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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 61, number 2, Summer 2015. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

neuroscience and modern

fiction

Stephen J. Burn

A little over halfway through Don DeLillo's fourth novel, Ratner's Star, a character named Skip Wismer begins a confessional dialogue with Billy Twillig as he escorts the young mathematician toward a huge operating theater. "My wife is dead, you know," Wismer explains:

"She's in an icebox in Houston. . . . Left her body to science"

"What will they do with it?"

"I hate to tell you. . . . The whole thing depresses and worries me, not least of all the question of what happens in the first few seconds after electrical activity in the brain ceases forever." (242)

Mixing comedy with a mordant undertow, Ratner's Star is full of such scenes that seem ancillary to any concerted narrative or thematic de-velopment. As Billy moves around the research facility, he encounters a vast array of similar minor characters whose offbeat reflections stall Billy's work and bloat the margins of the novel's narrative. As such, Wismer and his many companions might be seen, in Alex Woloch's terms, as "the proletariat of the novel," "subordinate beings who are delimited in themselves while performing a function for someone else" (27); but rather than simply ceding space to a dominant personal-ity, these characters often serve to bring the book into contact with its immediate cultural and historical context. Although Ratner's Star has routinely been denied any real social valence, with its sphere

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of activity limited to the abstract and the absurd, characters such as Wismer are often solidly anchored in the scientific discourse of the early seventies.1 Wismer's description of death, for instance, is neither an absurd fantasy nor a piece of arcane research but a close paraphrase of a scientific definition of death ("the cessation of electri-cal activity in the brain" [66]) taken from a report on contemporary brain studies—Gerald Jonas's "Into the Brain"—that appeared in the New Yorker at the start of July 1974.2 Jonas's article was evidently an important storehouse of technical terms and concepts for DeLillo, and he drew on it for other small phrases—such as conceiving of memory as a "chemical residue" (Jonas 58, DeLillo 88)—as well as for the foundations of larger set pieces. When another minor character, Cheops Feeley, offers to bury a "LeDuc electrode" in Billy's head, for instance, DeLillo describes the electrode as:

a bundle of extremely tiny wires able to stimulate and record brain activity. . . . These wires are attached to a microminiaturized disk that functions almost exactly as a computer does . . . it's small enough to be implanted under someone's scalp. Through a tiny incision that leaves no scars. . . . I want to point out that subcutaneous implanta-tion is no great problem in and of itself. (243–44)

Running through this scene like a watermark is clearly Jonas's de-scription of Yale physiologist José M. R. Delgado's attempts to control monkey behavior through electrical stimulation. Jonas writes of "fine steel wires" (67) that make up "a stimulator that is small enough to be buried under the skin of a monkey's scalp. Once the incision heals, nothing is visible on the surface . . . in the next two years, with the new technique of integrated circuitry, it will be possible to implant microminituarized computers subcutaneously" (68).

Jonas's article is only one of the many popular accounts of brain research that underpin Ratner's Star. We might just as readily map DeLillo's description of Robert Softly's postnarcotic reverie ("Another . . . chemical event. Opiate receptors functioning nicely" [327]) on to Harold Schmeck's New York Times report on "Brain Receptors for Narcotics" ("brain chemistry . . . might clarify the nature of the chemicals event . . . what they call 'opiate receptors'" [30]). Yet while such source identification is often considered to be among the most lowly of scholarly tasks—Harold Bloom, for instance, cavalierly dismisses "those carrion-eaters of scholarship, the source hunters" (17)—tracking the extent to which Ratner's Star rehearses the vo-cabulary and overarching concepts of contemporary neuroscience can alter the terms of our engagement with the novel itself and arguably with the larger contemporary field.

