Minds, Messages, and the Moral Imagination in the Media of Fiction: Inanimate Alice between Cognitive and Rhetorical Paradigms

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Notes

¹ Among the many recent commentaries on this dire situation are Bok (2013), Delbanco (2012), and Jay (2014).

² The full title is “The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects.” The document can be downloaded at the Common Core State Standards Initiative web site.

³ Tim Murphy’s (2014) article in Mother Jones provides an accessible overview of the history and controversy over the Common Core in the context of the ideologically polarized political climate of the United States during the period of its implementation.

⁴ Zunshine offers a succinct explanation of benefits of fiction’s “sociocognitive complexity” in her response to “Euclid at the Core” in the Style forum (2014, see especially 89–90). Zunshine’s objection to the Common Core’s marginalization of fiction is one of the most incisive in the issue: “The decision to teach elementary and secondary students more literary nonfiction and less fiction will affect the future of higher education as severely as drastic budget cuts, yet more insidiously” (91).

⁵ I should mention that the same reform instituting this ethics requirement also eliminated the mandate that all undergraduates at UHM take two classes in the English department’s Introduction to Literature Program, a scaling-down symptomatic of the waning prestige of literary studies in the American model of higher education.

⁶ The criteria for evaluating the substantive content of proposed “Contemporary Ethical Issues” classes are (i) Contemporary ethical issues will be presented and studied in a manner that is fully integrated into the main course content; (ii) The disciplinary approach(es) used in the class will give students tools for the development of responsible deliberation and ethical judgment; (iii) Students will achieve basic competency in analyzing and deliberating upon contemporary ethical issues to help them make ethically determined judgments. (Hallmarks 2014).

⁷ Within the discipline of literary studies, as Terry Eagleton has noted, this tendency to reduce literary texts to case studies or reportage manifests itself whenever works are read primarily as illustrations of the real-world social and political problems with which teachers and scholars wish to engage. “To read like this,” Eagleton cautions, “is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska” (2013: 2).

⁸ A notable exception is Rita Charon’s (2008) description of how studying literature enriches the training of physicians, which privileges the experiential dimension of reading over the edifying effects of morally relevant scenarios represented in literary texts.

⁹ Caracciolo (2012: 217–218) points out that while Herman’s recruitment of cognitive models like the joint attentional scene allow Herman to account for the reader’s reconstruction of the intended story world, they are less enlightening in regard to the reader’s freedom to elaborate interpretations of that world.

¹⁰ I thank David Ciccoricco for this suggestion.

¹¹ Although my use of “attunement” here alludes Immanuel Kant’s “respect for the moral law,” I indicate below that students and professionals alike draw from a range of philosophical traditions to describe the sense of personal responsibility that infuses their alignment with formal ethical codes. For a compelling exploration of “attunement” as an ethical resource, connected in particular with the skill of listening, see Lipari (2014).

¹² The project’s web site offers a wide range of downloadable teaching resources and activities developed by Jess Laccetti, including lesson plans aligned with the curriculum standards of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Gavin Stewart (2010) offers a compelling analysis of these materials along with the many other paratextual elements surrounding the novel.

¹³ See Pullinger (2008) for an account of Pullinger and Joseph’s decisions regarding the representation of Alice’s perspective.

¹⁴ I thank Chris Joseph for his permission to reproduce this code.

¹⁵ Ciccoricco (2013a: 42–43) questions this notion that all the images and animations in the novel can be ascribed to Alice’s imagination by pointing to what appear to be depictions of places and events that are crucial to the plot but which Alice herself could never have seen nor likely imagined.

¹⁶ In this regard I share Brian McHale’s (2012: 120) questions, which he directs to Alan Palmer’s work in particular, about the centrality of “mind” in the cognitive paradigm: “If narrative is essentially identical to mental functioning, one is tempted to wonder what, if anything, is left over. Is there anything in a narrative that is not mind?” McHale goes on to point to the methodological limitations arising from this lack of conceptual granularity: “Ultimately, if everything in narrative is mind, then hasn’t the very category of fictional consciousness or representation of consciousness been rendered redundant? Under the “whole mind” hypothesis, is it even useful any longer to maintain a separate category of represented consciousness?” (120).

¹⁷ For more extensive analyses of the relationship between the narrative form of Time’s Arrow and its ethical impact on the reader, see Phelan (2012: 2010) and Martínez-Alfaro (2011).

¹⁸ In the context of my present discussion of ethically oriented literary pedagogy, I find Ido Geiger’s (2011: 163) description of Kant’s idea particularly resonant: “This feeling of respect for the moral law, or better, the capacity for feeling respect for the law – this affective attunement to the claims of morality – is a necessary condition of moral agency. It is not our duty to acquire this capacity – although it is our duty to cultivate it.”

¹⁹ Given my focus on Walsh’s redeployment of Althusser’s concept of interpellation, it is striking to note that Levinas at times uses the term “interpellation” to describe the appeal of the Other, as in this passage from “Phenomenon and Enigma” (1987: 64–65): “Across the unbreakable chain of significations, standing out again the historical conjuncture, was there not an expression, a face facing and interpellating, coming from the depths, cutting the threads of the context? Did not a neighbor approach?” Martínez-Alfaro’s (2011) compelling reading of Time’s Arrow draws heavily on Levinasian ethics.