Poetics Today

Situated Cognition:
The Literary Archive

Terence Cave
St. John’s College, Oxford

Abstract Literary utterances reflect the situatedness of cognition itself both through
their historico-cultural specificity and through their deployment of highly particular-
ized language. It follows that the literary archive (in the broadest sense, all forms of
storytelling, fiction, poetry, song, drama, and their offshoots) is also a cognitive archive
and that a history of cognition and of reflection on cognition might be traced through
imaginative literature rather than through a history of science, a history of philosophy,
or a history of ideas. In such a project, the local and contextual aspects of the archive
would be taken into account not just as contingent factors but as part of the exercise of
calibrating the cultural reach of cognition: what it is capable of, and its constraints, in
different local ecologies. The literary archive, it will be argued, offers to the interdis-
ciplinary field of cognitive studies a reservoir of potential insights into the embodied
interconnectivity of cognitive process together with a critical language which is en-
active, context oriented, sensitive to the conditions of live cultural ecologies. The essay
features textual examples drawn from the writings of Michel de Montaigne and
Andrew Marvell.
Keywords situated cognition, embodied cognition, literary archive, cognitive prehis-
tories, cognition as imagination

I am grateful to the Balzan International Foundation for allowing me to reproduce here in

revised form some materials from my lecture “ ‘Far Other Worlds and Other Seas’: Thinking
with Literature in the Twenty-First Century” delivered at the University of Berne in October
2014 (published in 2015).
Poetics Today 38:2 ( June 2017) DOI 10.1215/03335372-3868486
q 2017 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

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Situating Literature

It is not difficult to agree that literary utterances (however one defines

literature)1 tend to be highly situated in more than one sense. One might indeed
argue that that is one of their most distinctive features. They carry powerful
markers of their cultural and historical provenance, that is to say, of their
“external” communicative context. But they also display a recognizable “in-
ternal” situatedness.2 Their particular forms of expression (their internal
specification) assign them to a virtual locus which is less transitory, to a use
value less fungible, than most instances of everyday language can aspire to.
They seem designed to linger in the memory in all its forms — collective
and individual, unreflective and reflective, procedural and episodic. They
can even become earworms: you get them, or fragments of them, on the
brain. They readily associate themselves with a named and remembered
individual.3 They are often consumed in specific kinds of environments: an
armchair, a reading group, a theater or cinema, the audience of storytellers in
court circles, a pub, or (according to the time-honored but not implausible
myth) in the evening round a fire. And their material, purveyable, tradable
manifestations — books in particular over the last few thousand years but also
all the other affordances that play an equivalent role — are just as tangibly
situated. They both conform to and shape the practices of a literary ecology.
It appears equally self-evident that literature is a distinctive product of
human cognition, although distinctive on a spectrum, not as a thing apart.
Literary utterances reflect in especially rich ways the situatedness of cogni-
tion itself. Before amplifying that remark, I need briefly to rehearse the sense
in which we can say that cognition is situated. Fundamentally, it means that
cognition can only be defined as a function-oriented organic instrument
which has evolved in response to particular environments. Those environ-
ments fall within the spectrum of physical conditions capable of fostering
1. I shall use the word to refer to an anthropological phenomenon: a widespread human
cognitive practice that includes all forms of storytelling, poetry, song, dramatic performance,
and their avatars in modern media. I discuss its relation with other forms of imaginative
discourse in Cave 2016, especially chapters 5 and 9. The terms and conceptual topics I use
in this essay are all explained and used in Thinking with Literature in the context of a cognitively
inflected literary criticism.
2. The terms external and internal are not meant to be antithetical, still less mutually exclusive.
Their difference is chiefly one of angle of perception. Many of the features I refer to as
“internal” (the form of a sonnet, the genre of the novel) clearly also have a cultural and histori-
cal situatedness.
3. Of course there are many examples of anonymous literary works, especially from earlier
periods. But often the anonymity is merely accidental, an effect of the passage of time. The
names of prehistoric storytellers and rhapsodes were no doubt remembered in their day and
sometimes long afterward. Homer is one such.