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At the local level of DeLillo criticism, the specificity with which the apparently absurd maps on to quotidian discourse might encourage us to reconsider the novel's generic classification. Ever since George Stade's review identified the novel as a Menippean satire, scholars have (often by way of insightful readings) mostly amplified and rub-berstamped his classification.3 Yet, if Menippean satire typically relies on "outlandish fictions" and "extreme distortions" (Kirk xi), then it's clear that such carefully documented passages index a much shorter distance between book and satirical target than Menippean satire is sometimes thought to permit.4 Implicit here is a larger argument about the orthodox and too-hasty association of postmodern texts with parodic techniques, a move buried in the use of "black humor" as an early near-synonym for postmodernism, and one that points toward absurdist frameworks, sometimes isolating these novels from their social and historical contexts. But remaining for a moment within the confines of DeLillo scholarship, revealing the extent and variety of Ratner's Star's cognitive dialogues also expands our sense of the novel's imaginative project. Although most studies frame the book in terms of its mathematical and cultural obsessions,5 the extent to which the novel's references to the brain permit and reward annota-tion suggest that we reclassify the novel as a kind of neurofiction, a work that absorbs and carries on a dialogue with the contemporary sciences of mind.6

That a novel by one of the most studied contemporary authors can approach middle age without its heavy investment in popular brain research receiving sustained critical attention is at least one of the axial motivations of this special issue's focus on modern fiction and neuroscience. Ratner's Star might be considered a representative case of the extent to which fiction has engaged with what Melissa Littlefield and Jenell Johnson have called the "neuroscientific turn," and my initial reading of it here attempts to sketch what might be at stake in exploring that engagement in terms of the relatively conventional literary concerns of form, genre, and annotation. But the purpose of this special issue goes beyond the closed circle of DeLillo criticism to add to the larger, collaborative project of tracking interactions between modern fiction and the sciences of mind. As numerous state-of-the-field surveys indicate, literary criticism has sporadically engaged with brain research across the second half of the twentieth century, though different literary historians identify dif-ferent genealogies for brain-based literary studies. For Joseph Tabbi, the "critical landmarks in the field" are Roman Ingarden's Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (1968) and George Szanto's Narrative Consciousness (1972) ("Cognitive" 77). For Lisa Zunshine, the larger project of what she calls "cognitive culture studies" (5) originates

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in Raymond Williams's exploration of "evolution of the human brain [and] the particular interpretation carried by particular cultures" in The Long Revolution (1961) (qtd. in Zunshine 5). Others might point to work by H. W. Fawkner, Norman Holland, Sally Shuttleworth, Ellen Spolsky, or Mark Turner.

Yet however the historical territory is mapped, the terrain clearly shifts around the millennium when a rapid acceleration of critical activity emerges—encompassing both accessible essays by novelist-scholars (such as David Lodge's Consciousness and the Novel [2002]) as well as more conventional academic studies—that "explicitly address[es] interactions between neurology and literature (as opposed to psychology and literature, madness and literature, etc.)" (Stiles, Introduction 8). Landmark works in this developing field include Mary Thomas Crane's 2001 study, Shakespeare's Brain, which critiques Foucauldian readings of the early modern period by drawing on cognitive science's claim that "the power of culture to shape individual selves must be filtered through the material, bio-logical constructs of the brain" (23) to argue (through examination of polysemic word patterns) that "Shakespeare seems . . . to have been doing cognitive research on his own mental lexicon" (24). The same year, Alan Richardson's British Romanticism and the Science of Mind appeared. A pioneering example of cognitive historicism—that is, "cognitively informed interpretive readings of literary texts that at the same time fully acknowledge their historical specificity" (Richardson and Steen 5)—Richardson's study maps a rich cultural matrix that ranges through Pierre Cabanis, Franz Gall, Erasmus Dar-win, and others to outline a "neural Romanticism" that looks "to the body with its nervous system, brain, and 'organic' mind rather than to a disembodied Reason as the ground for human uniformity" (177). Somewhat later, the field's purview extends to Victorian literature: Nicholas Dames's The Physiology of the Novel maps connections between, for instance, the diminishing size of British novels at the end of the nineteenth century and studies "of the motor processes involved in reading" carried out by a French physiologist and oph-thalmologist in the late 1870s (212); Anne Stiles's Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century sets late Victorian neurology, with its "aura of Gothic mystery [and] element of horror," next to a sequence of novels, with particular attention to cerebral localization (24).

