The View of Where We've Been and

Where We'd Like to Go

F. Elizabeth Hart

Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An F. Elizabeth Hart is an associate

Introduction. London and NewYork:
professor of Renaissance at the
Routledge. $115.00 he. $33.95 sc. 176 pp.
University of Connecticut,
Gavins, Joanna, and Gerald Steen, eds. 2003. Storrs, and author of articles on
Cognitive Poetics in Practice. London and
Shakespeare and cognitive
NewYork: Routledge. $125.00 he. $34.95
SC. 173 pp. approaches to literary studies.

Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 2002.

The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and
the Mind's Hidden Complexities. NewYork:
Basic Books. $21.00 SC. 396 pp.

T he three studies that are the subject of

this discussion bear in common, among
other things, an important assumption
that touches intimately on the concerns of
literary research and pedagogy. They assume
that, in a post-Derridean world, not only is
the quest to understand the processes of
meaning-making still a valid one, but that
226 College Literature 33.1 (Winter 2006)

today, ironically, we may have at our disposal more instruments than ever
before with which to explore how human beings communicate.
Philosophers and literary scholars on both sides of the great Theory Divide
are wondering alike, inevitably: What's next? How might we proceed in the
wake of poststructuralism's rearrangement and even discrediting of the for-
malist and structuralist strategies that once provided our (admittedly foggy)
windows onto communicative acts and the texts that encode them?
To the authors and editors of these books, the tools literary scholars need
not merely to dispense with the older paradigms but actually to surpass them
in their ability to teach us about meaning-making are most readily and sen-
sibly found in the cognitive sciences. These studies culminate (though in a
limited way that I will discuss shortly) roughly twenty years of eavesdropping
by a small contingent of literary scholars on conversations taking place with-
in fields like cognitive psychology, hnguistics, psychohnguistics, computer
science, the cognitive neurosciences, cognitive evolution, evolutionary psy-
chology, and others that fall under the widely interdisciphnary label "cogni-
tive science" (and that generally tend to make those of us in the humanities
cringe—^with honest intimidation if not distaste). Literary scholars intrigued
with recent advances in learning ahout the human brain/mind (learning
spurred on by the invention of imaging technologies such as CAT scan,
MRI, and OIS that allow scientists to view live brains in action) have been
bringing to their roles as literary theorists and critics a conviction whose
time has surely come: Simply put, they beheve that our approaches to liter-
ary questions can and should be enriched by an acknowledgment of how the
enabling and constraining behaviors of brains and minds contribute to liter-
ary experience.
The diversity of tides now associated with this belief testifies to the
expansion and increasing maturity of cognitive literary studies. To cite some
of the major titles from just the past five years, including monographs, essay
collections, and theater as well as literary studies: Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds
(2004), Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (eds.). The Work of Fiction:
Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (2004), Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and
Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion and Cognitive Science,
Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (both 2003), David Herman
(ed.). Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (2003), Bruce McConachie,
American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting
Containment, 1947-1962 (2003),JosephTabbi, Cognitive Fictions (2002), David
Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (2002), Mary Thomas
Crane, Shakespeare's Brain: Reading With Cognitive Theory (2001), Ellen
Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World
(2001), and BlakeyVermeuele, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology
 F. Elizabeth Hart 227

in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2000). (Also, forthcoming in 2006 is Lisa

