Snagsby's paper shop in Bleak House (1853) deals in “all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper—foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands—glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention.”Footnote ¹ While one might imagine this stifling bookish environment as especially inviting for an object-oriented reading, this passage has recently attracted what I might call a newly inflected kind of subject-oriented reading. This description from Bleak House makes an appearance in two recent critical monographs concerned with how the reader's cognitive capabilities meet words on the page to transform them into a felt reality. How does a passage like this act on our minds, creating mental images or offering a sense of embeddedness in an unreal “reality”? How does fiction become phenomenological?

In the case of Dickens's description, its excessiveness prompts critical claims for his prescient approach to information management. For Elaine Auyoung in When Fiction Feels Real (2019), the passage demonstrates Dickens's use of hyponyms to diminish the strength of readerly impressions. Hyponyms—specific examples of a general category like “paper”—at once “register a quantity of things that exceeds what readers are able to take in” but at the same time demonstrate “a compelling thematic imperative to manage, categorize, and contain information that threatens to engulf individual perceivers.”Footnote ² For Megan Ward, in Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character (2018), the passage's “articles too numerous to mention” likewise conjures reality by marking its limited capacity to convey total information. Yet her interest is not in the finitude of the list as such but in the way the novel models an alternative method of organizing information. She argues that Bleak House suggests the need for a stochastic approach to managing information—a term derived from late 1940s computing for the measurement of redundancy and entropy across a system as a whole. The passage both formalizes and thematizes a stochastic system of relation, criticizing the unwieldiness of England's evidence- and paper-based order of meaning and replacing it with an approach exemplified by Inspector Bucket's understanding of information as abstract and diffused. For both Auyoung and Ward, the passage shows Dickens working through what enables an individual consciousness to make sense of potentially dehumanizing excess. Rather than investigate the vitality (or lack thereof) of all that paper, these critics see the passage as part of the Victorians’ larger project of validating the capacity of individual consciousness to collaborate with the materiality of the page to generate sensation—to make sense of matter, even in its most counterintuitively chaotic, repetitive, inhuman, and even inhumane forms.

Considering these monographs alongside John Plotz's Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens (2018) as well as (slightly further afield) Jonathan Kramnick's Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (2018), this review examines criticism concerned with the novel as offering a distinctive cognitive and affective experience. The monographs mentioned above are interested, often in very fine-grained ways, in the complex techniques through which realist narratives solicit readers’ absorption in or assent to a world with a weighty, felt unreality. The nineteenth-century novel, they claim, has a special importance for the investigation of how narrative works on the mind, for readers themselves have long identified the realist novels of this period as having a particularly compelling sense of reality. Beyond a commitment to the phenomenology of reading, then, is also an affirmative, egalitarian politics—articulated most explicitly by Auyoung but present also in Plotz's citations of Jacques Rancière—a goal of depicting realism's world as accessible to any reader without diminishing the significance of criticism's long-standing specialist tools.

On one hand, this criticism is engaged with affect theory, the neuro-humanities, and posthumanist work like N. Katherine Hayles's redefinition of thought itself as primarily nonconscious and of interpretation as a cognitive process that occurs in many kinds of assemblage (from animal minds to computers).Footnote ³ On the other hand, it is situated within a strand of postcritique literary studies. The first three critics—Auyoung, Ward, and Plotz—are specifically indebted to Catherine Gallagher's essay “The Rise of Fictionality,” which concerns readers’ ability to suspend disbelief, taking the openly unreal representations of a novel as distinctive kinds of entities different from our experiences of ourselves and our reality. Balancing these two priorities, these books all evince a deep investment in interpreting “the realist novel” as an aesthetic form with distinctive capacities, confirming the disciplinary authority of English rather than confirming or allegorizing theories of cognition emerging from currently prestigious scientific disciplines.Footnote ⁴ Although they differ as to when in the eighteenth or nineteenth century they locate the starting point of literature's function as a cognitive technology, these books are all concerned with the novel's formal interaction with the mind understood not so much as an active, self-possessing, self-making subject but as the site of phenomenal experience. They each demonstrate the value of the formalist impulse arising from a postcritique orientation toward our present moment of disciplinary insecurity.Footnote ⁵ But insofar as they all make assumptions about the cognitive functions of the (reading) self in the real world, they reveal a set of methodological fissures in the ways in which scientific accounts of cognition can or should inform this formalism.

