Whilst taking a break from reading Book Three or Arcadia (which I must say, I am thoroughly enjoying), I read an article by Andrew Elfenbein entitled "Cognitive Science and the History of Reading" (PMLA, 121.2: 2006). He is concerned with reading cognition and how various memory processes affect our interpretation and understanding of a text. I thought I'd share one paragraph that seemed relevant to Arcadia:
"[W]hen a teacher assigns an epic or novel with complex and dense plots to students who have relatively little background in reading such works, the amount of working memory resources they will need to perform such operations as tracking characters, creating causal links between plot developments, and registering major changes in time and space will inhibit their ability to perform tasks basic to contemporary literary criticism. These include creating connections across wide spans of plot that may not be causally linked, noticing unusual details that may not play a major role in the story, and linking content to generic, historical, or ideological background. Such tasks should be easier for readers with high reading spans and for those who have more background knowledge, skills, motivation, and time to read, but for many students, the newness of the cognitive tasks may result in what, to the teacher, look merely like shallow readings and basic mistakes" (498).
(Disclaimer: I promise not to cite this as an excuse for writing a weak paper)
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This is fascinating. It may explain why Sidney and Spenser are such difficult texts on the first encounter.
ReplyDeleteIt is also interesting in light of what we have discussed about the ways that romance (with all its plots and characters) is dismissed as "escapist" fantasy and simple reading, when, in fact, it takes up more cognitive processing power.
Could the dismissal of romance, then, be both a distrust for the overtly emotional and an unconscious rejection of the complexity possible with the emotional?
ReplyDeleteIn partial response to Emily: Perhaps the degree of emotional response in intimately linked to the complexity. Fully comprehending a long work with a complex plot and many characters is surely satisfying -- and fully grasping all the complexities should enhance the emotional response.
ReplyDeleteElfenbein argues that in becoming accustomed to reading complex works (like Sidney and Spencer -- though he doesn't mention them), the reader is actually building 'brain-power'. He speaks of why early critics may have been opposed to the novel (think of Richardson's Pamela, for example): he says, "Underneath ... critics contempt for the novel may lie a degree of awe and fear of the kind of brain work that seemed to be increasingly attainable."
We can perhaps see that if becoming adept at reading long and complex Romances builds brain-power then that may be seen as threatening to the so-called intellectuals of the day. Heaven forbid, but perhaps readers actually started to develop independent opinions and began to express them !
Interestingly, the same criticisms that were leveled at Romances were later aimed at novels, melodramas and movies -- all things that encouraged independent thought and emotional responses that may have challenged the status-quo.
I think we can see just from Book III of Arcadia how a woman reader might develop some 'unconventional' ideas -- and who knows, she may even have voiced them. Reason enough to condemn all Romance as an evil influence, wouldn't you say?
While it is tempting to equate emotional response with complexity, it is not that simple. Perhaps "complexity" needs to be qualified. A complex logical proof might not always create an emotional response and many emotional songs rely on simple words, melody and harmonies. Perhaps the idea of recognition might be important?
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