Issue #0

The brain of Robert Frost

a cognitive approach to literature

Plot

"Norman Holland has been the major pioneer in the empirical study of how literature is actually understood by readers. Over the years, he has taught us that the literary text does not have a fixed inherent meaning, nor is it subject to an open range of arbitrary, unconstrained interpretations. Instead, literary interpretation is a product of the human psyche, and as such is both constrained by limits on the psyche and opened up by variations across individual readers. The Brain of Robert Frost is a marvelous exploration of how we comprehend both poems and poets. It is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the interpretive process." —George Lakoff "The Brain of Robert Frost is as brilliantly inventive as it is widely serviceable. Here physiology, psychology, cybernetics, psycholinguistics, biography, pedagogy, and literary theory meet to illumine the most radical faculties of the mind, human identity, mythopoesis. Written with verve, erudition, humor, and admirable intellectual clarity, Holland's work also maps new territory. Readers of literature will spend hours and years, in decades to come, exploring that territory with a glint in their eye." —|hab Hassan "Drawing shrewdly on recent discoveries in the cognitive sciences, Norman Holland offers us an ingenious, moving and quite convincing account of human literary endeavors." —Howard Gardner, author of Art, Mind and Brain ln his newest book Norman Holland brings brain science to literary criticism. The Brain of Robert Frost combines psychoanalysis with the revolutionary new findings of brain research and cognitive psychology to model the way we create and respond to literature. Using Robert Frost as an example both of a writer and a reader, and comparing Frost's reading of a poem to readings by six professors of literature, Holland builds a new, powerful way of thinking about literary criticism and teaching.