Literary Neurophysiology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Knoper
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
Scientific Epistemology ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Pauline Hopkins ◽  
Cognitive Practice

Writing about neurophysiology more than a century ago, what were US authors doing? Literary Neurophysiology: Memory, Race, Sex, and Representation in U.S. Writing, 1860–1914 examines their use of literature to experiment with the new materialist psychology, which bore upon their efforts to represent reality and was forging new understandings of race and sexuality. Sometimes they emulated scientific epistemology, allowing their art and conceptions of creativity to be reshaped by it. Sometimes they imaginatively investigated neurophysiological theories, challenging and rewriting scientific explanations of human identity and behavior. By enfolding physiological experimentation into literary inquiries that could account for psychological and social complexities beyond the reach of the laboratory, they used literature as a cognitive medium. Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Gertrude Stein come together as they probe the effects on mimesis and creativity of reflex-based automatisms and unconscious meaning-making. Oliver Wendell Holmes explores conceptions of racial nerve force elaborated in population statistics and biopolitics, while W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins contest notions of racial energy used to predict the extinction of African Americans. Holmes explores new definitions of “sexual inversion” as, in divergent ways, Whitman and John Addington Symonds evaluate relations among nerve force, human fecundity, and the supposed grave of nonreproductive sex. Carefully tracing entanglements and conflicts between literary culture and mental science of this period, Knoper reveals unexpected connections among these authors and fresh insights into the science they confronted. Considering their writing as cognitive practice, he provides a new understanding of literary realism.

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia J. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Physical Suffering ◽  
Convergence And Divergence ◽  
Similarities And Differences

This book examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century together with influential religious ideologies helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Theories of the civilizing process as intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify a revulsion from physical pain among the postbellum elite. Yet a sizeable portion of this elite rejected this comfort-seeking, pain-avoiding aesthetic as a regrettable consequence of over-civilization. Proponents of the strenuous cult instead identified pain and strife as essential ingredients of an invigorated life. The Ache of the Actual examines variants on a lesser known counter-sensibility integral to the writings of a number of influential literary realists. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt each delineated alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering rather than to either revulsion from or immersion in it. They resolved the binary contrast between pain-aversion on one side and pain-immersion on the other by endorsing an uncommon responsiveness to pain whose precise form depended on the ethical and aesthetic priorities of the writer in question. Focusing on these variations elucidates the similarities and differences within US literary realism while revealing areas of convergence and divergence between realism and other long-nineteenth-century literary modes, chief among them both sentimentalism and naturalism, that were similarly preoccupied with pain.

Vitality, Racial Creativity, and Biopolitics

2021 ◽  
pp. 81-117
Author(s):  
Randall Knoper
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Bell Curve ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Physical Energy ◽  
Class Average ◽  
Pauline Hopkins ◽  
African American Race

In a materialist vitalism that emerged, nerve force as a physical energy was assumed to give idiosyncratic shape to organisms, races, and species. Borrowing from evolutionary theory and biometrics, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests in Elsie Venner that the vital force of the average members of a race or species will prevail, while hybrids at the edges of the vital bell curve will expire, a principle that applies as well to literature, which has its own vital curve. William Dean Howells promotes a naturalized realism of the healthy, national (white, middle-class) average. W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins take on the task of establishing the African American race as vigorous and empowered rather than enervated—and of eluding constraining racial definition by oscillating between biological and immaterial conceptions of racial force.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Core ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
American Literary Realism

The terms “poetry” and “realism” have a complex and mostly oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the postbellum period. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated. Poetry is thus almost entirely absent from scholarship on American literary realism except as the emblem of realism’s opposite: a desiccated genteel “twilight of the poets.” The typical tale held that, while poetry sputtered into decline, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain towered over literary culture as “major realists,” with 1885 standing as the ...

scholarly journals The MOVE Framework: Meanings, Observations, Viewpoints, and Experiences in processes of Social Change

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 321-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Séamus A. Power ◽  
Gabriel Velez
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Social Psychological Research ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Over Time