Zunshines Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel.)
These works represent hterary scholars' efforts to assimilate brain/mind
science into a broad range of historical and close-textual readings; and as
such, they risk heing accused by colleagues in the humanities of being epis-
temologically naive, even parasitical, feeding off the greater cultural curren-
cy of science and therehy slighting (so the logic goes) the complexities of ht-
erary creativity. Yet it is worth noting that the inverse is also occurring:
Occasionally, cognitive scientists focus their own research on hterary or the-
atrical phenomena, recognizing that those domains of human experience
present rich "on-line" laboratories, ideally suited to cognitive experimenta-
tion. Among the scientists who have returned the epistemological compli-
ment in this way are Raymond W. Gihhs, a psycholinguist {Poetics of Mind:
Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding, 1994); Daniel Schacter, a neu-
ropsychologist and memory expert, working in collaboration with the liter-
ary critic Elaine Scarry {Memory, Brain, and Belief 2000); and Gilles
Fauconnier, a linguist, whose own coUahoration with the literary critic Mark
Turner {The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden
Complexities, 2002) is one of the three works considered here.
What the modest rise in such studies attests to, at least on the part of the
literary scholars, is hoth a nostalgia for the good old days of formalism, when
one could safely assume that a text was grounded by its language (and that
the language, of course, was successfully meaningful for those who had
acquired the right kind of "competence")—as well as a willingness to take
seriously the postmodern problematics of interpretation, even to push the
epistemological project of postmodernism further to its horizons. By this I
mean that cognitive hterary studies emhraces the disciplinary hreakdown that
has heen the gift of postmodernism and uses it to pose scenarios that might
have seemed utterly alien to literary studies just a half a century ago. For
example, what if metaphor, far from heing a discursive wild card, turns out
to he the actual ground of knowledge—alheit a grounding of cognitive and
perceptual processes rather than language per se or the hterary text? What if
emotions, far fi-om heing the embarrassing stepchildren of rationality, turn
out to provide the shaping contexts that give reason its very logic, its force?
What if humans possess cognitive predispositions that play a role—^perhaps a
key one—alongside our historical and cultural inheritances in determining
how we, say, track the plot of or infer multiple characters' intentions within
a Dostoevsky novel? These are some of the kinds of questions heing pon-
dered (and actively apphed to literary reading) in light of findings in today's
cognitive science.
228 College Literature 33.1 [Winter 2006]

One response to such lines of questioning might be to say that cognitive

literary studies places too much faith in empiricism, that its apparently slav-
ish devotion to the science must undermine its humanistic integrity. While
here is not the space to pursue the full-hlown debate on empiricism (whose
pitfalls neither the scientists nor the cognitive literary scholars are naive
about, at least not in my experience), let me just say that, at the moment, the
conjunction of literature and cognitive science seems to be meeting a certain
need among literary scholars for intellectual balance.That is, weighed against
what we have learned and accepted about the problematics of interpretation
is the desire to shift the conversation onto genuinely new conceptual terri-
tory, one that allows a panoramic view both of where we have been and
where we'd like to go.This balancing act is ultimately what we should expect
from the field's newest publications, but sadly, this is precisely what's miss-
ing from Peter Stockwell's Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, and its com-
panion volume of essays. Cognitive Poetics in Practice, edited by Joanna
Gavins and Gerard Steen. Purporting to be representative ofthe "cognitive
turn" (Stockwell, 6) in literary studies, in fact, these studies survey only one
aspect of that turn, the important but relatively narrow effort to redesign
literary styhstics using insights from cognitive studies about reception and
comprehension.
Covering a wide range of approaches to stylistics, from poetics to dis-
course theory and narratology, these two studies represent some ofthe exten-
sions of "cognitive rhetoric" beyond its foundations laid by Mark Turner in
Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (1991) and
by Turner in collaboration with the cognitive linguist George Lakoff {More
Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, 1989). Both studies are
designed as textbooks, presumably targeted to undergraduates, although,
owing to their density and difficulty, they may be better suited to graduate
students or at least advanced English majors. (My recent experience using the
Lakoff and Turner in an introductory poetry course has convinced me of this
material's opaqueness for newcomers.) Each has also been carefully put
together for multiple use: Students may read them separately or consecutive-
ly, or they may cross-reference them with each other since the explanatory
chapters in Stockwell deliberately mirror the content of the essays applying
reading strategies in Gavins and Steen. The chapters in Stockwell offer a cat-
alogue of cognitive concepts (e.g., prototype theory, the theory of mental
spaces, possible worlds theory, cognitive semantics) that bear demonstrably on
age-old stylistics problems (e.g., genre, intertextuality, characterization, con-
textualization, narrative structure,"literariness,"figuration).Cognitive and lit-
erary themes are helpfully presented in unison, as alternate approaches to the
same or similar phenomena, thereby reducing the reader's suspicion that a
 F, Elizabeth Hart 229

cognitive investigation is by definition a foray onto completely alien ground.

