Ellen Spolsky is Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel and Director of the Lechter Institute for Literary Research.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The difficulties and advantages of assuming modularity of mind
Describing changes in literary systems
How can these claims be investigated?

1. Minds, Modules, and Models

The earliest and strongest version of the modularity hypothesis
Jackendoff's modularity theory
The visual and the language modules
Gardner's modularity theory
The crucial recognition of failure
Parrallel distributed processing models
Edelman's Neural Darwinism
Dennett's gappy consciousness
Summing up and hedging

2. New Genres: American Autobiography

Western American autobiography
The category fits the time

3. New Inferences: Reading Hamlet and the Politics of Genre

Resisting genre
Categorization and inference

4. Women Readers and Women's Rules

Fetterley's reading and Fetterley's rule
Gilbert's reading without Fetterley's rule
Categorization and transformation: Leaving room for the improbable

5. Intermodular Competition: Transformation and Inference

Metaphor and vision
Preference rules
Advantages and risks of multiple coding

6. Immobile and Immortal in the Monument of Literary History

Resistance to change: The conservatism if the experienced reader
The link between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Spearing's dignity conditions and alterity conditions
The Bloom connection

7. Writing Literary History: Neoclassicism, Modularity, and the New Histories

Viewer-centered and object-centered understanding
Speaker-centered vs. public language
Interaction of the object-centered and the viewer-centered
Leaving space for the other
New historical criticism
Listening to others

8. The Dynamic of Freedom and Compulsion

The inevitability of contradiction
A Summary of the possibilities for change in the modular mind
Building culture into the survival of the species
Resisting reading

Notes
References

Index