Ward and Auyoung approach Victorian literature as a prescient framework for modeling mind in a period before the professionalization of the sciences, a framework that begins to “write consciousness”—or reading—“as a series of automatic perceptions.”Footnote ⁶ In Seeming Human, Ward argues that Victorian literature anticipates the mid-twentieth-century mind-modeling of artificial intelligence in order to generate an openly unreal virtual reality; in Feeling Real, Auyoung finds resonances between contemporary cognitive science and the ways in which nineteenth-century texts maneuver the reader into a sensation of reality. Both identify the distinctive aesthetic resources of novelistic forms—from the shape of free indirect sentences to the role of repetition to character systems at large—for bringing a novel to “life.” These orientations are primarily formal, rather than intellectual-historical—we are not usually much concerned with how Victorians’ own psychological discourses anticipated these more recent developments (tackled with varying degrees of presentism in more historically embedded criticism), nor in whether newer discourses like AI show any traceable debts to Victorian fiction's innovations—though if they did, I would be eager to know more.

Ward's tightly focused book argues against the assumption that Victorian realism (from Charlotte Yonge to Thomas Hardy) consolidates interiority, contending that mid-twentieth-century computing helps reveal the machinelike mechanicity of cognition in what we often take to be “realist” characters. Ward investigates how four “forms of mimesis” or artificial intelligence—the feedback loop, the information system, the Turing test, and the Perceptron—extend modes of virtuality originating in Victorian characterization. Rather than representing consciousness, Ward claims, the novel engages in formal modeling of consciousness for both character and reader, which effectively means reimagining consciousness itself as a formal model. What makes a character seem human need not always be access to inward thoughts: tracking novels that eschew complex representations of interiority for significant members of their character systems, Ward emphasizes the surprising efficacy of characters marked as superficial, flat, fake, or one-note. In her discussion of Bleak House, for instance, she demonstrates—building on Caroline Levine's argument about the role of networks in Dickens—that “characters are not only individual sites of thought, emotion, and desire but also signals in the stochastic system” (48). This is what makes the most idiosyncratic Dickensian characters (like, say, Skimpole) so repetitive: “Reading stochastically, we see the novel creating an individual through the many reinforcements of the sameness of type, a kind of antirevelation” (64).

In this light, Victorian novels serve as precursors to twenty-first century novels, like David Lodge's 2001 novel Thinks . . . (covered in Ward's epilogue), that are explicitly about cognition. Like Ian McEwan's Saturday or Tom McCarthy's Remainder (pivotal for Kramnick's Paper Minds as they are for Zadie Smith's “Two Paths for the Novel”), Thinks models the mind as model in a continuation of the realist novel's innovations. From Victorian novels onward, Ward claims, realism rethinks thought by calling into question what counts as thinking in its characters. Thus, although she does not pursue the implications of this statement, Ward's book raises the possibility that Victorian realist characters might be “formally and technologically compatible with posthumanism” (5). Rather than consider the machinelike qualities of thought—for example, the idea that simulation is a cognitive process within the brain—Ward argues for the substitution of machine-thinking for thought, a move that leaves untouched the plausibility of “the human” or “‘coherent inwardness’” as a measure of ourselves, particularly ourselves as readers.Footnote ⁷ While “characters have always been posthuman,” readers remain selves (11). Ward seems surprisingly unconcerned with whether posthumanism itself is a compelling theoretical framework—with whether AI should reframe our understanding of subjectivity beyond reevaluating the formal models that purport to represent it. In other words, I am left wondering what it might be said to do to readers’ experiences of, and our critical conceptions of, our own minds, when we encounter the openly unreal, the model as model. Implicitly for Ward, as it is much more explicitly for Gallagher, we tend to be relieved by our difference from characters in their characterhood. Is this necessarily and universally true? What other kinds of feelings might arise?