Applications to specific literary texts (usually poetry—a constraint that has
always heen a weakness of cognitive poetics) and genres or modes (e,g,, par-
ody, allegory, science fiction) are revealing and creative, hut they assume of
students a wider reading repertoire than may he practical (ranging from the
medieval Dream of the Rood through Emily Bronte to Ted Hughes),
and—what may he worse—they suffer at times from almost numhing lan-
guidness.The sections on "Discussion," "Explorations," and "Further reading
and references" that end each chapter emphasize hoth the still-tentative sta-
tus of cognitive poetics and the interactive spirit of this introduction, invit-
ing students to help formulate the field rather than passively receive it,
Gavins and Steen's introduction to Cognitive Poetics in Practice does a more
coherent joh than Stockwell's of situating cognitive poetics within its sphere
of influences, including Russian formalism, Czech and French structuralisms,
Israeh poetics (especially the pioneering work of Reuven Tsur, one of this
volume's contributors), American hut also increasingly international cogni-
tive linguistics (at whose center stands LakofF, Turner, and another contribu-
tor, Raymond Gihhs), more recent hreakthroughs in mental space and cog-
nitive hlend theory (Fauconnier,Turner), and AI research aimed at cracking
the mystery of how humans (but interestingly not computers) use mental
fi-ames, scripts, and schemas to negotiate their complex worlds. As noted
hefore, the essays in this companion guide mirror the suhject matter of
Stockwell's Introduction almost chapter by chapter, a decision that serves
simultaneously to reinforce the meanings of the cognitive concepts and,
unfortunately, to dull those concepts' vihrancy with over-repetition. In effect,
one of this project's greatest strengths, its clear, pedagogy-fi-iendly design, is
also a weakness as it too often locks the essays and their authors into formu-
laic presentations that their discussions can't transcend. This is most true of
some of the essays on narrative, which tend toward static, Al-influenced
graphic reduction; but less true of those that survey the recent revolution in
"cognitive semantics" (also called "cognitive linguistics"), an orientation that
signals rich theoretical prohing into the relationships hetween individual
writers, texts, readers, and their source cultures. Of the latter type essays, three
in particular warrant special mention.
The essays hy Peter Crisp ("Conceptual Metaphor and Its Expressions"),
Michael Burke ("Literature as Parahle"), and Elena Semino ("Possihle Worlds
and Mental Spaces in Hemingway's 'A Very Short Story'") all assume the
importance of embodiment as a concept in today's linguistics and cognitive sci-
ence in general. This form of embodiment, which I will call "cognitive
embodiment" to distinguish it from what culture-studies theorists often
mean when they use the term (i,e,, poststructuralism's inscription of cultur-
230 College Literature 33.1 Pnter 2006]

