending metaphors activates

"I See Van 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 also ultimately depend on the kind of task in which they are engaged. For example, it may not always be justified to generalize from experimental data about pairs of words to sentences and then to paragraphs and longer texts (Faust and Weisper 186). It is also noteworthy that the dominance of left hemispheric lateralization for language appears to emerge with the end of childhood, on the one hand, and with print literacy, on the other (Kane 42-43, 45-46). Opinions differ about whether or not there is any significant difference between men and women regarding the neural organization of language processing. For a statement that the sexes are similar, see Frost et al.; for an argument for difference, see Rossell et al., who found that men have a marginal left hemisphere advantage over women and that men also have stronger left lateralization. See Kane 25n.2 for citations from other studies. IS Researchers differ significantly with regard to what constitutes a "metaphor." Kircher et al. use the term loosely and focus on single words that can resolve the meaning of a sample sentence in different ways. By contrast, Bottini et al. discuss metaphors at some length and define them as a figure of speech that "violates denotative rules" (1246). For their experiments, they specifically chose "new" "metaphoric sentences," such as "The old man had a head full of dead leaves" (1243), and avoided those that have become "worn out" through use. Researchers also vary in the terms they use to characterize hemispheric differences. For example, in their survey of previous studies

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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 normally tend to prefer literal interpretations of metaphors and idiomatic expressions 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 they process. Because even a completely disconnected right hemisphere can comprehend some kinds of written material, it is generally believed that each hemisphere has an independent lexicon or hypothetical store of words (Waldie and Mosley 117). However, researchers disagree about whether the hemispheres treat grammatical parts of speech differently in comparison to other lexical categories. One study suggests that the right hemisphere lexicon may consist of "concrete, imageable nouns" (Abernathy and Coney 941); another finds that there is no such asymmetry when nouns and verbs had similar degrees of "imageability" (Chiarello et al. 1460); yet another shows that verbs are processed more quickly in the left hemisphere, while nouns are processed equally in both (Sereno).14 There is a consensus, however, about the kinds of relations that characterize the lexicons or semantic fields in the hemispheres. The right hemisphere quickly activates a loose or "coarse" range of meanings associated with a word that is presented to it, while the left focuses on the most probable meaning of a word in the given context and is characterized by relationships that are hierarchical 1 and logical." Supporting this conclusion are findings that the right hemisphere does not recognize the links between semantically related pairs of nouns, a pheRichards and Chiarello state that patients with right hemisphere injury "tend to prefer literal interpretations of phrasal metaphors and idioms" (160; italics added). By contrast, Brownell et al. argue that right hemisphere damaged patients show "pervasive insensitivity" to alternative interpretations of linguistic units and do so more than half the time (375, 379). In my references to various studies below, I follow the individual researchers' own evaluations and ways of characterizing the significance 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 right hemisphere's role in processing metaphors. For example, Rapp et al. conducted fMRI experiments that showed left hemisphere activation for metaphors. As a result, they suggest that "the right hemisphere theory of metaphor comprehension needs to be critically reevaluated. Recent research with functional imaging strongly suggests that the right hemisphere plays an important role in language processing oil a sentence level; however, other factors than metaphoricity per se may trigger right hemisphere recruitment" (401). A similar conclusion is reached by Gagnon et al. and by St. George et al. The latter argue that "right hemisphere engagement during sentence comprehension is not specific to the processing of figurative aspects of language" and "appears to be a more general phenomenon that occurs routinely" when readers attempt to construe a text's meaning and the writer's intent (1322-23). 4 " Jakobson ("Brain and Language" 507) cites experimental data that show that the temporary inactivation of the left hemisphere via electric shocks affects verbs (except for simple imperatives such as "stop, walk, help") and auxiliary words, while nominative forms of nouns are somewhat more tunder the control of the right hemisphere (because they depend less on context). See also lvanov 428-29. 11See Ivanov 433; Abernathy and Coney 933, 942 (who also cite a related formulation that the right hemisphere lexicon is "based on associational and emotional relationships"); Coney and Evans 272 (who also cite Beeman et al. about the right hemisphere's being involved in the "relatively coarser semantic coding of words.., which weakly activates a large semantic field, in contrast to a smaller and more focused field of activation produced in the left hemisphere"); and Faust and Chiarello 827.