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human life, including such basic features as gravity, the availability and
properties of water, the way other creatures (animal and vegetable) have
adapted themselves to the same environments, and many other factors.
Within that broad envelope (it appears broad to us, but it is in fact very
narrow in cosmic terms), cognition has evolved to thrive on the particular,
on the understanding and exploitation of local environments, from particular
ecologies (rain forests, the Nile delta, the Arctic tundra) to the most histori-
cally and culturally specified microcontexts, such as the one afforded by the
journal Poetics Today in 2017. In addition, humans have evolved the specific
ability to think beyond a specific habitual environment, to improvise solu-
tions to problems that few other creatures can even begin to handle except by
long-term phylogenetic attrition, and hence exponentially and at remarkable
speed to increase the range and complexity of local habitats and thought
worlds. This is what we call culture, the human way of doing nature. Despite
that extraordinary (in the literal sense) shift, cognition is constructed by the
world. It is not an autonomous standpoint from which the world can be
observed, even if human cognition has acquired the ability to perform limited
acts of virtual autonomy (such as scientific experiment).
If that view is accepted (as it is, by and large, in this issue as a whole),
it determines the sense in which the word cognition is itself being used. I adopt
the consensus of second-generation cognitive research that cognition is not a
separate, autonomous rational function but the whole suite of functions that
enable a creature to register and respond to the environment successfully
enough for it to pass its genes on to the next generation.4 This suite of func-
tions includes the processes that are traditionally labeled memory, imagin-
ation, emotion, reason, and indeed perception.5 Such folk labels imply a
spatial separation, a location of autonomous functions in different regions
of the brain, as in earlier diagrammatic representations of the “mind in the
head.”6 The situated cognition model, by contrast, would regard these as
connected and continuously interactive functions ensuring constant feed-
4. Broadly, the first generation of cognitive research (in the late twentieth century) used a
computer-based model of human cognition, regarding the brain as a machine within an enve-
lope of organic matter. The second generation and its heirs insist that cognition is embodied,
continuous with the body and indeed with the body’s ecological habitat. For different varieties
of this claim, see Varela et al. 1991; Glenberg and Kaschak 2002; Barsalou 2003; Damasio 2005
[1994]; Gallagher 2005; Clark 2008.
5. I prefer not to address the philosophical question whether there are “cognitively impene-
trable” forms of perception. As I see it, perception is precisely the set of resources by which
humans and other creatures are able to engage with, interpret, understand the environment.
It informs cognition ab initio.
6. One of the best known of these is Robert Fludd’s map of human thought processes (c. 1620).

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back between mind, body, and world. Cognition, in that perspective, is essen-
tially multifaceted and mixed.
Literary utterances are by their nature mixed in just this way. They are
a product of human cognition, and they reflect its complexity and con-
nectedness more faithfully, one might argue, than any other kind of dis-
course. The language of literature is always embodied and enactive. To
compose its imagined ecologies, whether narrative, poetic, or dramatic, it
moves as a matter of course between sensorimotor resonances, affect,
counterfactuals, imaginative perspectives, improvisation, probabilities, pos-
sibilities and impossibilities, and all manner of correspondingly different
logics. Furthermore, if every cognitive act is situated, it follows a fortiori
that literary utterances are bound to be apprehended as both cognitively
and contextually situated. Although literature is programmatically released
from the demands of immediate, real-world instrumentality, the virtual
worlds it proposes are essentially familiar to those who choose to gain
access to them, or rather — since literary utterances, like all communicative
uses of language, are intrinsically underspecified7 — it proposes prompts or
affordances which enable readers, listeners, spectators to imagine those
environments for themselves and hence to engage cognitively with them.
Literature thus lends itself extremely well to cognitively inflected analysis.
By this I mean a full-scale literary analysis that reconfigures the method-
ologies of literary criticism by framing them within a cognitive perspective
and by adapting for that purpose terms and conceptions derived from cog-
nitive research across the disciplinary spectrum. What is critical here is the
posture that those of us who are committed to literary study adopt, the way
our disciplinary stance is directed. If, in obedience to the protocols of exper-
imental science, we strip literature of the very particularity and situatedness
that constitute its primary claim on our attention, the result is virtually certain
to be perceived as reductive. For scientists, reduction to fundamental prin-
ciples is a primary aim, and no one disputes that it would be wonderful to
have a grand unifying theory of at least three if not all of the four forces if you
could get it. For literary specialists (except perhaps a few die-hard theorists),
the processes of reduction stifle and eventually kill the creature you’re trying
to understand, and in the last analysis not merely kill it: erase it entirely as a
distinctive entity. If literature is to be a resource for cognitive research, we
need to think from literature toward science at least as much as the other way
round. We need to counter the tendency to submit to the policing of literary
7. I refer here in short-hand form to the communication theory known as relevance theory. See
in particular Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]; Carston 2002. Relevance theory demonstrates
that language is only partly a code. It depends in varying degrees on the interlocutor’s capacity
to infer the speaker’s meaning from the evidence offered.