al identity onto the bodies of subjects), stems originally from Maurice

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body-mind connection—his (now
empirically tested) idea that human brains/minds structure their conceptual
representations of the world by way of the body's perceptual interactions
within that world. Cognitive embodiment underlies cognitive linguistics,
fi-om which all three books under consideration in this review take their
direct theoretical origins. Crisp's essay is a pointed example, explaining the
cognitive linguistic notion of "conceptual metaphor" and elaborating on how
projections or "mappings" of conceptual metaphors enable our interpretation
of selected poems by D.H. Lawrence and John Keats. Specifically, Crisp
demonstrates how the poems' metaphoric dynamics are prompted by words
or phrases but also—and this is the important difference from traditional
poetics using traditional linguistics—how those linguistic prompts point to
nonlinguistic or conceptual semantic networks that most readers (including
literary critics) are unaware of and so take for granted.
In a somewhat parallel analysis, Burke considers the role of basic cogni-
tive schemas—^what he calls variously "story" or "parable" (after Turner's own
varying uses in The Literary Mind, 1996)—in allowing humans to construct
their understanding of everyday episodes and events as well as literary narra-
tives (with which we more commonly associate "story"). Like Crisp, Burke
posits the inconspicuous presence of such conceptual stories, then asserts that
we achieve complex narrative constructions of our worlds through the map-
ping of these basic stories onto all domains of life. Without such cognitive
predispositions toward narrative, we would have insufficient frames within
which to generalize experience, making every experience seem new and
random and quickly exhausting our mental resources. This does not neces-
sarily mean that "the everyday is Hterary" (as Turner likes to say and as Burke
rather too faithfully repeats); but it does point to a profound insight about
humans' tendency to pre-organize their world (including not just events but
also people and cultures), using the same capacities that we exercise more
intensively and rituaHstically in art. It is the cognitive scientific variation
on—and to my mind an endorsement of—Hay den White's analysis of the
inescapably culturally constructed nature of historiography.
The only essayist of these three to consider a non-poetic text (Burke
examines Shakespeare's Sonnet 2), Semino demonstrates how yet a third der-
ivation firom cognitive linguistics, mental space theory, helps illustrate the
cognitive gymnastics that readers perform during their processing of imagi-
nary "worlds" in even the most rudimentary of literary narratives (the
Hemingway story is only 634 words long). Mental "space" theory—itself
drawing on a metaphor of neuronal connections firing in spatial clusters,
which is sometimes but not always true, as MRI has shown us—outlines the
 F. Elizabeth Hart 231

mind's apparendy endless capacity to create spontaneous, discrete sets of asso-

ciations based on grammatical cues, then to juggle deftly those sets of asso-
ciations, folding them into one another but also—and equally impor-
tant—keeping track of their boundaries. So the rejected lover of
Hemingways brief narrative proposes not just a temporal sequence of events
surrounding his failed affair in WWI Italy, but also the "possible world" of
marriage in the U.S. that he and his girlfriend had once imagined for them-
selves—complicated throughout by a cascade of even more subde scenarios
of "would," "should," and "maybe" worlds (e.g., "It was understood that he
would not drink"), each primed by grammatical aspect and swiftly assigned
its separate "space" in the reader's mind. Importantly, mental space theory
makes no distinction between real- and imaginary-world construction since
the mechanisms for constructing all mental worlds are the same. Semino's
analysis thus bears implications not just on how readers negotiate hterary
narratives but on how literary critics might refine their thinking about ^c-
tionality itself.
Crisp, Burke, and Semino all tap into different aspects of the cognitive-
semantic revolution, a backlash, starting in the 1970s, against formalist and
often mathematically driven methods of theorizing language. (Gibbs' essay
"Prototypes in dynamic meaning construal" is also worth mentioning as a
symptom of this backlash.) Before then, philosophers and hnguists strove to
describe language in terms of the generahzed rule systems that had been
popularized by formal logic, unconcerned with and in fact actively margin-
alizing questions about language use, in effect, institutionalizing Ferdinand de
Saussure's distinction between idealized language and natural language prag-
matics. The more recent shift toward examining how people actually speak
led quickly to questions about how people come to understand their
worlds—^which is very different from asking how they come to acquire par-
ticular bits of knowledge. And this shift, in turn, gave rise to a cognitive hn-
guistics whose practitioners refused to accept the orthodoxy that conceptu-
al categories or the rules governing syntax could exist independent of speak-
ers' intrinsic experience within, and understanding of, their specific worlds.
This history- and culture-friendly "experientialism" was eventually re-artic-
ulated as cognitive embodiment in the Merleau-Pontyan sense (described
earlier), and it is this embodiment as a concept that now fuels much of the
newer work in the cognitive sciences. (In fact, it is precisely this sea change
in cognitive science that has made current research on the brain/mind so rel-
evant to the humanities and the humanities—^particularly hterature, theater,
and the fine arts—suddenly interesting to science.)
Cognitive hnguistics underhes each of the three essays I've singled out
here, lending much-needed theoretical coherence to the Gavins and Steen
232 College Literature 33.1 [Winter 2006]