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nomenon which implies that nouns in the right hemisphere lexicon are not organized in a way that would allow activation between what are known as "category exemplars" (such as in the category "fruit" and the exemplars "apple," "pear," and "plum"). However, when words are presented to the left hemisphere they do activate other words in the same semantic category (Abernathy and Coney 941). Split visual field experiments using primes and targets show similar results. When a target word is primed by several words that are related to it only weakly, the right hemisphere shows stronger activation than the left. But when the target is primed by one strongly related word, there is greater activation within the left hemisphere (Beeman et al., cited in Coney and Evans 274). An analogous result appears on the orthographic level. During reading, the right hemisphere recognizes relations among words that share letters of the alphabet whereas the left does not. This implies that on the visual level of orthographic representation more processing occurs in the right hemisphere, whereas in the left hemisphere processing moves quickly from orthography to semantics and phonology. 6 This conclusion would seem to be applicable to reading the kinds of texts that rely on sound repetitions (even though orthography and phonetics are not iden17 tical), such as poetry or certain kinds of artistic prose. Based on these studies, it seems reasonable to hypothesize thatJakobson's "metaphoric" pole of language-which is associated with the process of selection or substitution and with paradigmatic or "spatial" relations among words-may be more a function of the right hemisphere than of the left. As Coney and Evans put it, the right hemisphere "plays a supporting role in language processing, a role defined by its capacity to cast a wider net than the left in the elaboration of word meaning" (281).1 Moreover, the "metonymic" pole-which involves combination or syntagmatic and "linear" relations among words, including linkages via time, space, and causality-may be more a function of the left hemisphere than of the right. Consequently, it seems reasonable to speculate that mundane and 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 the right hemisphere would presumably cause an utterance to be structured differently. 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 difference between the hemispheres: when processing written material, "the right hemisphere is thought to access the meaning of words 'directly' from orthography without intermediate phonological decoding ... whereas the left hemisphere is specialized for phonological and grammatical processing." 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 righthanders, 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 important when reading silently, an activity in which words are recognized "at a glance, gestalt fashion, without being further analyzed" (118). "i Coney and Evans also cite work showing that the right hemisphere is specialized for global meaning that is contextual and based on "connotative aspects of word meanings," as well as another study demonstrating that damage to the right hemisphere interferes with its ability to integrate elements in a coherent narrative and to select punch lines for jokes (274).

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

Hemispheric Cooperation and Time

Time is another category relevant for understanding the differences between how the hemispheres process language. There is evidence that the right hemisphere's role may be secondary to that of the left. One study finds that the right hemisphere appears to make an important contribution to normal reading by receiving most of its information from the left hemisphere, which carries out initial analysis and decoding (Coney 34). There is also possible support for this result in studies that find that the right hemisphere is involved in processing words more slowly than the left (Waldie and Mosley 17; Koivisto 667)."' Explanations for how this time delay occurs have also been proposed. One is that the left hemisphere maintains the dominant meaning of a word and suppresses the subordinate meanings; by contrast, the right hemisphere increases activation for these meanings. However, if the left hemisphere cannot use the word's dominant meaning successfully, then the right hemisphere makes available to it the range of subordinate meanings it has maintained (Coney and Evans 280-81). Another researcher suggests a congruent scheme: initially, all the meanings of a word are activated in the left hemisphere, which then rapidly chooses a meaning appropriate for the given context and integrates it into the current discourse 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 period of time and then decay.2 " Whether or not the alternate word meanings within the right hemisphere are maintained may depend upon whether or not mean22 ing is selected successfully within the left hemisphere. Moreover, the length of
"'See Kane for a related argument. However, she presents a long list of features common in poetry as being functions of the right hemisphere.

'('Results reported by Abernathy and Coney are more ambiguous because they suggest that seman-

"2 Cited in Faust and Chiarello 828. Faust and Gernsbacher (234, 252-53) find that, although both hemispheres suppress inappropriate forms of homophones (words that sound alike but are spelled differently), the left hemisphere is more effective than the right in suppressing inappropriate homographs (words spelled alike but differing in derivation, meaning, or pronunciation) during sentence comprehension. This implies that the hemispheres have different semantic processing systems and that the left hemisphere is dominant for integration during comprehension, at least for alternative senses ofhomographs. "
Cited in Faust and Chiarello 828. See also Ferstl and von Cramon, who cite a related argument
pertaining to hemispheric cooperation-that the inability of patients with right hemisphere dam-

tic information is relayed from the left hemisphere to the right and vice versa, as are "the secondary products" of activation "rather than the primary stimulus itself" (944).

age to draw "bridging inferences" is due to their inability to activate "a sufficiently large field of world knowledge associations" (326). However, a different model of hemispheric cooperation has

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 108

the linguistic sample may further affect the relation between the hemispheres. If the sample is a sentence rather than a pair of words, the metaphoric meanings that arise in the right hemisphere may become available to the processing mechanisms in the left hemisphere (Faust and Weisper 190). In general, however, all these explanations correlate with the right hemisphere's lexicon consisting of loose semantic associations, in contrast to those in the left.

