Spatial cognition in literature: texte-centered contextualization (1995)

The call in recent pedagogical scholarship for approach to literary study is consistent with postmodernist opposition to text-oriented criticism. Education theorists have advocated what Betty Jean Craige terms holism, which involves a shift in focus from canonized texts to methods of contextual interpretation (1). Arguing that meaning is contextual, she encourages reading texts as documents of social history, whereby scholarship would become a means of political activism (122, 76, 86). Thus by she means oriented toward whole of society (115). What contextual approach overlooks, however, is that literary text is in itself site of contextualization by reason of that figurative language operates. Cognitive linguists have demonstrated that we think in terms of metaphor, and metaphoric thinking is always contextual. Through metaphor, work of literature organizes and unifies concepts and experience into synergistic gestalt. As philosopher Max Black has observed: memorable metaphor has power to bring two separate domains into cognitive and emotional relation by using language directly appropriate to one as lens for seeing other...in new way (236). My purpose in this essay, therefore, is to discover contexts that are embedded in literary text and to suggest that many literary works are themselves models of holistic thinking. Specifically, wish to argue that very concept of holism is rooted in spatial metaphor and that it is via metaphor that literature moves out of itself and into our daily lives. Designed to identify spatial that make literature site of holistic consciousness, my procedure will involve synergistic correlation of neurophysiological research, Northrop Frye's anatomy of literary structures, psychological theories about nature of unconscious, and recent philosophical investigations of orientational dynamics of figurative language and its basis in physical experience of our environment. As explained by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the structure of our spatial concepts emerges from our constant spatial experience, that is, our interaction with physical environment (56-57). Fundamental spatial images are root metaphors in manner described by Stephen C. Pepper: they organize into networks (91-92). Such networks orient consciousness and structure it by analogy to physical environment. The psychologist Julian Jaynes has described consciousness as narratization, movement of I through time and inner space (63-64). The structure of that inner space is complex metaphor of outer world. As Herman Melville expressed idea in Moby-Dick: Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind (310). Spatial are also evident in scientific descriptions of brain structure. Neurophysiologists such as S. J. Dimond and J. G. Beaumont, for example, see human cerebral cortex as composed of two hemispheres, concept that is reflected in Eastern idea of Yin and Yang, and in Western polarity of head and heart. Head and heart, in turn, became identified with different spheres of activity, providing spatial basis for specialization of sexes in Anglo-American social mythology: man became associated with mastery in external and public domain; woman became associated with inner realm of heart, which in turn was identified with hearth or home. A composite evocation of this spatial of thinking may be found in Anne Bradstreet's Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment, where husband and wife personify complementary psychological components of spiritual unity separated in physical space: So many steps, head from heart to sever...I here, thou there, yet both but one. …