Mind-reading in the dark [electronic resource] : social cognition in nineteenth-century American fiction

This dissertation uses a sustained examination of implicit models of cognition in nineteenth-century American fiction to construct a new narrative of the formation of the nineteenth-century literary canon and, by extension, to reevaluate the tradition of American "exceptionalism" in literary studies. Examining major texts of the nineteenth-century American canon from Charles Brockden Brown to Henry James, I find that these fictions evince a radical skepticism regarding explanatory constructs like beliefs, intentions, and motivations, often encouraging readers to understand characters' actions not in terms of internal mental states but as conditioned reflexes or, even more radically, as meaningless epiphenomena. The works examined herein not only undermine interiorizing psychological models through their revision and perversion of metaphors and genres that construct consciousness as private and propositional; many of them, like Poe's Dupin trilogy and Melville's "Bartleby, " also offer alternative methods of behavioral interpretation that emphasize material causation over agential action. Methodologically, this dissertation points toward a new understanding of the relation between literary studies and the social sciences, revealing that fictional representations of character can actively challenge the methods by which readers explain and predict other agents' behavior ― and that textual models of the mind constitute a rich and diverse archive of theories from which literary scholars can productively talk back to cognitive and social psychologists. The text's four chapters are thus organized by four prerequisites for any successful theory of mind: a metaphorical vocabulary with which to label minds and mental states; a narrative framework for subjective experience throughout the lifespan; a capacity to ask and answer "why" questions about human behavior; and a set of tools for manipulating other individuals, whether for prosocial or self-interested ends. While Mind-Reading in the Dark makes a targeted intervention in cognitive literary studies, the dissertation also has significant implications for the place of American studies in the larger field of world literature. My analysis suggests that morphological differences between American and British fiction registered by "exceptionalist" critics were indeed real -- but, rather than resulting from these traditions' supposed insulation from each other, they instead constitute a strategic response to their remarkable proximity and mutual imbrication. We can best understand the American canon's radical narrowing and revision in the early twentieth century as an adaptive attempt to recenter American fiction on these cognitively unconventional texts, transforming the United States' historically peripheral position in the Europe-centered literary system into an advantage. This dissertation thus asks us to view American literature as one peripheral tradition among many -- albeit one that attained global significance through a kind of strategic marginality.

Keywords: English.
Advisor: Ruttenburg Nancy primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Jones Gavin Roger
Moretti Franco