Estrangement The relations between the hemispheres posited in these studies suggest the additional (and not unexpected) hypothesis that the brain is more actively engaged when trying to make sense of an utterance that consists of familiar words taken out of their habitual contexts and placed in unfamiliar juxtapositions than when it makes sense of everyday words in everyday utterances. This is also the effect of "defamiliarization" that the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky posited as 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 function."23 One of the ways that language can be "defamiliarized" or "estranged" is by structuring an utterance in such a way that the dominant and habitual meanings 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 straightforward meanings of the words. However, "the iron gates of life" requires not only the dominant meanings of the words but also their secondary associations, all of which have to be correlated if this metaphor's meaning is to emerge. This metaphoric 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 meanings are, in the special sense that interests her, similar to, as well as different from, those that can be adduced for "iron gates." Thus, the speaker finds "equivalence" between seemingly dissimilar terms ("iron gates" and "life"), which is the process of "selection" (and which entails rejecting "fence," "prison," "bank," etc.), and arranges these terms into a syntactical unit according to the laws of English grammar, which is the process of "combination." In other words, the speaker superimposes or "projects" the "axis of selection" onto the "axis of combination." The process of interpreting this metaphor is similar. The reader has to consider not only the familiar, literal meanings of the words involved and their arrangement into a linear sequence (which, according to the studies cited above, occurs primarily in the left hemisphere), but also the array of attendant figurative 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 activates a larger array of meanings in the contralateral hemisphere. 23 For a discussion of Shklovsky's essay, see Erlich 176-78. See Miall and Kuiken, "Foregrounding," for a description of experiments demonstrating that devices causing estrangement in artistic prose

lengthen reading time. Tsur, for whom Shklovsky's concept plays a foundational role, suggests that
delays in processing aesthetically organized language affect the perception of stylistic elements in a

given work (5).

LITERATURE AND THE BRAIN/109

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

Coherence Building The right hemisphere appears to have a special role with regard to constructing the overall meaning of utterances. Whereas the left hemisphere deals with such features of language as phonemes, grammar, and syntax, the right is concerned with processes such as connecting sentences into paragraphs, appreciating irony, and, it would seem, recognizing metaphors. Damage to the right hemisphere impairs an individual's ability to understand humor (he or she cannot connect the punch line to the preceding part of the joke), to make inferences, to understand the relevance of contexts, and to understand emotion in spoken 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 damage also indicates that "global coherence"-the connection of individual sentences to an overarching "text macrostructure" or to information earlier in a text-is 4 typically achieved by the right hemisphere2 Much about how the right hemisphere achieves global coherence is still unclear, and even an adequate definition of "discourse coherence" is still lacking (St. George et al. 1324). Nevertheless, it is possible to hypothesize a connection between the right hemisphere's involvement in processing figurative language and its role in building non-syntactical types of global coherence, activities that can be seen as variants of each other and that are central to the kind of linguistic structuring inherent in "literariness." As St. George and her colleagues suggest, the presence in the right hemisphere of semantic fields that are looser and larger than those in the left may lead to "a greater potential for overlap (and integration 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 how the right hemisphere achieves "global" coherence. The left hemisphere is driven by a "top down" search for meaning. This entails the integration of all the information 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 as to whether or not they had titles that made the content of the paragraphs intelligible. See also the

complementary results in Coney and Evans 274. Ferstl and von Cramon dispute St. George, et al.'s

conclusion on the basis of experimental fMRI results that do not support a special role for the right
hemisphere in building coherence (338). However, it should be noted that Ferstl and von Cramon used pairs of sentences rather than paragraphs, that they were concerned with "local" rather than "global" coherence (337), and that they acknowledge that the difference in results may be due to "task differences" between the experiments (339). Consequently, the right hemisphere may have a role in cases when the text is larger or more ambiguous. See also Jakobson's citation of work showing that when electrical shocks temporarily inactivated a patient's left hemisphere the result was a decrease in the number of words used and in the variety and length of syntactic combinations and levels of subordination. By contrast, inactivation of the right hemisphere resulted in an increase in the patient's production of complex multi-leveled constructions ("Brain and Language" 507).

