21 austen and the brain - Of Heartache and Head Injury...

Of Heartache and Head Injury:
Reading Minds in Persuasion
Alan Richardson
English, Boston College
Abstract
The new intellectual climate inaugurated by the cognitive revolution can
help elicit neglected contexts for literary historical study, to pose new questions for
analysis and reopen old ones. The current challenge to social constructionist ac-
counts of subjectivity, for example, can lead to a fundamentally new reading of Jane
Austen’s last novel, Persuasion (). Austen’s was a period when a dominant con-
structionist psychology—associationism—vied with emergent brain-based, organi-
cist, and nativist theories of mind. Austen pointedly contrasts a heroine seemingly
formed by a history of erotic disappointment with an antiheroine, whose character is
transformed instead by a severe blow to the head, at a time when brain injury featured
centrally in debates on the materiality of mind. Moreover, the novel’s innovative nar-
rative style and approach to characterization take up and extend the embodied ap-
proach to subjectivity being worked out contemporaneously by Romantic poets and
brain scientists alike.
How might the study of literary history change in the wake of the ‘‘cog-
nitive revolution’’ (Gardner )? A few literary scholars, most notably
Mary Crane and F. Elizabeth Hart, have begun to explore the tensions be-
tween relatively stable patterns of cognition and linguistic categorization
on the one hand and the specific cultural and ideological milieus within
which they develop and gain expression on the other (Crane ; Hart
). Such work illustrates Mark Turner’s contention (posed elsewhere in
this issue) that cognitive theory can inspire a ‘‘more sophisticated’’ notion
of human history by supplementing the prevailing emphasis on cultural
Poetics Today : (Spring ). Copyright ©  by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.

142 Poetics Today 23:1
history with an increased attention to the claims of phylogenetic and onto-
genetic history. Even within the current parameters of literary historical
studies, however, an awareness of recent developments in cognitive theory
and neuroscience can significantly affect critical practice by shifting atten-
tion to previously unexamined issues, providing new terms for the critical
lexicon, and reopening questions foreclosed or effectively abandoned by the
reigning consensus.
The British Romantic period, to cite a particularly rich example, has long
been viewed as dominated by an associationist account of mind, relied upon
by writers as diverse as William Wordsworth and Jane Austen, and chal-
lenged primarily by the transcendental idealism best represented by S. T.