UC Santa Barbara

Does form shape thought? If so, how, and to what degree? This dissertation answers the question by proposing a new cognitive theory of aesthetic affordances applied to case studies of Virginia Woolf (1941) and Lettrist cinema (1951). After a brief introductory chapter which includes terminological clarifications, the second chapter contributes to the present recourse to affordances in literary theory (Cave 2016; Felski 2017; Levine 2015; Serpell 2014) by addressing ambiguities in its use. It outlines the concept’s intellectual heritage in psychology (Gibson 1979; Jones 2003; Shepard 1984; Turvey 1981). It argues that its current use in literary theory assumes an instrumental view of literature by accepting an embodied view of cognition, which stipulates that literature, like a tool, augments thought (Clark 1998; Heft 2003). The chapter then offers an alternative definition, which it calls aesthetic affordances, based on advances in cognitive neuroscience (Cosmides and Tooby, 1994; Dehaene, 2020; Kahneman, 2011; Pinker, 2007). This perspective captures how the mind can intuitively understand literary form through cognitive mechanisms. Crucially, the chapter argues that this redefinition is more faithful to the original concept of affordances which also proposed that understanding is intuitive, pre-verbal, and instant. This is also why the following two chapters, three and four, focus on form: aesthetic affordances allow consideration of how literature can be understood outside a language of sense.

The chapter on Virginia Woolf addresses her lifelong attempt to find a form of writing which could communicate her political beliefs without stating them literally or symbolically. It analyzes her World War II novel Between the Acts (1941) through the cognitive mechanism entrainment, which describes how the mind intuitively understands rhythm (Poeppel and Assaneo 2020; Poeppel and Teng 2020). The chapter argues that Woolf uses entrainment to demonstrate and question the insidious ways that patriarchal traditions hold sway over the mind. It, therefore, argues that Woolf can communicate her politics through rhythm.

The fourth chapter builds on this question surrounding form and content by analyzing the avant-garde cinema (1951) of the Lettrists Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître. These artists sought to communicate exclusively through form by disrupting representational imagery and sound. The chapter argues that Lettrist cinema can be understood, despite its rejection of mimesis, through the mind’s intuition for geometric primitives (Dehaene 2006; Dehaene 2020; Sablé-Meyer 2022). This analysis amounts to a defense of the Lettrist insistence on formal experimentation in contrast to the criticism by the Situationist International that the avant-garde must prioritize political content (Debord 1967).

The dissertation concludes in a short fifth chapter that summarizes future directions for how aesthetic affordances can analyze the impact of form in different media and how incorporating cognitive neuroscience can expand and democratize what it means to understand the arts.