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study by philosophy and science and insist on the principle of working induc-
tively from the literary archive as a cognitive resource.
One could indeed claim that there is a sense in which literature has
always been imagining for us the problems addressed by latter-day cognitive
science and philosophy without necessarily straining for a resolution. What
that amounts to is the proposition that the literary archive is also a cognitive
archive and therefore that a history of cognition, and of reflection on cogni-
tion, might be traced through imaginative literature rather than through
a history of science, a history of philosophy, or even, more broadly, a history
of ideas.
Various questions arise here. How would the evidence be discovered,
inferred, displayed? What would be the status of the history in question?
What would it be a history of ? Those questions and some others will be at
the center of this essay, but even more central to it is the use of examples or
particular cases from the literary archive broadly conceived. So I shall frame
the remainder of my discussion of these issues with two case studies from
different genres.

Case Study 1: Framing the Mind in the Airy Body of Words

The first example is taken from Les Essais (The Essays) of Michel de Montaigne
(1965, 2:377 – 78, 379), written between 1572 and 1592:
We have news of only two or three Ancients who have trodden this path; and even
then we cannot say whether it was in quite the same way as I have done it here,
since all we know of them is their names. No one since has set off in their tracks. It is
a thorny enterprise, more so than it might seem, to follow a movement as wan-
dering as that of our mind; to penetrate into the opaque depths of its inner recesses;
to tease out and pin down so many of its subtle shades and stirrings. . . . What I
depict principally is my cogitations, a formless subject, which cannot become
apparent as concrete action. At best, with the greatest difficulty, I can frame it
in the airy body of words (My translation).

Nous n’avons nouvelles que de deux ou trois anciens qui ayent battu ce chemin; et
si ne pouvons nous dire si c’est du tout en pareille maniere à cette-cy, n’en con-
naissant que les noms. Nul depuis ne s’est jetté sur leur trace. C’est une espineuse
entreprinse, et plus qu’il ne semble, de suyvre une alleure si vagabonde que celle de
nostre esprit; de penetrer les profondeurs opaques de ses replis internes; de choisir
et arrester tant de menus airs de ses agitations. . . . Je peins principalement mes
cogitations, subject informe, qui ne peut tomber en production ouvragere. A toute
peine le puis je coucher en ce corps aërée de la voix.8

8. Les Essais, bk. 2, chap. 6, “De l’exercitation” (“On Practicing”).

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This passage is part of a lengthy extension that Montaigne added to his essay
“De l’exercitation” (“On Practicing”) more than fifteen years after he had
written the original version. He’s trying retrospectively to find words to
describe what he’s been aiming to do in his Essays as a whole. The essay itself
in its original form tells the story of a near-death experience that Montaigne
had had perhaps four years earlier (around 1569), before he had retired from
public service and begun to write. While out riding not far from his chateau,
he was accidentally knocked off his horse and thrown to the ground. He
remained semiconscious, but for some considerable time he experienced a
kind of suspended cognitive state which he describes in some detail. In par-
ticular he talks about the temporary loss of his short-term memory of the
accident and then the sudden recovery of the memory. I shall come back to
that passage in a moment.
The title of the essay (“On Practicing”) refers to the unique opportunity
Montaigne was presented with of practicing death, trying it out, feeling what
it’s like to die. Usually that’s the one thing you can’t practice, and he insists
on the rarity of the experience. He follows early modern habits of mind by
introducing the topic in the opening pages of the essay as a variant of tra-
ditional philosophical modes of reflection on death and pain. But within that
initial frame, what he is doing is in fact highly unusual for his time and his
culture. Similarly, if one compares this intrinsically situated scene of a near-
death experience with the institutionally policed, didactic scenes of death that
are conjured up by devotional treatises and other books of piety, the distinc-
tive character of “On Practicing” becomes immediately clear. We could
describe it as a layperson’s experimental reflection on his own temporary
cognitive deficit.
More broadly, in this essay and many others Montaigne is feeling his way
toward a cognitive phenomenology — not a formal philosophical phenome-
nology but an intuitive, unsystematic way of exploring mental processes from
a first-person point of view. It’s a glimpse, in other words, of a kind of inquiry
that will, as we know, exist in the future but which was scarcely imaginable in
Montaigne’s day.
The essay isn’t an imaginative representation of cognition and of reflection
on cognition solely by virtue of its explicit (propositional) content. It also
depends heavily on the cognitive resources of language. Look, for example,
at the extraordinarily delicate, finely calculated kinesic effects: “to tease out
and pin down so many of its subtle shades and stirrings” (“choisir et arrester
tant de menus airs de ses agitations”), “the airy body of words” (“ce corps
aërée de la voix”). What Montaigne is doing here is nothing less than finding
a language for the way mind manifests itself as a body — a tenuous, elusive
body, hard to capture and pin down but a body nonetheless. Look too at

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the meticulous ordering of the sentence registering the process by which

an episodic memory of the accident itself is recovered. The sequence is
dominated by lexical and syntactic expressions of time:
But long afterwards, on the following day, when my memory began to open up and
represent for me the state in which I had found myself at the moment when I had perceived
the horse bearing down on me (for I had seen it at my heels and took myself for a dead
man, but this thought had been so rapid that fear had no time to take hold), it felt as if a
lightning flash was striking my soul with a shuddering blow and that I was returning
from the other world.