The breadth of imaginative activity here is sufficiently diverse to produce internal dialogue about exactly how to connect literature and the sciences of mind. Stiles, for instance, begins her collection Neurology and Literature by distinguishing her methodology from "the approach typified by cognitive literary theory, a school of thought

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which anachronistically imposes twenty-first-century neurological concepts upon fictions of earlier time periods" (Introduction 8). Equally, these millennial studies represent a field that's sufficiently mature to have synthesized the routine objections it arouses from its critics—such as Richardson's opening defense against claims that he "illicitly borrow[s] an aura of authority from the sciences" (xvi)—and to have sufficiently developed its own identity to the point that crit-ics can mark the boundaries that divide it from cognate scientifically shaped criticism.7 But however the subdiscipline polices its borders, and whatever range of methodologies it encompasses, what is clear from this brief, partial survey is the field's asymmetrical historical reach. While the British nineteenth century in particular has re-ceived extensive coverage, the post-1900 period has—in spite of the spectacular ascent of the neurosciences across the century—been comparatively unmapped, with mostly only sporadic attention to intersections between brain research and literature until the sudden appearance of what Marco Roth has called the "neuronovel" in the twenty-first century.8

In an essay that appeared in n+1, Roth conceived of the form through the lens of his conservative regret for the passing of psycho-analysis (an era that was "more friendly to the informal psychological explorations of novelists"), but despite a few historical gestures (to the decay of the linguistic turn, to Lionel Trilling) his account of the neuronovel's timeline depends on a shallow chronology that is tied to millennial pop science rhetoric and Ian McEwan's recent fiction. Thus, the cultural conditions that permit the neuronovel's emergence are set not by "new scientific discoveries" but by the "superbly confident rhetoric" of Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained (1991) and Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (1997). Fueled by such works, "a new strain within the Anglo-American novel" arises, and its novelty is cemented by a precise birthdate—1997—when McEwan "effectively inaugurates the genre of the neuronovel" by publishing Enduring Love.

Roth's essay is, of course, not the only treatment of twenty-first century "neuronovels,"9 but his account has been quite influential and has done much to establish the micro-canon—McEwan joined by Rivka Galchen, Mark Haddon, Jonathan Lethem, and Richard Pow-ers—that dominates such treatments.10 Yet while there's something to be said for the relationship between twenty-first-century brain-based fictions and the proliferation of popular science texts (driven, in America at least, partly by the administration of President George H. W. Bush sponsoring the 1990s as the Decade of the Brain), there are at least two reasons why we might question the truncated lifespan Roth ascribes his invention. First, the "superbly confident rhetoric" of Dennett and Pinker is not quite the radical development that Roth

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suggests, but has rather always been the field's lingua franca. While Roth notes the contemporary rise of a "popular journalistic form" that suggests that "the new reductionism can or will soon describe all human behaviour," as Michael Hagner and Cornelius Borck have argued, the field has always had a "proleptic structure" that recent "popular hagiographic histories" simply extend but do not create:

brain research has frequently operated in an outspokenly futuristic mode. This started in the early nineteenth century with Franz Joseph Gall's phrenology, which promised to be a comprehensive basis for the management of society, including education, religion and law. In the twentieth cen-tury, the advancement of the brain was said to lift mankind into a state of enlightenment about its own intellectual foundations. (508)11

