The Contracts Of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community University Press Scholarship Online

__The Contracts of Fiction__Exposing the underlying structural and processing homologies among works of imagination and life processes such as metabolism and memory, Ellen Spolsky demonstrates the seamless connection of life to art by revealing the surprising dependence of both on disorder, imbalance, and uncertainty. In early modern London, for example, reformed religion, expanding trade, and changed demographics made the obsolescent courts a source of serious inequities. Just at that time, however, a flood of wildly popular revenge tragedies, such as Hamlet, by their very form, by their outrageous theatrical grotesques, were shouting the need for change in the justice system. A sustained discussion of the genre illustrates how biological homeostasis underpins the social balance that we maintain with difficulty, and how disorder itself incubates new understanding. Cover 1 The Contracts of Fiction 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Illustrations 12 An Invitation to Think about Contracts and Balance 14 The Evolutionary Perspective on Balance 25 Where Does This Theory Fit within Other Literary Criticism? 28 1 Embodiment and Its Entailments 34 The Genres of Fictions as Niches 41 Person to Person Broadens to Brains and Things 43 Learning from Fictions 46 Learning How to Use Fictions by Experiencing Them 49 Meanings Are Overdetermined and Not Fixed 51 Who Learns to Use Stories and Who Teaches? 54 Moving from Individual Learning to Communal Understanding 57 2 Lyrics and Their Frames 60 “The Wanderer” 61 Categorization: A First Approximation 65 How Is Poetry Different and How the Same? 69 How Medievalists Talk about It 72 Prototyping: A Cognitive Description of Understanding Images 74 Framing and Exploration 78 Memory 82 How Does This Fit with Literary Theoretical Interests? 86 Summary 87 3 Genre Change and Narrative Recovery (Maybe) 89 Mind Reading as a Version of Categorization 95 Narrative: Ballooning Claims, Lessons Learned 101 Embodiment Again: Analogical Learning, Narrative as Nourishment 103 Learning to Produce Narrative Genres; Living with Gradient Judgments 106 The Suicide of Lucretia as a Representationally Hungry Problem 109 4 Intelligence on a Communal Scale: An Enriched Theory of Distributed Cognition 123 Using the World 124 Distributed Cognition 124 Interventions, Benign or Malign? 127 How Sacred Objects Work 134 Faces 144 Portrait Painting 147 Teaching and Learning 158 Change or Resistance 159 5 Distributed Misunderstanding 163 Imaginative Literature Displays and Evokes Real Cognitive Performance 164 How the Macbeths Mess Up 165 The Contributions of Austin and Cavell 166 Theory of Mind 171 Metacognition and the Pressure of Time 176 The Pieces are Coming Together 179 The Relationship of Fictional to Real Brains 182 Metacognition and Tragedy, The Soliloquy as Niche 183 Distributed Cognition: How Far Does It Stretch? 186 6 Affording Justice through Sinderesis: An Early Modern Embodiment Theory 188 The Commercial and Religious Contexts Demanding Change 188 The Equity Court and the Terms of the Debate: Conscience 193 Saint German’s Solution: Sinderesis 200 Fairness Is a Body Word, Justice An Abstraction 206 7 Balance and Imbalance 208 Analogies in the Revenge Plays 211 Madness, Chaos, Havoc 218 Some of the Relevant Cognitive Theories 220 Balance, or More Important, Imbalance 223 The Looping Biological Evidence 229 8 The Skepticism of Grotesques: “Between the Known and the Unknown” 231 Grotesques as Expressions of Skepticism 233 Unpredictable but Self-Regulating, without Precedent, Carnivalesque 238 The Theatrical Grotesques 241 The Crucial Move: The Revenger Becomes the Director and the Judge 247 The Rage for Chaos 250 Evidence That Disorder Gets the Job Done: Enzyme Catalysis 254 Cheating or Creativity? 256 9 Detach and Reuse 262 The New Biology 266 Gene Reserve 270 Forces in Restraint of Free Trade 275 The Next Questions 277 References 282 Index 304 The Contracts of Fiction reconnects our fictional worlds to the rest of our lives. Countering the contemporary tendency to dismiss works of imagination as enjoyable but epistemologically inert, the book considers how various kinds of fictions construct, guide, and challenge institutional relationships within social groups. The contracts of fiction, like the contracts of language, law, kinship, and money, describe the rules by which members of a group toggle between tokens and types, between their material surroundings - the stuff of daily life - and the abstractions that give it value. Rethinking some familiar literary concepts such as genre and style from the perspective of recent work in the biological, cognitive, and brain sciences, the book displays how fictions engage bodies and minds in ways that help societies balance continuity and adaptability. Being part of a community means sharing the ways its members use stories, pictures, plays and movies, poems and songs, icons and relics, to generate usable knowledge about the people, objects, beliefs and values in their environment. Exposing the underlying structural and processing homologies among works of imagination and life processes such as metabolism and memory, Ellen Spolsky demonstrates the seamless connection of life to art by revealing the surprising dependence of both on disorder, imbalance, and uncertainty. In early modern London, for example, reformed religion, expanding trade, and changed demographics made the obsolescent courts a source of serious inequities. Just at that time, however, a flood of wildly popular revenge tragedies, such as Hamlet, by their very form, by their outrageous theatrical grotesques, were shouting the need for change in the justice system. A sustained discussion of the genre illustrates how biological homeostasis underpins the social balance that we maintain with difficulty, and how disorder itself incubates new understanding. This title considers the advantages of describing fictions as governed by a set of social contracts. It combines current cognitive research with attention to the historical context of works of imagination to argue against the claim that fictions corrupt clear thinking and provide, at best, inert pleasures. The chapters explore the different ways creative work in media from statues to stage plays helps to maintain cultural homeostasis. Like the social contracts of law, language, kinship, and money, the social contracts of fiction are constructed and continually revised within communities. Content: Embodiment and its entailments -- Lyrics and their frames -- Genre change and narrative recovery (maybe) -- Intelligence on a communal scale: an enriched theory of distributed cognition -- Distributed misunderstanding -- Affording justice through sinderesis: an early modern embodiment theory -- Balance and imbalance -- The skepticism of grotesques: "between the known and the unknown" -- Detach and reuse -- Conclusion and the next questions. The Contracts of Fiction invites readers to consider the advantages of describing fictions as governed by a set of social contracts, teaching us how to think about the stuff of daily life, animate and inanimate, as abstractions.