Mais long temps apres, et le lendemain, quand ma memoire vint à s’entr’ouvrir et me

representer l’estat où je m’estoy trouvé en l’instant que j’avoy aperc eu ce cheval fondant sur
moy (car je l’avoy veu à mes talons et me tins pour mort, mais ce pensement avoit esté si
soudain que la peur n’eut pas loisir de s’y engendrer), il me sembla que c’estoit un esclair
qui me frapoit l’ame de secousse et que je revenoy de l’autre monde. (Ibid.: 377; my
translation, my emphases)9

This is an account of situated cognition managed by the tense sequence,

the temporal phrases and clauses, and that almost imperceptible but power-
ful “and” which marks both the sequence and the high-speed inferential
structure of the episodic memory, that is to say, the reflective (conscious)
memory which is recovered as Montaigne’s cognitive processes reestablish
themselves.10 It is hard not to be impressed by the remarkable precision of
this reenactive account of the operation of memory and of the shift between
unreflective and reflective states.
This consonance between the situated cognitive theme and a precisely
situated language is not just a local or accidental effect in Montaigne’s writ-
ing. As I said earlier, it is not difficult to show that his description in these lines
of what we would call a cognitive project of phenomenal self-description is
actually a description of the whole work. It surfaces repeatedly in different
forms and at critical moments of The Essays and is crystallized in fact in the
title of the book. Vast amounts of energy have gone into trying to read
The Essays as a philosophical or epistemological project or as a project of
self-portraiture, a book about the self. It’s high time that someone wrote
a book about Montaigne’s precognitive project. But that book would need
systematically to analyze his language, his mode of writing, as a style that is
intrinsically cognitive at all kinds of levels — syntactic, procedural, rhythmic,
9. I have chosen a literal rendering of the sequence of tenses in the last segment of the quotation
in the original (past historic sembla followed by two verbs in the imperfect tense), which is
arrestingly precise in French but which doesn’t lend itself well to idiomatic translation.
10. On the distinction between episodic or declarative memory and other memory processes
(the procedural, the semantic, etc.), see Squire and Kandel 2009.

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figurative, haptic, kinesic, and so on. In Montaigne’s writing, there is a seam-

less consilience between the reflective theme and the prereflective mode
of expression.

Pre-histories: The Literary Archive

What, then, can one do historically with a text such as this? If we agree
that a cognitive project as we would conceive it today is indeed scarcely
imaginable in the sixteenth century, it is clearly inappropriate to insert
Montaigne’s remarks into a sequential history of science or philosophy or
even, more broadly, a history of ideas. Questions of perception, rationality,
memory, the imagination, illusion and delusion, and other features of
what we would call the cognitive domain are certainly recurrent topics of
Western philosophy and science from Aristotle onward, but the emergence
of a specific “cognitive” field of study is a twentieth-century phenomenon.
Similarly, the phenomenological tradition as we know it was far beyond the
horizon of Montaigne’s thought world.
This is a classic example of what I would call a pre-history. A pre-history is
made up of the fragments or traces that seem to us retrospectively to antici-
pate a later conceptual or historical development when that development
has not yet reached a threshold where it has become fully established and
potentially visible to contemporary observers in the period in question. For
example, accounts of the self or of personal identity reach a threshold in the
seventeenth century with René Descartes, John Locke, and lexical phenom-
ena such as the emergence of the noun le moi in French. Montaigne, William
Shakespeare, and Miguel de Cervantes belong to a period just prior to the
threshold, so it becomes a delicate matter to decide how to describe their
exact places in that history.11
Similarly, one would need to be cautious about saying, for example, that
the thinking of Aristotle, or Montaigne, or Descartes, or Denis Diderot,
or Adam Smith, or even William James anticipates the modern cognitive
project. They belong rather to its pre-history. The field that we loosely
refer to as cognitive studies has reorganized a vast swath of knowledge in a
distinctive way. Simply focusing on cognition rather than knowledge, or
psychology, or any other roughly equivalent term changes the whole frame
of reference irrevocably.
In short, then, my example from Montaigne would clearly belong to a
highly fragmentary pre-history of cognitive thought, not to a progressivist
11. See Cave 1999 for an account of this development within the perspective of a pre-history
in the sense indicated.