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sentence-level constructions than on relations among individual words. When a meaningful word is encountered, each successive word is integrated into the sentence in a way that makes sense given the prior context. By contrast, the right hemisphere functions in a more "bottom up" fashion, because for it the meanings of individual words are much more important than "sentence constraint" when interpreting a given message. The only kind of "top down" constraint used by the right hemisphere is "general world knowledge," such as would allow constructing a courtroom scenario from the sequence "angry, jury, confront," no matter how the words are ordered in the sequence (Chiarello et al. 1461).25 In short, the left hemisphere functions in "predictive" fashion by activating words that are likely to appear next, whereas the right hemisphere engages in "integrative" processing, comparing new words to those encountered previously. As a result, the left hemisphere may be more efficient than the right in everyday language processing when it encounters expected words, but less efficient when its initial expectations have to be revised (Federmeier and Kutas 373, 388). The right hemisphere's ability to maintain multiple meanings would clearly be an advantage when ambiguous meanings arising from unexpected juxtapositions of words need to be interpreted and when initial interpretations need to be revised (Faust and Chiarello 832-33)26 These findings again suggest a connection with "literariness" understood as a form of linguistic structuring that maximizes the generation of meaning via both

syntagmatic (metonymic) and paradigmatic (metaphoric) relations among the

constituent words. The left hemisphere's reliance on sentence-level mechanisms would seem to correlate with the former, while the right hemisphere's ability to fashion meaning from scrambled sentences (and via word-level mechanisms) would seem to correlate with the latter. These two processes exhaust the ways in

which language can generate meaning and presumably begin to function when
the text is structured in a way that requires both."7 As Faust and Chiarello state,

"no specific interhemispheric 'control' mechanism is required and the unique

capabilities of each hemisphere are drawn upon as needed based upon alterationsin information salience and relevance that modulate the use of multiple processors distributed throughout the brain" (833; italics added).
15 See also Morris, cited in Faust and Chiarello 828. There are parallels with how the hemispheres treat space: the left focuses on discrete elements, while the right structures a holistic image (Ivanov 418-19). 1 A possibly related finding is that a negative and thus linguistically more complex sentence takes

longer to process and causes greater and broader activation of the relevant parts of the brain than does an affirmative sentence (the average time to process an affirmative sentence is 3511 ms, whereas a 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 hemispheres, but he makes the radically different claim that in this regard poetic creativity is no different from other types of conscious language use (437). Here it is useful to recall that Jakobson's function" exists on a sliding scale, from having a dominant role in an utterance to one that is merely incidental. Thus, there are degrees of "poeticity," which implies differing degrees and kinds of linguistic structuring, and therefore differing roles of the hemispheres. Kane cites an investigation showing that subjects reading a technical text had stronger electroencephalogram signals from their left hemispheres than their right; however, the signal strength was reversed when subjects read stories that were high in imagery (23).

"poetic

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Hemispheric Dominance, Creativity, Schizophrenia Several groups of researchers make overt connections between differences in
how the cerebral hemispheres process language and the kinds of practices implied by verbal creativity in our culture. Creative behavior can be defined provisionally as the ability to tolerate ambiguity and to relate in meaningful ways information that is varied, conflicting, or inconclusive (Atchley et al. 479, 482) .21 According to this definition-and in accordance with the right hemisphere's role in processing metaphors, maintaining multiple word meanings, and constructing "global" coherence-creativity cannot occur without a significant in-

volvement by the right hemisphere. The differences in the ways the hemispheres process language suggest that some part of the difference between individuals in terms of creativity may be the extent to which they can maintain multiple ambiguity in the right hemisphere (Atchley et al. 483). The authors of this study caution, however, that generalizations of this sort must be used warily because there is no widely accepted definition of "creativity." A different set of associations relevant to the link between creativity and hemispheric dominance centers on schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder that entails loss of contact with the environment and disintegration of the personality. Phi-

losophers and writers have linked madness and creative genius for over two millennia-from Plato and Aristotle to Ficino, Shakespeare, Diderot, Poe, Nietzsche, and Artaud, among many others. Contemporary neurologists do so as well. The authors of one study point to Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), the father of "eugenics," which is the study of methods to improve inherited mental and physical characteristics, and Cesare Lambroso (1836-1909), whose theories explore the