Social psychologists are often criticized for failing to capture the dynamic nature of psychological processes. We present a novel framework to address this problem. The MOVE framework contends that to comprehend complex, contradictory, and divergent patterns of thought, affect, and behavior within changing, real-world contexts, it is necessary to undertake ecologically valid research that is attentive to the lived experiences and meaning-making processes of culturally embedded individuals over time. A focus on meanings, observations, viewpoints, and experiences is essential for social psychological research that holistically captures how people construct, understand, respond, position, and act over time within changing social, economic, and political contexts. To illustrate the utility of our proposition, we draw on classic social psychological studies and multimethod fieldwork during a period of rapid social and political change in Colombia during the peace process (2012–2017). We argue the MOVE framework has the potential to advance psychological understandings of, and contributions to, individuals embedded in real, dynamic social and political contexts. We discuss the implications of this extended social psychological paradigm for advancing psychological science.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 254-272
Author(s):  
Jerome Tharaud
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
William Apess ◽  
Conservation Movement ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter looks beyond the American Civil War to consider the ways evangelical space continued to shape how Americans saw the landscape and themselves in literary realism to the conservation movement. It mentions how Mark Twain became a representative figure of how a secularizing America remained haunted by a sense of sacred presence rooted in the soil itself. It reviews the story about the rise of white Protestant evangelicals within U.S. national culture and how their form of evangelical space became American space by the eve of the Civil War. The chapter explores the ironic story about how evangelical space escaped control as writers and artists from other traditions reconfigured the relationship between landscape representation, media, and the sacred to produce their own apocalyptic geographies. It recounts how William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Robert S. Duncanson, and Henry Obookiah appropriated and adapted evangelical space.

The Effects of Three Instructor Participatory Roles on a Small Group’s Collaborative Concept Mapping

2021 ◽  
pp. 073563312110572
Author(s):  
Fan Ouyang ◽  
Weiqi Xu
Keyword(s):  
Concept Mapping ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Knowledge Construction ◽  
Concept Maps ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Student Group ◽  
Computer Supported Collaborative Learning ◽  
High Level ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Collaborative Concept Mapping

Collaborative concept mapping, as one of the widely used computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) modes, has been used to foster students’ meaning making, problem solving, and knowledge construction. Previous empirical research has used varied instructional scaffoldings and has reported different effects of those scaffoldings on collaboration. To further examine the effects of instructional scaffoldings, this research implements three different instructor participatory roles (i.e., cognitive contributor, group regulator, and social supporter) to support online collaborative concept mapping (CCM). We use multiple learning analytics methods to examine the group’s CCM processes from the social, cognitive, and metacognitive dimensions, supplemented with assessments of the concept maps. The research reveals different effects of three instructor participatory roles on the group’s collaborative behaviors, discourses, and performances. When the instructor engaged as a cognitive contributor, the student group achieved a lowly-interactive, low-level metacognitive engagement and behavior-oriented knowledge construction; when the instructor engaged as a group regulator, the student group achieved a socially-balanced, high-level metacognitive engagement and behavior-communication-interrelated knowledge construction; and when the instructor engaged as a social supporter, the student group achieved a highly-interactive, medium-level metacognitive engagement and communication-oriented knowledge construction. Based on the results, this research proposed pedagogical, analytical, and theoretical implications for future empirical research of CSCL.

A Rose is a Rose is a Hero is a Horse: Naming and Referentiality in the Poetry of Robert Kroetsch and Gertrude Stein

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Casas
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Robert Kroetsch ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
The Status ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Writings

The contemporary Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch claims Gertrude Stein as an important influence on his work. On the surface, there are indeed many similarities between the poetics of Kroetsch and that of Stein. Separated by one generation and one epoch of literary history – from Stein’s Modernism to Kroetsch’s avowed Postmodernism – they are nevertheless both avant-garde poets, with an interest in the relationship of signifier to signified and in the problems and joys of representation. However, the poetry of these two writers diverges radically in meaning-making practices and, finally, philosophical foundations. Although Stein and Kroetsch share a fascination with the unstable relationship between signifier and signified, Stein’s approach seems to suggest that the instability was a problem and source of anxiety in her quest to represent reality, even inasmuch as ‘representation’ became ‘creation’, while Kroetsch’s poetry and critical writings express a joy and sense of play produced by his awareness of the gap between signified and signifier. I have reconstructed the metalinguistics of these two avant-garde writers by comparing poems by Kroetsch and Stein at the level of syntax, lexical collocation and coherence, and conception. Their poems share many themes and preoccupations, including conceptions of ‘naming’, the deconstruction of the signifier, and the status of the text. However, differences in technique are the direct reflection of philosophical differences in art movements at opposite ends of the 20th century.

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