Even the overblown titles of Dennett's or Pinker's work reflect less a millennial hubris and more an ongoing tendency in the popular science of mind, and Dennett and Pinker in the nineties might eas-ily be substituted for Marilyn Ferguson, A. R. Luria, or Carl Sagan in earlier decades.12 As we enlarge our temporal scope, the second reason to question Roth's construction of the form stems from the first. Although there are clearly writers whose engagement with neu-roscience derives from firsthand encounters with scientists, whatever cultural transmission takes place between neuroscience and fiction often extends—as DeLillo's reliance on the New Yorker and the New York Times suggests—from popularizations.13 As we move beyond the failure to think historically about popular neurorhetoric, so a richer and fuller account of the range of neuroworks across the century should come into view. One barrier to recognizing the spectrum of activity, however, is the tendency to limit our understanding of neu-rofiction to the appearance, in Gary Johnson's neat phrase (itself a reversal of a Dennett title), of "consciousness as content"—that is, to solely consider books that have "cognitive science as a, or the, main theme" (170). To do so is to confine our attention to a novel's topical interests and potentially miss its non-narrative freight. Ratner's Star once more provides an exemplary case of what might be at stake in such an endeavor.

Shortly after the novel was published, DeLillo explicitly ad-dressed the novel's neuroscientific project when he told Tom LeClair that the "strong demarcation between the parts" of the novel was designed to imitate the differences between the "left brain [and] right brain" ("Interview" 87).14 Split-brain research, that is, the scientific study of asymmetries in brain function between the left and right hemispheres, has been dated back to 1836 (Springer and

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Deutsch 11), but from the 1960s through the early 1970s the field was revolutionized. In 1970 and then in 1973—during the critical years for the research program that underwrites Ratner's Star—the New York Times devoted several articles to summarizing new break-throughs, considering, for example, how the conclusions of split-brain research might be applied to education "without aggravating classic differences within nations" (Rosenzweig 72), or how the "discovery that we possess two separate information-processing systems may allow us to understand some of the polarity which has characterized some of our intellectual life" (Ornstein 35). But while the polarities of intellectual life are very much a subject of Ratner's Star, the most likely foundation for the novel's initial development was provided by a long article entitled "We Are Left-Brained or Right-Brained" by Maya Pines that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1973. Pines summarized split-brain studies conducted by researchers such as Michael Gazzaniga and Robert Ornstein and singled out the scientist she believed to be the leading figure in the field when she explained that in split-brain research "all roads lead to Dr. Roger Sperry" (32).

Reacting against the dominant behaviorist paradigm of his day—specifically the view that downplayed genetic determinism, "tell[ing] us that literally 99 percent of human nature and mind is a product of experience and training" ("Mind, Brain" 91)—Sperry him-self frequently summarized his work for a general audience, and it's worth noting that DeLillo's 1979 description of the halves of Ratner's Star as "left brain, right brain" precisely echoes the title of an essay Sperry published in the Saturday Review in 1975. At the same time, Sperry's extrapolations from his research often parallel the interests of Ratner's Star, such as when Sperry argued that mind science would help "theoreticians from the NASA committee or from radio astronomy [who] want a more educated guess about the possibility of encountering on other globes other minds with perhaps totally dif-ferent dimensions of conscious awareness" (Problems 4). Yet beyond such superficial overlaps, summarizing Sperry's work from the late 1960s and early 1970s illuminates how DeLillo integrated split-brain research into the workings of Ratner's Star on a more fundamental level. Seeking to develop an "'emergent' theory of mind" from the study of epileptics who had the connective circuitry between their hemispheres severed ("In Search of Psyche" 430), Sperry devised a series of experiments that led him to conclude that "two independent streams of conscious awareness" exist in each brain, with one located "in each hemisphere" ("Hemisphere Deconnection" 724). Though more recent research has somewhat qualified the deductions Sperry drew from his experiments, his work carefully mapped the respective strengths of the hemispheres.15 The left hemisphere, Sperry argued,

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was the brain of "speech, writing, and calculation," while it was "also the more aggressive, executive, leading hemisphere" ("Changing Concepts" 58). "Highly verbal and mathematical," the left hemisphere, he maintained, performed with "analytic, symbolic, computerlike, sequential logic" ("Left-Brain, Right-Brain" 31). By contrast, Sperry summarized the more intuitive right hemisphere function as largely involving "the apprehension and processing of spatial patterns, rela-tions, and transformations. They seem to be holistic and unitary rather than analytic and fragmentary . . . they seem to involve concrete perceptual insight rather than abstract, symbolic, sequential reason-ing" ("Changing Concepts" 59). This nonverbal right-brain function operated with a "synthetic spatio-perceptual . . . kind of information processing that cannot yet be simulated by computers" ("Left-Brain, Right-Brain" 31).

