RESEARCH

Background

In his effort to capture the “mystical state of consciousness” which lies at the root of his psychological appraisal of religious experience, psychologist William James elevated the arts as a particularly important mediator of mystical states. Sensitive to the clinical “suspicion” which typically excludes such a state from serious study, James nevertheless attempts to describe a state of consciousness which seemingly “defies expression.” For James, the reception of art (and poetry in particular) serves as an experiential “middle-ground” where the skeptic and seeker alike might meaningfully inquire into the psychological dimensions of religious experience:

“Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.”

In the century since James’ foundational investigation into religious experience, empirical research into the nature of spiritual experience—including the analysis of “spiritual” emotions like awe, which art commonly elicits—has legitimized inquiry into these “vague and vast” states while deepening our appreciation for literature’s capacity to elicit them.

This project recognizes spirituality as a vital dimension of literary inquiry and initiates important interdisciplinary discussions within the field of literary studies through collaborative and empirically based research that is discovery-oriented and future facing. 


The data collected in this project provides the foundation for a future collaborative research agenda targeting specific reader dispositions, specific literary genres and texts, and longer-term analysis of literature’s self-modifying effects on readers.


Art Seeking Understanding

This research is supported by Templeton Religious Trust’s “Art Seeking Understanding” initiative. My research into the value of literature is aimed at better understanding its capacity to impart knowledge and further our understanding in measurable ways.

Putting literary theory into practice

Theoretical analysis of the transformative dimension of literary engagement has been prevalent since the rise of “reader response” criticism in the 1980s. Such theoretical analysis, however, largely neglected asking actual readers for their experiences, and instead stuck to formulating ornate theories based solely on the limited experiential knowledge of the critic. A part of this study will include analyzing a few theorists’ claims, but it will compare those claims to reader’s actual descriptions of reading, to see where the theorist and the everyday reader agree and/or disagree.

In moving toward a more material understanding of the cognitive activities literary engagement facilitates—activities which include the emotive and affective dimensions of reader experience—cognitive criticism uses the latest findings in psychology to develop several promising approaches for investigating the means by which literature “transports” and “absorbs” readers into worlds which alter the reader’s sense of self and sense of reality in significant ways. Yet, critical consideration of literature’s role in eliciting experiences which readers identify as spiritually significant remains largely absent from the growing field of cognitive literary criticism as well as literary criticism more broadly. This project aims to address this gap by inquiring directly into the ways literature impacts readers in ways they identify as spiritually significant.

Through the survey information collected here as well as in classroom studies, a taxonomy of feelings, emotions, and experiences linked to spiritual discovery will be constructed through linguistic analysis. As a method of discourse analysis, Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis grants an “insider’s perspective” to these spiritual experiences and aids further research and publishing in the area of cognitive literary studies.

Study framework

Below is a visualization of how interaction with a literary text might elicit spiritual change, whether cognitive or experiential. Follow the lines to see how different aspects of each component (reader, act of reading, text, and spiritual reality) facilitate, respond to, and mediate other components.

Publications

As an art form largely devoid of sensory content—the touch of paper and scribble of black marks notwithstanding—literature demands a wholistic imaginative commitment for anything to be seen, felt, or understood. Unlike painting, sculpture, or film, the art of fiction takes place primarily in the reader’s mind: the reader, as Elaine Scarry describes them, is only given “a set of instructions for how to imagine” which they themselves must complete. Understood as an aesthetic form which is made possible only through the reader’s receptivity and self-surrender to the promptings of the text, literary engagement fosters and forms the intellectual and spiritual resources prioritized in the contemplative tradition. This article examines the cognitive means by which literary engagement trains readers in the absorptive acts of imaginative assent, perceptual attunement, and self-emptying, acts which invite readers into a type of contemplative posture grounded in an enhanced receptivity to otherness. It concludes by turning to empirically driven research and absorption studies as a means of progressing in our understanding of literature’s spiritual dimension. As a viable psychological metric for studies of attentiveness across disciplines and a term which populates the literary critical writings, absorption offers a useful fulcrum by which our own forays into the contemplative dimension of the arts might be balanced.

Literature and the Contemplative Tradition
Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality
Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 23, Number 2, Fall 2023
pp. 192-210
10.1353/scs.2023.a909103