volume as a whole. But something else that each essay offers, which might
be indispensable to the scholar or student wanting to delve deeper into cog-
nitive hterary theory, is an introductory perspective on Fauconnier and
Turner's "cognitive blend" theory, the aspect of cognitive hnguistics that I
believe wOl have the most lasting impact on literary studies. Before I proceed,
however, with my brief analysis of Fauconnier and Turner's The Way We
Think, let me summarize my comments about the Stockwell and Gavins and
Steen textbooks as follows: Overall, these books provide a sincere, pedagog-
ically considerate introduction to a new field, albeit one that runs the risk of
making poetics seem even more difficult for students than it already does
owing to the density and complexity of its theory and readings. But the
problem of inaccessibility is not these authors' fault since, in truth, the diffi-
culty, including the challenges of the science, cannot be helped. It is the
nature of this particular interdisciplinary beast because, as cognitive science
itself is now showing us, our minds' interactions with both the everyday
world and the art that responds to it are astoundingly complex, perhaps mak-
ing them impossible ever to analyze satisfactorily. Teachers and students who
engage with these textbooks must accept the difficulty and also, one hopes,
actively embrace it, taking these texts slowly and in the spirit of exploration.
My more serious complaint about both volumes, as mentioned earlier,
has to do with the narrow self-conceptualization and presentation of this
"cognitive poetics" thatfi-anklyignores companion scholarship by others in
cognitive literary studies. For instance, I find it strange that in his final chap-
ter Stockwell represents poststructuralist problems such as discourse and ide-
ology as still largely unexplored fi-om a cognitive-literary standpoint; when,
in fact, these have been the subjects of a number of studies pubhshed in
recent years by Spolsky, Crane, Zunshine, and others. (I'm tempted to spec-
ulate that this is a sign of typical U.K.-U.S. disjunction, except that
StockweU cites some American researchers in his introduction, and several
of the Gavins and Steen contributors are American.) While such an over-
sight might have been unintentional, nonetheless, its effect is to hide more
than a decade of careful, related work, which amounts—in my mind, at
least—to misrepresentation.
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's The Way We Think summarizes, in
their first monograph together, the long collaboration between a cognitive
linguist (Fauconnier) and a literary critic with considerable experience in
cognitive studies (Turner). The two have published numerous articles that
have alternately targeted scientific and literary audiences (you can usually tell
which by the arrangement of their by-lines). There are signs that this mono-
graph is clearly intended for a cognitive science readership: its by-line
arrangement, publisher's categorization, even the fact that Turner's literary
 F, Elizabeth Hart 233