In Great Jones Street DeLillo had already modeled a novel around the "left hemisphere of the brain . . . the verbal hemisphere" (228), and he explicitly refers to the findings of split-brain research on several occasions in Ratner's Star; one of the unpleasant side-effects of the Leduc electrode, for instance, is that it "tends to over-stimulate the left side of the brain" resulting "in an overpowering sense of sequence" (244). Yet beyond such asides, DeLillo draws on this rich cultural matrix to shape the book's non-narrative form. Part one ("Adventures") is modeled to reflect the strengths of the left brain. The numbered, discrete chapters replicate its analytic dimension, what Sperry called the tendency of "the left hemisphere . . . to see separate salient features" rather than an indivisible whole ("Hemispheric Specialization" 60). At the same time, this left-brain dominance is reinforced by the conceptual titles—segmentation, se-quence, dichotomy—that seem to summarize the left brain's "abstract . . . sequential reasoning" strengths ("Changing Concepts" 59), and that provide governing ideas that order and control each chapter. Moving to a level below the novel's overarching arrangement, part one's narrative voice reinscribes the left brain's influence, as is evident even in the opening paragraph: "Little Billy Twillig stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land. This much is known for certain. He boarded the plane. The plane was a Sony 747, labeled as such, and it was scheduled to arrive at a designated point exactly so many hours after takeoff. This much is subject to verification, pebble-rubbed (khalix, calculus), real as the number one" (3). These sentences offer less narrative propulsion than a progressive fragmentation, a computerlike rendering of the novel's world with more attention to analyzing the weight of each linguistic term than to a developing dramatic situation. The process is one of the constant subdivision and reassessment of the terms present in the opening sentence, a

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careful rendering of analytic left-brain function. From the very start of the second part of the book ("Reflections"), however, it is clear that the abstract logic and language-driven bias of the left brain have been substituted for the spatial, holistic emphasis of the right hemisphere. While "Adventures" begins with a series of short, direct, discrete sentences, the opening of "Reflections" dramatizes the right brain's tendency to "process information more diffusely, all at once" (Ornstein 35) as DeLillo unfurls a 220-word sentence. Imitating what Robert Ornstein identifies as the right brain's preference for "spatial and intuitive thought" (35) over language skills, "Reflections" begins with "the failure (or instinctive disinclination) to produce coherent speech" (280; emphasis added). The first segment of this chapter is headed by no title, and instead the reader is thrown into a sentence overloaded with spatial terminology. Not only does the word "space" appear twice within this sentence (279, 280), but DeLillo stresses "distances" (279), "reconnoitering for fit and placement" (279), "re-adjustment of original position" (279–80), and "descent" (280). As a further reflection of the right brain's holistic impulses, the discrete, numbered chapters of "Adventures" are replaced by a rapid succes-sion of episodes that are no longer separated off under titles signaling abstract concepts that seek to subdivide and order reality. Instead, part two's narrative fluidly switches between viewpoints—sometimes in midsentence—up to twelve times within a single narrative unit. These sections are headed by more personal titles, which reflect the right-brain function that Sperry summarized as "information process-ing that cannot yet be simulated by computers" ("Left-Brain, Right-Brain" 31). DeLillo's rendering of such processes mostly draws on a simple vocabulary to point up instinctive, elemental feelings (thus, part two begins with "I Take a Scary Ride," and includes sections with such titles as "I Don't Feel So Good," and "I am not just this").

