Cognition, Culture, Romanticism A Review Essay Lisa Zunshine, ed. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. ISBN 978-0801894886. Price: US$35.00 Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. ISBN 978-0801894534. Price: US$35.00

Literary critics have often dreamed of turning their impressionistic discipline into a proper science. Of late, some of them have been turning to the cognitive sciences for help. What was once a minor movement now has mainstream recognition, and scholars like Mary Crane, Alan Richardson, Lisa Zunshine, and Blakey Vermeule have gained new visibility for work linking cognitive neuroscience to literary study. Lisa Zunshine’s Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies attempts to bring a cluster of different methodologies together under one name, based on their desire for a “robust interdisciplinarity”: that is, one that allows discussion of “embodied universals” without losing focus on the predominantly historical and culturalist premises of humanistic inquiry. “Literary Universals,” the first of the book’s four sections, thus articulates the premise of the volume as a whole. The next two sections showcase two of the increasingly visible varieties of cognitive theory, “Cognitive Historicism” and “Cognitive Narratology.” The final section connects cognitive studies to postcolonial, ecological, aesthetic, and poststructural theory. The publication of such an anthology itself marks a moment in the development of a field, and Zunshine announces at the outset her desire to “shape the field for the coming decade” (1). There are two ways to frame the project of this particular collection. One is a “meet me halfway” strategy. As Zunshine notes, familiar debates between nature and nurture no longer obtain within most of the cognitive sciences. Rather than seeking to demonstrate biological determinism, today’s cognitive theorists attend to “the role of universally shared features of human cognition in historically specific forms of cultural production” (2). Since the scientists have met humanists partway by acknowledging the role of culture in shaping cognition, isn’t it time we met them halfway by admitting publicly what we already tacitly acknowledge: that not everything in human life and experience is culturally relative? In the post-Sokal hoax era, when even Bruno Latour has lamented the havoc wrought in the name of science studies, this may seem uncontroversial. Yet the “halfway” strategy might also obscure important differences. For it is possible to agree in principle, as almost everyone does, that nature and nurture interact in fundamental ways, and still disagree radically about where that interaction takes place, why it takes place, and how much it matters. Within the cognitive sciences, positions range from the empirical relativism of Jesse Prinz to the nativism of Jerry Fodor and Steven Pinker. And among nativists there are huge disagreements. These debates matter, especially for the majority of cognitive theorists who carve out positions somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, the uninitiated reader will not learn a great deal about this philosophical terrain in either of the books under review here. All of the contributors to Zunshine’s volume concur in placing their work within the context of the “second cognitive revolution.” The first cognitive revolution was a reaction against behaviorism and tended to picture the mind as software running on the hardware of the brain. As David Herman explains in his essay on cognitive narratology, some scientists now picture cognition as distributed externally, across linguistic and social networks; rather than localized within the brain, the mind is a “nexus of brain, body, and environment” (165). Thinking of cognition as extended in this manner is exciting, and helps to correct some common misconceptions about cognitive science among humanists. Yet invoking distribution and embodiment may not get us very far. For cognitive cultural studies to be useful, the claim must be a stronger one: that the insights of cognitive science afford some new and more powerful explanation of a cultural event than more familiar, non-cognitive methods. With the “meet …