Auyoung is more centrally concerned with reframing the reader's own inward experience, though she too does not particularly defamiliarize it. She considers both the kinds of automatic cognitive operations that Ward might have taken up, as well as more conventionally reflective ones, to create a fundamentally affirming picture of reading. She notes too the substantial role played by repetition in portraying characters like Skimpole or her example, Jane Austen's Mr. Collins. But for Auyoung, Collins's consistently Collinsy reactions to situations allow readers to generate the kinds of reliable mental models we create and depend on in real-life interactions, showing how fiction capitalizes on our capacity for unconscious cognition. Both Auyoung and Ward are likewise interested in repetitious depictions of everyday living in realist fiction. Ward, examining the work of Charlotte Yonge and Elizabeth Gaskell, notes that the “repetitive rhythms of mid-Victorian domestic realism . . . have not yet been accounted for by reading techniques that understand character development in terms of singular moments or deepening interiority,” a critical bias that leads us to overlook how women writers tackled “domestic realism's challenge: to capture character development at the iterative pace and microscale of daily events—the repetitive rhythms of the Victorian parlor”—where a woman has not the adventure of inward development but the flatter “experience of a life lived on repeat” (13, 19).Footnote ⁸ For Auyoung too, such depictions—in her case, in Tolstoy—allow novels to affirm the kind of lives too likely to go unnoticed. But the lives and skills most important to her are the reader's own:

She presents ordinary reading as a kind of cognitive validation, arguing, for instance, that “[i]n realist fiction, even readers who rarely find themselves in a position of mastery in their actual lives, who are more often than not managed and mastered by others, find themselves able to apprehend unreal persons and scenes in a seemingly effortless way” (33). For instance, Jane Austen relies on the reader's ability to apply mental models to characters to give each reader a sense of in-ground prestige and “consciousness of being uniquely able to comprehend the implied author,” while Thomas Hardy's ability to turn on and off the feel of immediate sensation demonstrates “[t]he fundamental role played by autonomy and control in a reader's capacity to become absorbed in a literary text” (114). Auyoung's version of reading is fundamentally democratic: she presents empowered rather than blinded readers, whose competency and control mean that they “are active even when they feel passive, and remain in control of their attention even when they feel utterly captivated” (121). Despite the seeming binarism of this formulation, Auyoung captures levels of phenomenological subtlety made possible when we complicate the active/passive dualism. But this does not mean ascribing to the reader any previously unnoticed sophistication. Since many of the cognitive moves she locates happen to the reader unreflectively, the project overall is much more about endorsing everyday readers’ experiences of realism's worldedness and demonstrating a set of competencies that literary critics have too long been eager to invalidate.Footnote ⁹

How much do we need to draw on concepts about the mind from outside our discipline in order to make this kind of argument? When should historical ideas about perception and cognition inform our analysis? More contemporary frameworks? This book is unapologetically presentist, confident in the explanatory power of current cognitive science, as anticipated by novels, using it with a sense of both disciplinary difference and consilient goals. Whereas Ward's approach appealingly does not depend on the “rightness” of mid-twentieth-century cybernetics in order to claim that it extends a mode of simulation innovated by realist fiction, Auyoung treats cognitive science as reliable. This confidence enables an exceptionally fresh, even wondrous reversal of the usual order of critical priorities: Auyoung asks not what literature's “working” trains us to do in life, but how we are trained by our lifelong, ordinary cognitive functioning in order for literature to “work.”Footnote ¹⁰ Whereas scholars usually ask what we can learn about perception, or affect, or cognition by reading nineteenth-century realism, she asks what we can learn about realism from what we currently know about cognition. This is complementary to, though not avowed as, an evolutionary cognitivism as it is practiced by Lisa Zunshine, Alan Richardson, Alan Palmer, Blakey Vermeule, and others, though with a difference of emphasis: defending its readers’ experience of a noninstrumental pleasure.