I've suggested elsewhere that when a writer structures their prose to imitate and fall within the boundaries of a neuroscientific concept, something more than a formal game is at stake; DeLillo's deliberate attempt to write each half of Ratner's Star within the con-straints of first left- and then right-brain function serves "to remind the reader that their own experiences take place within biological constraints" (40). My purpose here, however, is to suggest that to read modern narrative in terms of neuroscience is not necessarily to write the neuroscience of narrative, subordinating attention to nuance, style, form, genre, history, or anything else to the dictates of an imported master system. It might, however, be to begin to write the narrative of neuroscience, exploring the varied ways that neurorhetoric has shaped and distorted literary language across the modern and contemporary periods. There is much work to be done

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in this area, work that might connect the mainstream literary novel to currents in science fiction; that might explore the gender and race asymmetries in discussions of neurofiction;16 that might bring Dis-ability Studies into more productive dialogue with neuroscientifically informed criticism; that might examine the different ways that the novel has absorbed and contested what Francisco Ortega and Fer-nando Vidal call "the anthropological figure of the 'cerebral subject'" (7); or that might take us from H. G. Wells's sense that we are "matter with minds growing out of ourselves" (289) to Jennifer Egan's Look at Me, where a character can attribute her "visual architecture" to a "cerebral lobe" (34). The essays gathered in this special issue begin but do not exhaust this project. Although they remain within the boundaries of the Anglo-American novel (a confinement that should be broken in future work), they start to broaden and diversify our sense of how neuroscience and modern fiction might be addressed in future articles.

The hosting sites and electronic archives that deliver most twenty-first-century journal articles—whether based at Project Muse, JSTOR, or an individual university press—add convenience at the price of coherence and atomize individual issues according to the search terms that shape any given data set. This issue, however, is designed to be read in archaic fashion—sequentially—with the essays grouped into conceptual pairs that follow on from the one that precedes it. The issue begins with two linked essays that—like the above reading of Ratner's Star—are partly source studies, reverse-engineering the novelist's workshop from clues in the published work. Wes Chapman's "The Cognitive Literary Theory of Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2" acts in part as an introduction to the issue as a whole, tracing the his-tory of cognitive literary theory in dialogue with poststructuralism, before identifying the role Gerald Edelman's popular account of "the matter of mind," Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), plays in Powers's negotiation between the science of mind and a slippery conception of literary theory. Toward the end of his essay, Chapman quotes Zunshine on the compatibility of feminism and cognitive criticism, and the second essay—Alyson Bardsley's "Interspecies Limbic Love: Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven"—confirms this compatibility by read-ing popular neuroscience and the contemporary American novel in light of postmodernist and feminist critique. Bardsley's essay is the first academic reading of Smiley's novel as a neurofiction, and it, too, considers the cultural transmission of neuroscientific concepts in popular form by identifying A General Theory of Love (2000) as a key influence on Smiley's treatment of the limbic brain.

Like Bardsley, Andrew Gaedtke considers the role of popular sci-ence in the neuronovel's genealogy, but while tracing the discursive

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sources that underpin Will Self's Umbrella, Gaedtke also builds on his earlier study of qualia and style in recent British fiction, by draw-ing attention to the way that neuroscientific popularizations rely on literary techniques to piggyback their way past science's explanatory limits. This exploration introduces the methodology that links the second pair of essays, which is the important process of historicizing the neuro-age by placing neuroscientific concepts (in this instance, as they are related to encephalitis lethargica) in a longer lens that reveals the authoritative contemporary diagnosis as simply the latest link in a much longer historical chain of competing diagnoses. Anne Stiles's "Christian Science versus the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden" also extends her recent work—specifi-cally her engagement with Silas Weir Mitchell—and, like Gaedtke, she offers an important historical dimension to the special issue by concentrating on interactions between literature and science at the start of the twentieth century. In her cognitive historicist reading of Burnett's work, she makes a powerful case for attending to The Se-cret Garden's largely overlooked medical context and its intersection with Christian Science.