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history of philosophy of mind, or faculty psychology, or some such, however

much those projects might have to offer as a contextual point of reference at
significant moments in the pre-history. A kind of thinking is going on in The
Essays which (at times expressly) abandons well-worn paths, unsettles philo-
sophical assumptions and commonplaces, and affords openings onto more
imaginatively flexible, context-sensitive ways of handling things. There is, in
other words, no better example of situated cognition than this singular work
that belongs fully to its own time yet seems always to strive to look beyond it.
Having established that precautionary frame, I shall now sketch out the
premises for what one might call a pre-history of imaginative representations
of cognition in which Montaigne’s Essays would count as a paradigmatic
example. That archive would be in the broadest sense (the one indicated in
note 1) literary, since I want to argue that the literary archive, with its trade-
mark reliance on the implicit, on figurative and embodied language of all
kinds, is an especially fertile ground for pre-histories, not least for cognitive
pre-histories. Literature, as I suggested earlier, is a mode of thought that
exploits the full range of cognitive processes. It takes for granted their inter-
connectedness and thus maps extremely well onto the cognitive domain.
It shows humans in their cognitive ecology interacting with each other and
with the world, and it probes the limits of their capacity to imagine themselves
and their environment from alternative perspectives.
Of course literature is full of folk psychology and of other folk accounts of
what we call cognition. Some would claim that literature is based on fictional
accounts of views that are essentially naive and can therefore afford no
reliable or significant insights into thought.12 Most of us who work with
literature, however, find that, far from being naive, it is often complex, criti-
cal, counterintuitive. It’s capable of probing the deficits, lapses, and illusions
of perception and cognition and of the ways humans view their own cognitive
processes. Ellen Spolsky (2011) has made this point with especial cogency.
Likewise, analyzing the literary archive in a cognitive perspective and
according to cognitive critical instruments means, among other things, recov-
ering case histories: histories of pathologies and deficits, off-scale instances,
one-offs, delusive texts, all produced by the human mind, all lending them-
selves to interpretation as symptoms or traces, all indicating possibilities and
constraints across the whole cognitive spectrum. The way these case histories
are represented in an earlier text may, again, sometimes be erroneous accord-
12. I am thinking here of certain views advanced by Gregory Currie (2011). I should add that I
have enjoyed some lively encounters with Currie and that I respect his reasons for advancing
those views. However, the doctrine that the consumption of literature is a marginal and poten-
tially frivolous activity goes back a long way and therefore requires a correspondingly insistent
rebuttal.

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ing to modern cognitive science, but they don’t for that reason lose their value
as testimony. They are always instances of the way our enactive presence
in the world may be perceived and imagined. So the local and contextual
aspects of the archive must be taken into account not just as contingent factors
but as part of the exercise of calibrating the cultural reach of cognition: what
it is capable of, and its constraints, in different local ecologies.

The Universal and the Historical

I need here to return to and develop a point made earlier concerning the
question of reductionism. Despite all this talk of histories and pre-histories,
are not cognitive approaches intrinsically ahistorical and hence dismissive
of culture (history being in the last resort only the temporal gradient of
cultural differentiation)? Will they not always give priority to universals,
for which contingent historical or cultural forms are merely the local medi-
um of expression? The answer that neuroscientists, psychologists, philos-
ophers, and linguists would give to this question in relation to their own
subject would, I suppose, be an unambiguous “yes.” For them, culture and
its history may be interesting, but it’s only a sideshow.
Correspondingly, some of the leading contributions to cognitive literary
studies have emphasized the universal rather than the particular. This is true
of evolutionary approaches, such as those of Joseph Carroll (2004) and Brian
Boyd (2009), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980) notion of “meta-
phors we live by” as reflected in the work of Patrick Colm Hogan (2003) and
others, or the closely related notion of “conceptual blending” developed by
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002). In recent years, however, there
has been a marked return both to close reading and to historical contexts.
Boyd’s (2012) account of Shakespeare’s sonnets fuses the evolutionary ap-
proach with close attention to the detail of the text, Guillemette Bolens (2012
[2008]) demonstrates that kinesis can take us deep into the historically situ-
ated imaginations of writers from the Middle Ages to the present day,
and Mark J. Bruhn and Donald R. Wehrs (2014) set out specifically to address
the question of cognition in history.
This seems to be an opportune moment, then, to review the question in the
broadest terms. The outline arguments that follow would all need eventually
to be unpacked at length, but the objective here is to establish an opening
stance that is weakened by neither apology nor compromise.
1. The phenomenon of cultural evolution, which is the evolutionary niche
humans have above all exploited, means that it is incorrect to see the
relation between nature and culture as antithetical. (As I see it, there is