Although he considers many of the same phenomena in all their curious phenomenality, Plotz is on the other end of the methodological spectrum, borrowing minimally from other discourses and thus implying a defense of the satisfactions we have long derived from historically imprecise yet undeniable “closeness” to the literary objects that compel us. Plotz offers a thick genealogy of a specific state of mind he finds especially cultivated by nineteenth-century literature's version of virtual reality: what he calls partial absorption or, more frequently, semidetachment. How did writers solicit readers’ absorption in an unreal world? “The crux of an aesthetic experience,” he argues, “is imagined, or depicted or understood as residing neither in complete absorption in an artwork nor in critical detachment from it, but in the odd fact of both states existing simultaneously.”Footnote ¹¹ Plotz finds this doubleness in numerous modes of nineteenth-century culture, from the provincial novel to the dreamy figurations of absent music in the paintings of John Everett Millais and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the tension between ornament and representation in the work of William Morris, and the politics of magic lantern shows to the films of Buster Keaton. The rhythms of the monograph itself mirror the content—deep dives punctuated at surprising moments by lucid summations. Throughout, he documents a “durable mental state” associated with the post-Kantian tradition of imaginative aesthetics: a “tension” between the real and unreal that “reveal[s] how much even the ordinary world is shot through with problems of the imperceptible presence of ideas that persist even in the absence of any material substrate—or that precisely propagate because they lack actuality” (54). By tracking how, over the course of the nineteenth century, literary and visual technologies facilitate the incorporation of short into long forms, elongating and repunctuating briefer modes of reverie, Plotz offers a new rationale for modernism's aesthetics of “translucency and overtones,” which highlights the gap between events and their registration in consciousness (198). This approach—slow and rich, trained always primarily on the texts themselves—takes its objects as “cognitive systems” in themselves, producing a distinctive state of mind (37). They do this in part by modeling that state in the human figures they depict, who also tend to experience that mental doubleness. In a sense this means taking literature to reproduce something about the interaction between the individual mind and “the actual world” in general—how one's own consciousness is at once part of the world and attuned to it, and yet can operate at a felt remove from it (144). The implication of the mind's materiality in a material world despite its felt difference might sound like an opening onto either the new materialism or philosophy of mind's arguments for the irreducibility of qualia (much more to the fore in Kramnick, discussed below). But for Plotz, this state is of interest as distinctive to the arts and comes to awareness through close-reading and related, intradisciplinary methods. It might as easily have been rendered as semiattachment—how readily we become absorbed into the literary worlds we love.

Why, having dispensed with subjectivity, does a postcritique method seemingly encourage contentment with the ordinary self—“self-sufficient and self-defining”?Footnote ¹² These monographs, taken together, imply that there is a bit of a wedge between postcriticism and posthumanism within Victorian studies. I would argue that although some of the key texts that generated the postcritical turn, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling (2002), put significant pressure on the cogency of everyday selfhood, that turn has resulted in a willingness to let be readers’ own selfhood. This tendency may derive from these critics’ fundamentally aesthetic commitments to the primacy of literary explanation—of aesthetics itself—and thus the urgency of keeping scientific explanation in a secondary, supporting position, regardless of how and whether its truth claims are valued. Kramnick's Paper Minds, however, offers an approach that strikes me as more open to epistemologically, affectively, and ontologically unsettling claims even while it is equally formalist in its orientations.

