MUCH 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 English-speaking 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.”  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.”  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.”  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.”  Finally, Raymond Williams concludes that the category of “literature” is so “deeply compromised” that it has “to be challenged in toto.” 

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 Lévi-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.

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 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.