Stops on the Way to "Shiloh": A Special Case for Literary Empiricism

One of literature's memorable semiotic moments occurs in Stephen Crane's classic short story Open Boat. The desperate men in the lifeboat see a speck on the distant shore. Eventually, the speck becomes a man. He is waving his arms at the crew. Relief! Rescue at last? No, it appears that the man is only giving them a friendly hail, misreading their condition as they misread his signal. This essay is about other semiotic moments, some of them in a short story by Bobbie Ann Mason, some of them in the history of short-fiction theory. I will be waving my arms too, but let me begin by listing my premises: 1) storying is a primary mode of cognition (counting, for example, is another); 2) the short story--that singly authored, culturally specific, densely signifying art form--is a primary site for literary investigation; it cannot be explained by an aesthetics based on poetry or a narratology based on the folktale or a script based on cultural studies although each of these approaches has contributed to short-fiction theory. These premises have led to a kind of literary empiricism. This is not the same thing as an empirical approach to literature, a growing area of interest for many scholars in other disciplines. It does, however, mean an openness toward the findings of other people who do research on storying: namely, psychologists, discourse theorists, and cognitive scientists. This kind of literary empiricism is descended from three very central traditions in short-fiction studies: genre criticism, reader-response theory, and formalism. I will begin with a little of this family history, and then move on to a discussion of Bobbie Ann Mason's Shiloh. But genre criticism. isn't it--dead? I often hear those words (or get that look) when I say I am interested in the short story. Perhaps it is too late in the day to ask, What is a short story? We can, however, ask a more primary question: What is storyness? In the 1970s, psychologists working with memory looked at regularities in what subjects recalled from the stories they had read and found that texts with a normative event structure were most easily remembered (Mandler and Johnson 111-15). In other words, is a condition of narrative that fulfills a story grammar. In the 1980s there were many challenges to these story grammars, and the emphasis shifted from a linguistic to a cognitive model or schema. According to many psychologists, stories are about people trying to solve problems or achieve goals; thus, a model for comprehending plan-based behavior should explain how readers or listeners comprehend A variety of models was developed and, of course, allowed for subgoals, thwarted goals, and even negative or absent goals. Then, in 1982, the same year Bobbie Ann Mason published Shiloh in book form, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, William F. Brewer, challenged both the story grammars and the plan-based comprehension models, saying that neither was truly specific to the experience of reading stories. He had an understanding of both literary and rhetorical theory and knew that discourse has to be understood in the context of its function or purpose. So he claimed that stories are a class of narratives meant to entertain, and he developed experiments for testing the arousal, intensification, and release (or resolution) of three affects within readers: surprise, suspense, and curiosity (473). For many reasons, his structural-affect theory, as he called it, is alien to the literary scholar. Still it warrants attention. Brewer was trying to anatomize story processing, trying to determine its stages: the sequence of its cognitive strategies and affective states. He was interested in the way readers determine the storyness of stories and wanted to test empirically for this intuition. I shared his goal, though not his method. My working assumption was as follows: inheres in any narrative segment that tells about a significant risk to some form of human wellbeing that is subsequently either lost or gained/regained. …