“Conceiving perception as a kind of motor skill . . . we are adept at using our bodies to bring the world within reach,” writes Kramnick, making a point highly consonant with Auyoung's defense of the readerly mind's fundamental capability (68). Though his topics are diverse, when he does turn to realism, he is fascinated by how Sterne, for instance, creates “a realism of the surrounding world conceived as something drawn close,” which is precisely the power of realism that the critics discussed above unpack (72). His orientation toward the relationship between literature and scientific frameworks, however, is more historicized as well as more interested in defamiliarizing concepts like mind and self. Paper Minds is a collection of essays considering “how our writing about lines and sentences nudges up against debates about consciousness in the physical world” (x). Although he is well known for criticizing excessively robust claims for the explanatory power of neuroscience, Kramnick draws selectively on recent work in the philosophy of science, examining how literary texts of the eighteenth century are consonant with, but also complicate, how other discourses have modeled mind even until the present day. His essay co-authored with Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” especially reveals his interest in rejecting the idea that scientific explanation holds an interpretive key to literary texts; it self-reflexively defends the methodological investment of literary studies in context-specific explanation by explicitly valuing its own context-specificity. In other words, he claims that a temperamental amenability to contextuality will make the historically contextualized explanations of form we often encounter in literary criticism satisfying. That's not to say we can't “take what we can” from other discourses, but that the shape of what counts as a satisfying explanation is discourse-specific. The book as a whole might be said, then, to ask “under what sort of social, technological, and cultural pressures did the period come up with a model in which introspective mind reading became both possible and urgent, and according to what formal devices did writers evoke and render palpable a process understood to be mental and imperceptible?” (116).

He offers his most straightforward answer to this question early: “The idea is that perception is skilled coping, coping a way of living, and living a way of dwelling. The further idea is that poems and novels fill out or give form to each” (12).Footnote ¹³ It is ultimately attention to the structure and style of sentences—for example, the lyrical free indirect discourse of McEwan's Saturday or the use of prepositions in McCarthy's Remainder —that Kramnick takes as license to claim that “the brain is not (or at least not on its own) the basis of experience,” for it is at the level of form that narration “displaces consciousness from the inside and intellect to the surround, and each takes experience to be an ‘encounter with structure’” (131, 136).Footnote ¹⁴ To this end, Kramnick links Locke and Hume to more recent work by Alva Noë and James J. Gibson in order to offer a more expansive view of consciousness than is sometimes offered by the models in which it is all contained in the interiorized mind, a viewpoint consonant with ideas like Hayles's notion of planetary cognitive ecology, in which “cognition extends through the entire biological spectrum, including animals and plants; technical devices cognize, and in doing so profoundly influence human complex systems.” Just as Hayles argues that “we need not accept . . . that the self is an illusion to find [computational] models useful,” Kramnick neither rejects an everyday, ordinary sense of coherent selfhood nor implies that the “model” is a wholly adequate understanding of how consciousness works, either in the world or in relation to literary texts.Footnote ¹⁵ Although he does not discuss Dickensian description, we might imagine that Kramnick would find in his deliberately overwhelming list a set of metonymic relations to the narrator that would underline the environmental embeddedness of what we take to be ordinary consciousness.

If literary form models, what can it add to frameworks in which the role of modeling in the brain calls into question what counts as thought? Each of these critics demonstrates that the human mind, in its encounter with texts, “has powerful nonconscious cognitive abilities.”Footnote ¹⁶ This phrase comes from the conclusion to Hayles's Unthought and is, for her, a first step the humanities might take in contributing to understanding the relationships among all the planet's “cognizers.” With a few exceptions mostly centered on Thomas Hardy, critics generally have found little to connect Victorian novels to anti- and posthumanism. “Realist novels cultivate affective experiences that have long been out of fashion,” Auyoung comments. “Recognition, competence, and fluency run against the grain of a modernist sensibility that celebrates art for making things strange, discomfiting, and difficult” (121). The sense of liberation that comes with reframing reading in this light is beautiful and real. And yet, considering what happens to readers in the affective terms that present thought as at once more vivid and less contained, less human, less selved, than we might expect, suggests that there are ethical and political as well as scientific rationales to curiosity about the unfamiliar mind and the stranger real.