Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 12 Number 3, December 2011
___________________________________________________________________
Leverage, Paula, Reception and Memory: A Cognitive Approach to the Chansons de geste, Rodopi, 2010. 338 pgs, 9789042030428, $88.00USD
Reviewed by
Western Michigan University
In her new book, Reception and Memory: A Cognitive Approach to the Chansons de geste, Paula Leverage examines the manner of reception and its implications for memory of these French medieval epics. In this analysis, Leverage uses cognitive science models of literary analysis adopted from Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels. In her approach, Leverage deemphasizes the role memory played in the production and reproduction of the texts and instead places emphasize on the importance of the audience’s memory, specifically arguing that the audience’s memory created particular congnitive effects when confronted with the chansons de geste.
The book begins with two chapters which focus on the medieval audience of the texts. In these chapters, Leverage uses several forms of evidence including documents which reference the poems, evidence from the texts themselves, and codicological evidence to come to the conclusion that the texts would have been received by monastic and ecclesiastical communities, courtly audiences and the lower nobility and bourgeoisie. This conclusion is important because it serves to repudiate what Leverage calls the “fictive reconstructions of marketplace audiences which have been models for the reception of the chansons de geste” (18).
Once Leverage establishes who the audience of the chansons de geste would have been, she proposes a modern model of reception of the chansons de geste. Using reader response theory and congnitive literary theory, she argues that there are significant similarities between the way we understand reception today and the way it is understood in medieval memory theory. Specifically it is the notion of memory which links them. Continuing with the concept of memory, Leverage discusses it as a cultural and intellectual context for the medieval reception of the genre. Drawing from rhetorical theory of the same period, she is able to draw interesting and compelling parallels between medieval memory theory and the aesthetic form of the chansons de geste. Of particular importance, for Leverage, is the way that division of data, gathering of data and visualization are central components to both. Using the Renaut de Montauban as an example, Leverage argues that the audience’s memory of repetitions contained in the text contributes to specific aesthetic qualities.
The final part of the book applies these theoretical premises to practical analyses of the chansons de geste in order to show what the specific aesthetic qualities produced through interaction with the audience’s memory are. Specifically, Leverage focuses on what she considers to be two of the most prominent stylistic characteristics of the chansons de geste, their division and repetition. By using close textual readings, her examination reveal that the structures of division and repetition provoke an “active even creative, but determined, engagement of the audience with the chansons de geste [which forms] the reader’s active production in textual meaning” (20). In sum, she finds that the chansons de geste contain rather sophisticated aesthetic qualities which are able to facilitate an active and creative engagement between text and audience. These aesthetic features are capable of evoking emotive audience response and may be used in fostering cognitive skills by provoking the “processes of comparison and identification” (295).
At the beginning of this book, some readers may be turned off because of the esoteric nature of the research being conducted. This is particularly true of the sections on the historical audiences of the texts which provide serious considerations of sometimes obscure works. This is not to suggest that these sections are bad, far from it. In this work, Leverage submits to a meticulous empiricism which is often lacking in studies of literary text and should be lauded for this. However, of more general interest for those involved in consciousness and literature studies (or more broadly consciousness and art studies) is her application of various approaches from psychology to the research. The introduction of the social sciences or other interdisciplinary approaches appears to be a growing and potentially fruitful movement in our discipline. Leverage’s contribution is a good step in this direction, although more research certainly needs to be done. For example, Leverage seems to conceptualize that the cognitive effects produced by the chansons de geste emanate from the audience’s engagement with the text but that this engagement exists in a mental state of disassociation from all other context. At the very least she minimizes the importance of the broader context of cognition which frame understanding. After all, it is a basic premise of cognitive psychology that humans perceive objects as figures against some grounds or framework. In other words, objects or data in general are made sense of by contextualizing them, that is, by applying them to some frame(s) of reference. Leverage is correct to recognize that the texts themselves can be used as grounds for cognition but they do not and cannot act alone. The text must be referenced to wider contexts i.e. be grounded in a framework more broad in order to make sense of it. This wider context involves a system of characterization, differentiation, classification, symbolic representation, system of logic, and epistemological and ontological assumptions. I am not convinced that Leverage would deny this; however, this is not made substantially clear in this work. Nevertheless, with this effort the door is open for that discourse to be had.
In sum, Leverage provides a thorough and engaging book which will be of interest to scholars of the chansons de geste and also provides gems to be unearthed for use and critique in future studies for those engaged in research at the intersection of consciousness and the arts.