relation between heredity and crime, as the initiators of speculation about "commonalities between madness and genius" (Leonhard and Brugger 180). They also summarize the work of other researchers who find that similarities between psychotic and highly creative individuals hinge on "over-inclusiveness" or the tendency to perceive as related the kinds of things that are considered distinct by most others (Leonhard and Brugger 180)." The authors conclude that, although the popular idea of creative thought as localized exclusively in the right hemisphere is wrong, "some aspects of creativity do seem to be linked to [right hemisphere] associative processing." One example they cite is that healthy righthanded individuals made more associations among seemingly disparate visual patterns-such as Rorschach inkblots and random patterns of dots-when these were briefly flashed to the left visual field (or the right hemisphere), than to the right visual field (or the left hemisphere) (180-81). These results are complemented by the authors' own experimental data, which show that a reduction in
Gianotti et al. make a similar point (595). It should be noted, however, that the emphasis on artislic creativity as a form of innovation reflects a modern and generally Western cultural bias that is not universal in the world's cultures. For more on this, see Alexandrov. Gianotti et al. come to similar conclusions about "apophenia," which is the "specific experience

"

"2'

of an abnormal meaningfulness" of coincidental phenomena (596). This state is considered a key symptom of the onset of schizophrenia and is frequently triggered by associations between objectively unrelated events. The description of this state is in fact very similar to the experience of transcendent "holism" reported by creative artists. For a discussion of correlations among hernispheric specialization, psychological illness, and writing poetry, see also Kane 47-51.

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left hemisphere dominance in lexical decision-making, together with a relatively increased role for the right hemisphere, correlates positively with proneness to schizophrenic thought (as well as paranormal belief). The authors also make an intriguing speculative leap when they suggest that the use of the right hemisphere's semantic system may constitute "a selective evolutionary advantage allowing the genes predisposing to schizophrenia to proliferate despite the obvious disadvantages of this devastating disease" (Leonhard and Brugger 177) .30 In other words, the kinds of language processing associated with verbal creativity, or with "literariness," may also provide a "selective evolutionary advantage" despite their possible association with mental illness. This pushes the Romantic link of madness and creativity to an intriguing level of speculation.

Hemispheric Specialization and Evolution Another connection between evolutionary advantage and hemispheric specialization has also been suggested. One study argues that dominant language functions came to be located in the left hemisphere because it was already specialized to some extent for sequential processing (Corballis et al. 113; Tallal et al.). This seems plausible if one assumes that quotidian language use takes place in time and relies on sequence; presumably, early humans communicated largely in this way. The authors hypothesize that language developed in the left hemisphere by taking over tissues that had previously been involved in visuospatial processing. However, the right hemisphere retained this capability and became "specialized" for it "somewhat by default." This asymmetry increased over the course of human evolution and was thus caused not by the development of a new capacity in the right hemisphere, but by the loss of one in the left. The authors also suggest that the benefit of human cerebral asymmetry is the ability to carry out different linguistic and cognitive processes, which can be shared via commissures between the hemispheres (Corballis et al. 113, 114). The idea that there is a communicative benefit that accrues from the differences between the hemispheres can be correlated with Jakobson's conception that literary works possess a linguistic structure that maximizes both of the ways that meaning is constituted in language. Writers, and especially poets, appear always to have known this. AsJoseph Brodsky, Nobel Laureate and Poet Laureate of the United States, remarked after a public reading at Harvard University in the fall of 1980, language is humankind's highest achievement and poetry is the highest form of language.

Conclusion By correlating the findings cited above it is possible to make several broad, albeit tentative, generalizations about language processing in relation to hemispheric 1o See Schleifer for a different relation between creativity and a cerebral disorder. Miall and Kuiken also argue that "literary reading" has "adaptive consequences," although without invoking mental
disorders ("The Form of Reading" 340).

