Abstract
Students of narrative theory will doubtless recall Gérard Genette recounting this anecdote in his "Preamble" to
Narrative Discourse Revisited
: "A famous scientist asserted in a flash of wit, at the beginning of this century, I believe: 'There is physics, then there is chemistry, which is a kind of physics, then there is stamp collecting'." I had forgotten, though, how he follows that line: "since then biology too has become a kind of chemistry, and even a ... kind of mechanics" (8). While Genette, writing in 1983, could not have foreseen the rapid emergence of cognitive and biocultural theories into the critical mainstream over the last twenty years or so, his comments have proven prescient. In the January 2016 number of Narrative, Angus Fletcher and John Monterosso, cognitivists themselves, discuss the conviction shared by many literary theorists that these "cognitive experiments have already attracted such disproportionate attention that they are threatening to overshadow the rest of literary studies ... making them seem less like a source of diversity than a danger to it," a threat intensified by the perception that cognitive methodologies are "not only foreign, but hostile, to much of literary studies" (83). As those familiar with such theories know, this is not paranoia: several biocultural critics have confidently declared that their work will "ultimately absorb and supplant every other form of literary study," including all poststructuralist theories (Carroll, "Three" 62), which are now "not merely obsolete but essentially void" (Carroll, "Poststructuralism" 214-15). My interest here, however, lies in presenting specific examples of practices in Jane Austen's work that reward the application of cognitive theories of narrative, and thus more at the stamp collecting end of Genette's scale than at the mechanics end. Suzanne Keen, in a "Response" to Fletcher and Monterosso, suggests that scientific criticism, properly conceived, can create a shared intellectual space within which "we literary readers can pivot in the direction of empiricism without fear of compromising our distinctive contributions to the understanding of readers and narratives" (110), and as we shall see, the earlier criticism cited below is not supplanted by, but usefully organized and extended by, the framework of cognitive theory.