The final two essays in the issue are concerned in various ways with how we encounter the brain as a physical, material object: how we see it, and how we touch it. In N. Katherine Hayles's essay, "Brain Imaging and the Epistemology of Vision: Daniel Suarez's Dae-mon and Freedom," that exploration encompasses both the digital technologies for scanning brains and the economic substrate that underwrites such devices. Hayles's discussion of brain maps presses this special issue beyond the current canon of neurofiction, bringing it into contact with science fiction. Jason Tougaw's "Touching Brains" also introduces a new author into the discussion, with an overdue consideration of Siri Hustvedt's engagement with brain research. While Hustvedt has discussed brain research more discursively in The Shaking Woman (2011) and Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), Tougaw examines her fictional engagement with the sciences of mind in The Sorrows of an American (2009). Yet while the preceding four essays in this issue consider writers who are rarely linked to neuroscience, the final essay parallels the opening essay by offering a fresh look at two other standard authors of neuronovels—McEwan and John Wray—and through close consideration of scenes where characters touch brains, Tougaw offers the issue's most sustained taxonomical account of contemporary neurofiction.

Taken together, the essays in this special issue both offer new models for thinking about books that we already knew were engaged with the brain, and identify new dialogues with the sciences of mind in places where we may be surprised to find such engagements.

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While most of the essays focus on a single novel, their investigations participate in a larger conversation about an emerging field, and the issue concludes with a review essay by Alan Richardson that makes that connection explicit. Taking recent works by Paul B. Armstrong and David Herman as the occasion for a consideration of the field's larger dynamics, Richardson asks the question that underpins many of the discussions of neuroscience and modern fiction in this issue: "if cognitive literary studies have arrived, where are they heading?"

Notes

1. Joseph Dewey describes the book variously as "absurd" and "bizarre" (42); Jesse Kavadlo's often persuasive study similarly summarizes the book's premises as "overwhelming[ly] absurd" (146).

2. For the most part, my reading of Ratner's Star is archival, drawing on (but not limited to) materials held in the Harry Ransom Center's archive of DeLillo's research papers.

3. Mark Osteen notes the book's incorporation of "all fourteen features of classical Menippean satire" (63). While not adopting the same explicit vocabulary, David Cowart makes a comparable argument. See 153–55. Although Tom LeClair does not rely on ancient satire, his early reading similarly stresses the book's distance from the contemporary world, noting that "the dominant direction in Ratner's Star is toward an explicit excess of abstraction" (114). Robert Nadeau is one of the few critics to stress DeLillo's use of real—rather than fantastic—scientific materials, observing that "Ratner's star, which is eventually found to be a 'binary dwarf' consisting of red and white stars, resembles Pulsar 1913+ 16 which was first discovered by radio astronomers in Puerto Rico in 1974" (175).

4. Menippean satire's distance from a verifiable reality is underlined by a range of critics: Joel Relihan, for instance, argues that Menippean satire creates "a topsy-turvy world," is "constructed in [its] broadest outlines as parod[y]," and "is a genre that desires that nothing be taken too seriously" (22–24).

5. A significant exception is LeClair's pioneering reading, which briefly notes that the book conceives of fear as "hard wired . . . pulsing up from the brain stem" (142).

6. There are various terms to describe such works, but many of them—such as Marco Roth's "neuronovel"—arbitrarily assume that a prose work that draws on neuroscientific material must be a novel. There is, of course, no compelling reason why such works may not be novellas or short stories.

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7. Jonathan Kramnick's critique of the literary Darwinists, for instance, concludes by distinguishing work (such as Richardson's) that con-nects "the long history of cognitive science to the rise and fall of literary forms" (347) from the Darwinists' reliance on adaptationist arguments.