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little in the cognitive domain which is structured like a theoretical

antithesis.) Culture is a phenomenon in nature, and cultural evolution
works continuously (even if not always in harmony) with phylogenetic
evolution. Both are subject to change over time, although of course
culture moves more rapidly in most cases. What we call history is only
the most detailed and local expression of those processes.
2. The only in my last sentence is not meant to be dismissive. You can
choose to give priority to the long-term evolutionary perspective or
to the local cultural-historical perspective, or you can use the one to
get a better fix on the other, just as you can rotate a complex three-
dimensional model so that different features become salient in what is
essentially the same structure.
3. Another way of putting the same point is to focus on invariables and
variables rather than using the language of universals and contingent
particulars (or evoking essentialism, often used as a put-down by people
in cultural studies). As the cognitive psychologist James J. Gibson
(1986 [1979]: 134 – 35) put it, ecologies are formed by the interaction
of invariables, such as rock structures or climate and temperature gra-
dients, on the one hand, and variable organic forms, which may them-
selves achieve a kind of invariance, stable long-term manifestations,
on the other (see also Cave 2016: chap. 4). For Gibson, the invariants
afford particular phylogenetic adaptations together with behaviors that
may in some cases display cultural aspects (passed on from generation
to generation by learning and imitation rather than by phylogeny).
Literary specialists routinely play off the (relative) invariants of genre
and literary form against individual historical, cultural, and individ-
ual variants.
4. According to a cognitive methodology (any cognitive methodology),
all specific behaviors, including of course all utterances, are respon-
ses within a given context or ecology: they are enactive. The high-end
human affordances we call literature are no exception, even if some
of them are remarkably good at crossing frontiers into other contexts
and ecologies. It seems to me not only plausible but even self-evident
that the interest for cognitive studies of the literary archive is precisely
that it comes with an ecology. It is ecologically situated and saturated.
If you stripped out the detail in the interests of a universalist meth-
odology, you would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The
literary prototype is what philologists would call a hapax, an instance
that only occurs once in the historical record.

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5. The modern scientific theories that claim to be universal are themselves

part of a history of which we can’t guess the future. In other words, the
universals they seek to uncover will eventually mutate or be subsumed
under other categories if not proved erroneous. In that light, as I sug-
gested earlier, we can use the current state of scientific knowledge as
a provisional template which will make salient similarities and differ-
ences in the cognitive reflections of earlier periods and other cultures.
The fact that the template is necessarily provisional (and itself riven
by controversies) need not, however, throw us back into postmodern
relativism. It means adopting the best perspective, the best framing
devices that are currently available, while recognizing that they too
will in due course be perceived to be inadequate.
In short, those of us who want to defend the interest (and the interests) of the
literary archive must necessarily give priority to the fine grain of cultural and
historical variability but also take note of its invariables, including features
that are so long term that they look like invariables. There will still of course
be some further questions that need to be answered. Where does the inter-
pretative force of a cognitive reading of a historically or culturally determined
text lie? What does it do distinctively?

Cognitive Pre-histories in the Literary Archive

The only way we can find answers to those questions, I believe, is to embark
on a praxis, to practice and fine-tune a mode of criticism that satisfies as many
as possible of the relevant criteria. So we might, for example, propose the
following long-term project.
We start by compiling a pre-history of imaginative representations of cog-
nition, by which I mean instances like the Montaigne passage where what we
would call a cognitive theme is explicit and/or salient. In other words, we lay
down the basis for a pre-history of reflection on cognition in the literary and
paraliterary archive.
We take it as a fundamental principle that these instances should not only
be analyzed thematically or in terms of propositional content. The instru-
ment we use for interrogating the archive should be a cognitively informed
and inflected criticism which privileges the dynamics of agency and com-
munication and the pragmatics of embodied and situated language. That
condition probably means that we will begin by looking at strong instances:
instances that lend themselves well to that kind of analysis while making
salient the cognitive theme as such. Examples might include medieval alle-
gorical narratives like the Roman de la Rose and Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy;