credentials go entirely unmentioned on the book's jacket and in its acknowl-

edgments. However, a more incisive study of meaning-making and interpre-
tation would be hard to find on todays hterary studies shelves, I mentioned
earher that I think Fauconnier and Turners theory of cognitive blending will
be the aspect of cognitive hnguistics that has the most lasting impact on ht-
erary studies, and here, in brief, is why: Theirs is a theory of meaning that
acknowledges the postmodern problematics of interpretation (the view of
where we've been) while at the same time addressing our need to compre-
hend the mechanics of even imperfect meaning and interpretation (the view
of where we'd like to go).
This book actually provides two studies in one, the first part elaborating
a general model of human thought- and language-processing that crosses dis-
ciplines and domains of experience; the second detailing how these same
processing capabilities must have played a role in the development of the
evolutionarily modern human brain/mind. While I personally am fascinated
by the discussions of the second half (where the authors engage with the
cognitive evolutionary studies of Merlin Donald, Steven Mithen, Terrence
Deacon, Steven Pinker, and others), it is the model of cognitive blending
itself that will be of interest to Hterary scholars. A cognitive blend is an "on-
line" mental construction composed initially of at least three mental spaces,
each one containing semantic features that, when integrated with the others,
creates a fourth mental space and new conceptual material, A blend is a
dynamic process, chiefly utilizing active or working memory (hence it oper-
ates "on-line"), although long-term memory is also required for at least part
of every blend operation. The process begins when two concepts or domains
of experience, called "input spaces," are juxtaposed—framed together by lin-
guistic or imagistic means—causing the mind to scan automatically for
underlying similarities. If the two have schematic traits in common—some
spatial trait such as verticality, a trajectory of movement, patterns, a dominat-
ing shape—then the result of the scanning will be the recall from long-term
memory of a third or "generic" space containing the outlines of such
schematic relations. The presence of this generic space primes the mind to
project or "map" connections, resulting in yet a fourth space, the blend itself.
Here, not only are the schematic associations between the two inputs "run"
(tested forfitness),but also, ancillary associations within the two inputs spaces
are imported into the fourth space and similarly run, creating within this
blend connections that might never have existed in either the real world or
anyone's imagination.
To illustrate with an example that is not particularly creative but is famil-
iar firom ubiquitous car advertisements: Imagine a young woman wearing a
shiny, tight-fitting evening gown; now imagine a new-model car parked
234 College Literature 33.1 [Winter 200B]

upon a platform and illuminated by spotlights. If the woman is placed with-

in the same frame as the car, then we see, instantly and effortlessly, that the
two images share traits in common. The woman's gown reflects hght in pat-
terns not dissimilar to the patterned gleam of the spothghts on the car's
huffed hody. Her own weU-toned body's curves are accentuated by her
gown's tight fit, thus offering a visual match to the rounded contours of the
car's hood, roof, and side panels. We might list other schematic affinities, but
these are probably sufficient to set in motion the advertisers' hoped-for
result: the heterosexual male viewer's creation of a fourth mental space, in
which desire for the woman becomes conflated with imagined ownership of
the car.
This may seem at first glance like a generic metaphor, in which two
domains (tenor and vehicle, source and target) are mapped together to form
a single concept (A CAR IS A DESIRABLE WOMAN). But Fauconnier
and Turner's contribution to embodied metaphor studies has been to recog-
nize that something far more complex is going on: They recognize that the
original input spaces remain discrete and unrevised (i.e., we maintain the
ability to process the woman's and car's images separately) even while the
association of their traits takes on a power of its own.What enables their con-
flation is the spontaneous emergence of the all-important fourth space—the
blend—into which traits from both inputs are deposited to become a kind
of new "reality" that may now be run or explored. This "running of the
blend" (to use the authors' phrase) involves both creative elaboration and log-
ical restraint: elaboration because some ofthe ancillaries associated with each
input space (a woman's potential as a sex partner, the car's status as an object
for sale) map neatly together, creating the effect (or rather the affect) of
desire; but also restraint since not every ancillary the two inputs possess will
map in this way (the fact that the woman might have career and family
responsibilities finds no match with the car), thus limiting the scope ofthe
blend's elaboration.
A blend is a temporary construction, a product of fleeting working
memory; but it always has the potential to become a more permanent
one—a holding of long-term memory—if for some reason its constructed
reality seems especially resonant with other aspects of experience, especially
cultural experience. Thus, a blend might form a new semantic category or
contribute to the expansion or revision of existing categories, and its salience
as such would be agreed upon by a group of people. However, an important
thing to remember is that this process of meaning-making is entirely relative
to what individual brains/minds understand.That is, there is no objective asso-
ciation between, say, a woman's sexual availability and an object's being for
 F. Elizabeth Hart 235