8. The twentieth century is not, of course, entirely neglected, but while nineteenth-century studies are marked by a multi-author focus encompassing the writers who are widely considered to be central to our understanding of their respective literary movements (say, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats for the Romantics; Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing for the Victorians), twentieth-century studies have often limited their attention either to single authors (say, Steven Meyer's reading of Gertrude Stein in light of "the neurophysiological imagination" in Irresistible Dictation [1], or Patrick Colm Hogan's Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition) or to less mainstream figures. For example, Joseph Tabbi's Cognitive Fictions balances its readings of Pynchon and Powers with accounts of David Markson and Lynne Tillman. This does not, of course, mean that such studies do not contain important insights, but it does leave major twentieth-century territory unexplored.

9. For more nuanced accounts, see Charles B. Harris's reading of what he calls Richard Powers's "neurological realism" (243) or T. J. Lustig and James Peacock's collection on "the syndrome novel."

10. The article's influence—and the corresponding absence of attention to earlier scholarship—is anecdotally indicated by the forty or so submissions to this special issue. Around 25% cited Roth; none cited Meyer, Tabbi, or Shuttleworth. Only one essay cited Holland.

11. In a section headed "Rhetorics of the Future," Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega quote Hagner and Borck and discuss the close historical association between brain science and "euphoric rhetoric" (8).

12. As Jon Adams has shown, Pinker's title had already been used by psychologist Cyril Burt in 1933 for a volume that gathered a series of talks given for the BBC.

13. From Roth's list we might note Powers's involvement with the Beckman Institute's Cognitive Neuroscience group, while McEwan acknowledges working with the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. Beyond that list, Nicole Krauss talked to a neurologist and a pathologist while writing Man Walks into a Room (2002).

14. Several critics offer different and persuasive explanations for the different techniques deployed in the two halves of the novel. I don't intend to suggest that my reading in terms of hemispheric difference outlines some kind of master system that replaces earlier readings. Rather I suggest that the divergent readings are a product of DeL-illo's layered aesthetic. There are also further dimensions to DeLillo's interest in the split brain, and, in a doctoral dissertation titled "Cer-

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ebrating the Novel," Jefferson Eitig Faye persuasively discusses paired characters in Ratner's Star in terms of hemispheric specialization.

15. In a 1998 essay for Scientific American, Sperry's former graduate student Michael S. Gazzaniga noted that while split-brain research continued to pose intriguing questions, "over the years it has become clear that our first three cases were unusual," prompting researchers to overestimate the abilities of the right hemisphere (53). Whether or not a scientific concept is later discredited may make a great deal of difference within the technical field itself, but a writer's imagina-tive exploitation of that concept may not hinge on its ongoing truth status.

16. Roth's construction of the neuronovel is entirely white and mostly male, as are the canons surveyed by Gary Johnson and many oth-ers. Terry Reilly's discussion of Doris Lessing and the "language of lobotomy" is a notable break from this routine, though there are certainly other writers beyond the white-male axis who draw on the language and concepts of brain research: Colson Whitehead's char-acters measure their awareness in terms of when their "synapses fire" (148) and trace brain function to "the old brainstem" (169); John Edgar Wideman's "Fever" describes the biology of brain ("the dura mater covering the brain is white and fibrous in appearance" [146]); while Alice Walker's By the Light of My Father's Smile draws on the vocabulary of Paul D. MacLean's triune brain in describing a character who has "been overtaken by his ancient reptilian brain" (90). In addition to taking into account and contextualizing such ref-erences, further studies might draw on Mark McGurl's argument that white male writers respond to the rise of multicultural literature with a compensatory attempt to bolster their own individuality through the incorporation of increasingly abstract and specialized scientific knowledge: "put baldly, what Roth knows about the Jewish experi-ence, and Morrison knows about the African American experience, writers like Powers, DeLillo, and Pynchon know about the second law of thermodynamics" (62). To what extent is the ascent of the neurosciences—with its resurrection of concepts such as universal-ity—seen as an antidote to postmodern and multicultural pluralism?

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