From November 2 to 4, 2016, the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures (IWLC) at Tsinghua University held its fourteenth Seminar in the Global Humanities. The seminar, on the topic of “Poetry and Mind: From Thought Experiments to Thinking Experiments” was conducted by Laurent Dubreuil, Professor of Romance Studies, Comparative Literature, and Cognitive Science at Cornell University. Professor Yan Haiping, Dean of the IWLC and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, introduced Professor Dubreuil and moderated the discussion. Seminar participants included associated faculty members of the IWLC, faculty and staff members from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures—notably a strong contingent of linguists—as well as the three Tsinghua-Michigan postdoctoral fellows and the two classes of undergraduate students enrolled in the IWLC curriculum.
Professor Dubreuil presented his current interdisciplinary research on the relationship between cognitive science and literary theory, particularly between the relationship between mental processes and the poetic functions of language. This research began in Professor Dubreuil’s recent philosophical book, The Intellective Space: Thinking Beyond Cognition, published by the University of Minnesota Press, and the material presented in the seminar comes from his next book project, “Poetry and Mind.”
The first session of the two-part seminar focused on the connection between “thought experiments” and poetry. Preparatory readings included an article by the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach which develops the notion of the thought experiment—a mental process that involves the imagination of a hypothetical situation and an ordered speculation upon the potential events and outcomes produced by this situation. Professor Dubreuil paired this foundational concept with the “Lais de Bisclavret,” a twelfth-century French poem by Marie de France that hypothesizes about a werewolf who has lost his ability to change back into a man, in order to analyze the poem’s ability to perform a thought experiment and potentially, through its poetic properties, to push thought beyond the confines of this scientific process. By way of transition to the next session, Professor Dubreuil ended the first session with a reflection upon the genre of riddles, taking Gertrude Stein’s four-line poem “Guillaume Apollinaire” as an example of how riddles, which tend toward a fixed response but often exceed this response by their poeticity, operate on the border between “thought” and “thinking.”
The second session developed a notion of the “thinking experiment,” which takes thought processes beyond the normal boundaries of human cognition. Professor Dubreuil argued that poetry provides a particular insight into this process. Performing close readings of Tao Qian’s “On Drinking Wine,” the beginning of Euripides’s Medea, and an excerpt from Stein’s “Galeries Lafayette,” Professor Dubreuil argued that poetry’s simultaneous density and openness renders it highly “iterable”—borrowing the concept from Jacques Derrida—lending it the repeatable quality of a scientific experiment but guaranteeing that its results will differ with each iteration. If, as cognitive science would say, the human mind resembles a computer, then poetry demonstrates that mental operations cannot be reduced to computation.
Each session of the seminar included questions and comments by participants, moderated by Professor Yan Haiping. Questions focused upon details of the poems themselves, upon the importance of historical context in the intersection of science and the humanities, and upon the relationship between cognitive science, literature, and the study of linguistics. The seminar was followed by a reception and continued discussion in the lobby of Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.
BIO:
Laurent Dubreuil is Professor of French and Critical Theory, Francophone & Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Since 2007, he has served as the Director of the French Studies Program. He is currently the editor of Diacritics, the founder and general editor of Sans Papier—the first collection of electronic pre-prints in the field of French studies—and the editor-at-large of Labyrinthe, an interdisciplinary journal.
Prof. Dubreuil holds an agrégation as well as a doctorate in Literature and a second doctorate in Philosophy and Women’s Studies. His research focuses on literature as an expression of thought that both defies the boundaries of rationality and responds to the disciplines of knowledge. Prof. Dubreuil has reading ability in seven languages. He frequently works on French & Francophone literature, classical Greek texts, Continental theory, philosophy and social thought. Prof. Dubreuil has published numerous articles in journals or collections, and he has edited several special issues of Labyrinthe on topics ranging from the end of the world to comics criticism. He is the author of eight books.