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Montaigne’s Essais; the dialogues and novels of Diderot; certain of the works
of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Hein-
rich Wilhelm von Kleist; the novels of George Eliot, Franz Kafka, Virginia
Woolf, and William Faulkner; the writings of Paul Valéry and Wallace
Stevens (the corpus could and should of course be widened to include
works in other languages and from non-European cultures).
In parallel with this project, we envisage a more inclusive class of readings
that takes seriously the hypothesis that literature (in all its forms) is a distinc-
tive and comprehensive mode or instrument of thought. In that perspective,
all literary works potentially become equally valid as objects of cognitive
study. The presupposition here is that the whole literary archive testifies in
richly varied ways to cognitive process. Literature is now understood as a
manifestation of cognition: as an archive of insights which may sometimes
be erroneous but are always features of the way our enactive presence in
the world can be perceived and imagined. Errors, misunderstandings, false
assumptions, and the like will become evident diacritically, as a function of
the variety and richness of the archive as an affordance.
I believe that such a project would be on a par with cognitive research in
other disciplines and ought to be of interest to specialists in those disciplines. If
you’re still asking why pre-histories should be relevant to modern science, you
might begin by thinking about the archive of human remains compiled by
evolutionary anthropologists: a slender and fragmented archive from which
evolutionary stories are inferred. You might then consider that analyzing the
literary archive in a cognitive perspective and according to cognitive critical
instruments means recovering an enormous number of insights and case
histories of the kind I mentioned earlier — a vast archaeological laboratory
of materials capable of enriching the resources available to experimental
science in ways as yet unforeseen.13
Finally, the historical archive of imaginative representations is relevant,
indispensable, because cognition can’t be accessed by logical or scientific
modes of thinking alone. Those modes of cognition (as a whole series of
thinkers have argued since Giambattista Vico) are a modern invention.
Most of the time, the mind doesn’t in fact think like a computer, or like a
mathematician, or even like a philosopher (as Montaigne, for one, was well
aware). I adopt here a broad-brush picture similar to the one argued for by
Iain McGilchrist (2009). Leaving aside his insistence on the functions of the
two hemispheres of the brain, which many people are unhappy with, his
13. The psychologist David C. Rubin envisaged such a laboratory in his study Memory in Oral
Traditions (1995). He called it a natural laboratory studied inductively as opposed to the pro-
cedures adopted in the experimental laboratory.

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central argument — that logic-based systems are widely regarded as if they

were primary to cognitive functioning, whereas they are (and ought to be seen
as) secondary, purely instrumental — as I see it, is absolutely on target. We
need to get rid of the whole “hard science versus soft humanities” antithesis,
which is a pernicious cultural deviation. We need to keep remembering and
building into our methodologies that human cognition draws its remarkable
powers from its flexibility, its fluidity, its ability to improvise and imagine. We
need a conception of cognition as imagination.14 Let us be clear about the
sense of that word. I do not use it to denote the ability to conjure up something
like “pictures in the head,” although metarepresentation in some sense must
clearly be involved. It is the essentially situated cognitive faculty that engages
flexibly and fluidly with the world we live in and is capable of creating new
possibilities within that world (there is only one, not a series of alternative
worlds, except in a strictly metaphorical sense). Cognition as imagination,
thus defined, is precisely what the literary archive provides.

Case Study 2: The Color of Thought

Accordingly, I turn to lyric poetry for my second case study. The lyric (togeth-
er with its sibling, song) is after all a genre in which imagination is given
special license. The sixth stanza of Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” (2013:
157 – 58; written c. 1668) stages a celebrated thought act:
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Commentators explain lines 3 and 4 of this stanza as referring to an idea

which was already beginning to be outdated when Marvell wrote the poem:
the idea that for every land creature there is an analogous sea creature.15
Whether or not Marvell himself held this belief and whether or not we
(twenty-first-century readers) believe it, these lines and the two lines that
follow turn on a central cognitive question: the way the human mind
14. I trust that it will be clear that this formula is advanced as a counterintuitive claim designed
to call into question the entrenched meanings of both cognition and imagination (and especially
the equation of cognition with rationality).
15. For the whole poem with detailed commentary and notes, see Marvell 2013: 152 – 59.

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represents the world, both as it is and as the imagination might render it. The
same is true of the broader framework of belief the poem is said to refer to,
namely, a metaphysical concept of mind as capable of a Platonic transcen-
dence. It is of course of historical interest to restore this context, and it will
help modern readers situate the poem in relation to other works of the period.
But at the primary reading level, I would suggest that the cognitive principle
of limited counterintuitive violation proposed by Pascal Boyer (2001) oper-
ates here. The slightly quaint notion of lines 3 and 4 and the more main-
stream metaphysics may be counterintuitive if taken at face value, but these
violations pose no obstacle to the reading of the poem. On the contrary, they
open a window affording an untrammeled view of the poem. They work in
much the same way, one might say, as the first paragraph of Kafka’s famous
story The Metamorphosis (1996: 96). The limited counterintuitive violation
offered by the fictional belief that Gregor Samsa has been transformed
into something like a cockroach is made possible because everything else in
the story remains in place, proceeding as if this event had actually occurred.
One might indeed argue that to insist too much on the historically situated
“strangeness” of Marvell’s belief world would distort the cognitive effects of
the poem in ways it would not have been distorted for contemporary readers
and would thus paradoxically result in a false situatedness.
This line of argument applies a fortiori to the preceding stanza:
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarene, and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Insnared with flow’rs, I fall on grass.
(Marvell 2013: 157)