sale. Rather, that association is embodied, a symptom of some viewers' idio-

syncratic experience and specific cultural conditioning.
Fauconnier and Turner present their basic model (using more interesting
examples than mine here, although hke me they generally pluck theirs from
the popular media); then they gradually intensify their analysis until, by the
study's end, we are faced with a scenario of almost staggering complexity.
Cognitive blends contain a minimum of four mental spaces; in fact, most of
the blends we construct in response to our most mundane experiences
involve not just two but multiple inputs, recalling multiple generic spaces and
resulting in highly elaborated blends that may themselves be turned around
and used as input spaces for on-going construction. The authors identify var-
ious patterns of elaboration and restraint in their examples, assigning those
patterns labels that sound vaguely like psychoanalytical categories (e.g.,
cause-effect, compression, decompression, identity, representation) but which
should not be confused with psychoanalysis, despite the fact that both mod-
els arise from psychology. Ultimately, their aim is to designate a series of
blend types along a "continuum of complexity," culminating in something
they call the "double-scope" (or "multiple-scope") "integration network." In
what is probably the study's most controversial evolutionary claim,
Fauconnier and Turner argue that it was the capacity for double/multiple-
scope blending that finally differentiated the modern human brain/mind
from that of other forms of hominid.
If you're still with me at this point, I know what you're wondering: Why
is this so important to literary studies? Let me rephrase the question: What
aspect of literary studies might cognitive blending not pertain to? The hst of
potential applications would only begin where Stockwell and Gavins and
Steen have placed it—as a tool for poetics and other forms of close-textual
analysis. The culturally and historically specific nature of cognitive embodi-
ment makes cognitive hnguistics its own kind of historicism, with cognitive
blending its most powerful instrument for gauging "inputs" among dominant
and subordinate ideologies and the discourses and texts that constitute liter-
ary history. Such mines of rich cognitive blends must manifest the high end
of the complexity continuum that Fauconnier and Turner point to; and yet
even such heightened complexity maintains limits that would be useful for
literary scholars to understand. Imagine, for instance, how blending might
help us rethink problems of intertextuality, such as gender differences in the
anxiety of literary influence, or the differing pohtics of sixteenth- vs. seven-
teenth-century classical allusiveness. Blending is already being used as an
instrument of narrative studies and has unrealized potential in theater/per-
formance studies, both areas in which the no doubt blending-intensive expe-
rience of intersubjectivity predominates. The imphcations for postcolonial-
236 College Literature 33.1 Pnter 2006]

ism are similarly suggestive, as the blends we will find in postcolonial texts
surely encapsulate long histories of struggle between cultures whose overlap
has been conceptual as well as geographic. This list could continue, of course,
to include the many "-isms" of our postmodern literary milieu.
As with the other two studies considered in this review, the challenge for
hterary scholars is largely technical. The science will be daunting for many,
and Fauconnier and Turner's diagrams of cognitive blends begin to blur after
a while, reaching an almost absurd level of detail and what may seem like
over-thought. To their credit, however, Fauconnier and Turner have made
every effort to write a text that is as friendly to the lay reader as it is to their
fellow scientists, using crisp prose and accessible examples and maintaining
their focus on the same set of examples throughout (though this in itself may
contribute to the blur factor).
The reason,finally,to feel intimidated by this study is not so much its
difficulty but the vastness of its imphcations for literary studies, a vastness that
the researchers have left it up to others to explore. Fauconnier and Turner
offer an endorsement for this exploration near the end of their study, where
they ruminate on that singularly evolved human capacity for double- or
multiple-scope cognitive blending: Such blending, they write—the differ-
ence that, in the evolutionary scenario, determined which form of human
would finally win the title of "human"—is also the hallmark of hterary and
other forms of artistic creativity. In other words, what hterary scholars do,
what we study and what we strive to articulate for our students, is under-
stood within this model as realizing the most sophisticated of all human
capabilities. And that's saying something for the humanities.

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Gibbs, Raymond W. 1994. Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and
Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herman, David, ed. 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. CSLI Pubs.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2003a. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human
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