Notes Towards a Roundtable

* Call out words or short phrases
* Respond w/ a gesture while seated
* Gesture again, standing and linking
* Describe the "dance" we made together
 

III. (Anne, 5 minutes) We begin w/ these exercises as a way of introducing you, experientially, to our topic: how attending to the bipartite brain might change our thinking about and teaching of world literature .

Here are several images, created by our colleague Paul Grobstein, a neurobiologist who helped us prepare this panel, which might enable you to visualize what interests us:
 

frog brain (not to scale!)

Anne's brain

(Alice, 5 minutes) Here's another image:


Cenote at Xel-Ha archeological site (near Tulum, Yucatan)

And here are our (contrastive) descriptions of two forms of writing, each representative of one sort of brain functioning:

* Writing intended to represent consciousness is narrative, reflective, and organized in terms of space and time. It is compressible (= reducible to a precis), and clearly distinguishes between self and others.

* "Frog brain writing," on the other hand, is associative, lacks organization in space and time and is relatively incompressible (in the sense of not being mappable in any form more compressed than itself). It can’t be reduced to precis or meaning, and offers no clear distinction between self and other; it is not addressed to an audience.

IV. This distinction has opened up for us some interesting new ways for talking about different kinds of literary forms (from a web-based conversation about "World Literature and Neurobiology):

(Alice and Anne, 5 minutes)
Wai Chee Dimock (via Anne): I would associate the frog brain ... with syntactical structures and rhythmic repetitions ... present in world lit from the very first. In Gilgamesh, in the astonishing race through the tunnel against the journey of the sun, these lines are repeated 12 times, not so much telling a story as punctuating time:
 
When he had gone one double hour,
Dense was the darkness, no light was there,
It would not let him look behind him.
When he had gone two double hours,
Dense was the darkness, no light was there,
It would not let him look behind him.
When he had gone three double hours...

[I would study the traces of the] "cognitive unconscious" ... in a set of brain functions that don't rise to the threshold of consciousness, and are pre-linguistic for the most part ... but remain nonetheless deep-rooted and evolutionarily robust -- a much larger "pool" of syntactical possibilities than what is eventually articulated as speech.

Paul Grobstein (via Alice): A nice example of frog linguistic expression might be "speaking in tongues."

...in early to mid twentieth century western literature ... there is a distinctive recognition of the difference between the cognitive unconscious and the story teller .... my guess would be that ... that one can identity themes like, perhaps, temporal persistence and things grading into one another. And I would guess as well that there are more "literary" characteristics as well: a lot of loose ends, somewhat abrupt beginnings and endings, arbitrary associations, little attention to character development, and ... ?

Wai Chee Dimock: ... one place to detect the frog brain at work might be in those moments ( in Thoreau, Kafka, many others) when animals are seen or heard half externally and half internally, a kind of low-common-denominator rendition of the cognitive unconscious.

Here's Thoreau actually hearing the "trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, passing "the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-oonk, tr-r-oonk, tr-r-oonk! and straightway comes over the water from some distant cover the same password repeated... tr-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched." Frog linguistic expression as the cross-species origins of the sounds of poetry?

Wai Chee, continued: ... it would be interesting to try out an alternative organization of world literature based on brain activity, with a large provision for the unthought, unarticulated -- the cognitive unconscious as the most robust common ground for the human species.

["wonderland mapped" as a repeat pattern wallpaper]

V. (Anne, 5 minutes) Such a way of talking about literature might move us beyond the conventional hierarchies that value coherence over incoherence (or vice versa); see, for example, Tony Hoagland, "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment" (Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft, Graywolf, 2006):

Narrative and associative poems ... call upon fundamentally different resources in reader and writer. Narration ... aims to frame and capture experience; dissociative poetry verifies itself by eluding structures. Their distinct priorities result in different poetries. A poetry that values clarity and continuity is obligated to develop and deliver information in ways that are hierarchical and sequential .... In contrast, a dissociative poetry is always shuffling the deck in order to evade knowability .... to tell a story effectively ... you must orchestrate continuities, hierarchies, and transitions .... we lose when we jettison cohesion and continuity from our poetry .... the poetic pleasure of elusiveness commits itself, inadvertently, to triviality.

Talking about literature "from the brain's point of view" might also re-frame discussions current in English Departments such as Anne's, about how to organize "world literature"; see, for example, David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? (Princeton, 2003): 

"a work only has an effective life as world literature when ... it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture .... World literature is ... a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time."

Thinking about literature not in terms of geographical translation, but rather in terms of a bipartite brain organization, might lead us to
* organize our departments and courses differently,
* read individual pieces differently, and
* "find cracks" that might serve as openings to construct new understandings.

For example, the four steps with which we began this discussion might be said to figure different brain functions:
* because first calling out short phrases might come from either part of the brain,
* responding with gestures was our attempt to get you to "go deeper," into your frog brains;
* gesturing again, linking to others, was our attempt to see if frog brains might communicate directly w/ one another; and
* describing our shared dance was an attempt to return this frog-brained activity to the level of the storyteller.


"little frogs make their dens in these cracks," @ Exploring Divine Nature

VI. (Alice, 5 minutes) There are others, besides us, @ work now in this arena of "neurolit":

There are multiple conversations @ SLSA on this topic; for example, three related sessions on Saturday: one on "NeuroBioPolitics," another on "Neuroscience and the Arts," and a third called "The Neuroturn: Epistemological Intersections Between Neuroscience and the Humanities."

See also Michael Sinding, "After Definitions: Genre, Categories, and Cognitive Science," Genre 35.2 (Summer 2002): 181-220.

Raymond Tallis, "The Neuroscience Delusion," The Times Literary Supplement (April 9, 2008).

Patricia Cohen,"Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know," New York Times (March 31, 2010--source of our original title, "Mapping Wonderland").

Our own particular interests differ from these projects in our claim that possible payoffs for thinking this way are both theoretical and pedagogical: we're curious about what new ways of teaching might arise using material like this: new ways of helping people to read, new forms of literacy....

"Going to brain" instead of to geography or chronology to organize our discussion of world literature won't make us "freer" than using cultural stories as the basis for our work, since the brain is also bound: the storyteller is "stuck in the attic," without direct access to the outside world.

But making that knowledge more common, paying more attention to the frog brain, might enable us to do more readings from that location, and grant our storyteller a different access to the unconscious.  Working from greater access, attending to both the storyteller and the frog brain, might enable us to pull out different strands: different forms of representation AND different forms of interpretation.

Our exercise also highlighted the social dimension of collaborative work; what happens when frog brains work together? (What happened in our experiment this morning?)

Write for five minutes over the image of the cenote (how much of this is storytelling, how much frog brain? can you record your thoughts where from they arise?) about what you are thinking...

VIII. (Anne, 25 minutes): What is your reaction to what we have said? What have you heard that rubs up against what it is you thought you knew? Where do you want to push back against what we have said? What new questions has this session generated for you?

Presenters:


Alice Lesnick (with Bryn Mawr colleague Jody Cohen) and Anne Dalke. Alice is a teacher educator whose focus on collaborative learning has led her, most recently, into the exploration of social media and Web-based multi-media as pedagogical and creative tools. Anne is a literary critic interested in emergent pedagogies, feminist theory and narrative traditions, revisionary work in canon of American literatures, and the intersections between science and literature.