Modern readers might possibly need to be made aware, as contemporary

readers certainly would not, that Marvell is evoking a Garden of Eden, com-
plete with a kind of Fall. But if that reading is made salient and combined with
the Platonic ascent of the following stanza to suggest that Marvell is insisting
on the need to transcend the sinful world of the senses, historical contextual-
ization will have come close to making the poem disappear into a world of
conceptual abstraction. The limited counterintuitive violation required by
the phrase “I fall on grass” is already anticipated by the poem, which doesn’t
use biblical language and represents the “fall” as being pleasantly and con-
cretely rustic. Some of Marvell’s contemporary readers might have found

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this questionable, but one can infer from the confidence of the poem’s
language that most of them didn’t. The Eden-like garden is a thoroughly
this-worldly experience where no theology of sin intrudes.16
Let us see how that reading is carried by the stanza as a whole. Rather than
a description of a garden, it stages an almost erotically intimate interaction of
speaker and environment. That staging relies heavily on the use of kinesic
verbs (dropping, crushing, stumbling),17 and one of the ways Marvell induces
these kinesic responses is by the inversion of subject and object. The garden
and its fruits become the subject of kinesic verbs: the fruit, not the hands, are
doing the dropping, crushing, and reaching. In the early modern period,
the word curious (line 5) had a range of meanings, which in this case clearly
include “delicate,” “exquisite,” but it already had the sense “inquisitive,”
which makes the peach an anthropomorphic agent, inquisitively reaching
out to the human presence in the garden. In consequence, the speaker is
represented as not only engaged with but actually absorbed into the veg-
etable world of the garden, as if he were simply part of the natural ecology.
In cognitive terms, then, this is an enactive representation.
We can return via that loop to the final two lines of the following stanza.
Whatever the seventeenth-century metaphysics of the phrase “Annihilating
all that’s made,” it offers itself as a hyperbolic way of evoking the human
capacity for conceptualization, our key cognitive tool (along with language
itself). The human species has thrived on the skill of replacing the bewildering
plurality of particular things in the world with categories and concepts. Thus
a green thought is a quintessentialization of the garden — its greenness, which
absorbs, as it were, all its other aspects. But note that this “green thought” is
still a sensual or somatic imagination, and it takes place within a real garden.
It is produced by the garden. In this situated cognitive reading, the poem is
not a eulogy of abstraction. It proposes a reciprocal interchange between
body and mind, thought and the world. It would be hard in fact to find a more
imaginatively persuasive articulation of embodied cognition in poetic form.

Conclusions

I offer my conclusions in schematic form, beginning with the most general.

1. The archive of imaginative representations is distinctive, not secondary
to or dependent on histories of ideas and culture.
16. It is true that this is a garden without an Eve and that the poem as a whole makes that
absence salient. So there is a modern equivalent of a putative seventeenth-century fundamen-
talist reading. If you use the current Western politics of gender as an interpretative frame, you
get a violation which inhibits assent to the poem’s thought world.
17. On the notion of kinesis, see Bolens 2012 [2008]; Cave 2016.

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2. It follows that the methodology deployed to analyze literary examples

should be properly literary, that is, it should take full account of non-
propositional aspects of the text.
3. These nonpropositional aspects are the textual equivalent of embodi-
ment. They shouldn’t be regarded as purely formal or aesthetic add-
ons. Literary utterances are precisely a mode of embodied cognition.
4. The literary archive provides abundant and unique clues to the ways
cognition could be represented and imagined in earlier periods (or
other cultures).
Second, what do cognitive studies offer to literary studies, thinking in
particular here of their historical aspect? They offer
1. a new organizing principle for literary studies — the cognitive field
reconfigures the parameters of the literary archive while leaving its
historical/cultural features in place,
2. evidence of the constraints and affordances of long-term/widely dis-
tributed cognitive processes,
3. an updated (and constantly developing) template for calibrating the
constraints of those processes in relation to the unique “surface” realiz-
ation of particular historical/cultural instances.
Finally, what does the literary archive offer to cognitive studies as an
interdisciplinary enterprise? It offers
1. a broad spectrum of case studies which corroborate or challenge the
speculative constructions of modern science and philosophy;
2. a reservoir of potential insights into the embodied interconnectivity of
cognitive process;
3. a language which is enactive, context oriented, sensitive to the con-
ditions of living ecologies (cultures);
4. the infinitely variable testimony of cognition as imagination.

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