LITERATURE AND THE BRAIN/113

specialization and cooperation. The left hemisphere appears to be the locus of linear, 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 ancillary or secondary meanings of words. Language processing in the left hemisphere is 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 characterized by a looser or coarser semantic focus. Via metaphoric linkages, the right hemisphere can construct meanings from distal words that may otherwise seem unrelated to each other in the given language (and, one should add, at a given cultural moment). Because ancillary and secondary meanings of words linger in the right hemisphere and are not actively suppressed, these secondary meanings are made available to the left hemisphere when the individual is attempting to read an ambiguous text. In contrast to the left hemisphere, the right is concerned with the "global" coherence of the entire text and is more sensitive to orthographic repetitions; thus, the right hemisphere is organized paradigmatically and "spatially." These broad generalizations are noteworthy because they appear to echojakobson's ideas about the poetic function of language. However, it is important to note that texts with these kinds of linguistic structures may also be called by other names in other cultures, and that they may have other functions in these cultures than the ones that are, or were, associated with "literature" in the contemporary West. For example, in various ancient traditions verse forms and other devices that we associate with "poetry" have been used for very different kinds of writing-for example, Sanskrit ayurvedic medical treatises or Medieval Arabic medical poetry, including works by the celebrated philosopher Ibn Sina ("Avicenna"). Lucretius's epic of Epicurean philosophy De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) is written in hexameter. Religious chants, prayers, services, and sermons-indeed most sacred writings from all the world's religions-are often composed using verse forms and other devices that are manifestations of the "poetic function," even though the cultural role of such texts is not the same as literature has or had for us. Such examples could easily be increased. But this does not detract from the apparent fact that human beings can choose to embody distinctively constituted meanings in different kinds of utterances that they then treat as exceptional according to particular cultural norms. Another important caveat is that although "literariness" is not primarily a gauge for a work's value and quality, it has some obvious implications for such criteria. Nevertheless, because the density of meaning in a work such as a poem far exceeds what can be found in most ordinary utterances of the same length, Yurii Lotman has suggested a succinct formulation that can serve as an approximate description of the link between value and literariness: "beauty is information" (178). Although Jakobson was widely influential decades ago in linguistics, literary theory, anthropology, semiotics, and other fields, and is still recognized as a major figure of the past, he has fallen from popularity in recent years, especially in the English-speaking world. This is presumably due to post-structuralism's reac-

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 114

tion against its immediate predecessors and its distrust of grand and essentialist theories of any kind. However, the findings summarized above suggest that Jakobson may in fact have been ahead of his time in how he understood the relation between language processing and the brain, and that there is now sufficient reason to reconsider his legacy. Missing from my account, of course, is the kind of experimental cognitive or neuroscientific data pertaining to actual literary texts that would be essential for a full assessment of "literariness." Thus far, I have not found any studies in which

investigators tried to understand what was happening in subjects' brains while they read entire works of poetry or artistic prose in comparison to simple discursive texts. (This kind of investigation would also need to be carried out in different cultural contexts in order to assess the influence of cultural expectations on reading.)31 In principle, such experiments are perfectly feasible, even if the complexity of the mental processes involved and the numbers of possible variants that 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 the human brain is reading, or perhaps even producing, a literary text it processes language in accordance with a scheme that resembles Jakobson's conception of "literariness"? From one point of view, the consequences could be highly significant because the difference between "literature" and other kinds of utterances would 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 of inquiry to which they would doubtless be tempted to reapply hierarchical criteria. The door might also open to other, much more fine-grained investigations

of the relations between the brain and verbal art than those summarized above. Another important consequence could be a renewed focus on the way the structure of the text determines the meaning that emerges from it. If the brain can in fact be shown to involve the automatic, unconscious correlation of distinct procedures in the hemispheres, then it is reasonable to infer that meanings formulated by readers are a function of interrelated paradigmatic and syntagmatic

relations among the text's constituent elements (asJakobson assumed in his article on aphasia and in "Linguistics and Poetics"). Consequently, a reader who believes in such things as scientific objectivity or the possibility of limiting one's a priori biases during the act of reading might feel compelled to ascertain how the work's immanent structure determines a configuration of meanings specific to it. In turn, this might limit the degree to which such a reader would feel free to read the text from other ideological perspectives. A return to the text in the way that "literariness" implies might thus begin to provide a new (old) direction to literary studies in academe.

":' Chokron and De Agostini have found that normal right-handed individuals who read from left to right (French) and right to left (Israeli) prefer static and mobile images that show directionality oriented in the same direction as their reading habits. (This effect was not observed for landscapes, however.) Contrary to earlier studies that focused only on left-to-right readers and assumed that aesthetic preference was a function of cerebral lateralization, this evidence shows the domi-

nance of a cultural influence on a particular form of aesthetic judgment that is independent of

hemispheric specialization.

LITERATURE AND THE BRAIN/ 115

From another point of view, however, there would be no entirely compelling reason for anyone to change his reading practices. The relation between culture and 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 feel free to interpret any work the way he chooses, no matter what may be going on in his cerebral hemispheres. Within the realm of human beliefs there is no absolute ground that can be used to adjudicate what individuals choose to view as true, good, and real. In the end, therefore, "literariness" could be seen as just another ideology that the reader is free to accept or reject in light of other values.
Yale University

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TITLE: Literature, Literariness, and the Brain SOURCE: Comp Lit 59 no2 Spr 2007 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact he publisher: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~clj/