Bracher Schemacriticismliterature 2012

SCHEMA CRITICISM: LITERATURE, COGNITIVE SCIENCE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Author(s): MARK BRACHER

Source: College Literature , FALL 2012, Vol. 39, No. 4 (FALL 2012), pp. 84-117
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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SCHEMA CRITICISM: LITERATURE, COGNITIVE
SCIENCE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE
MARK BRACHER
DEFICIENCIES OF CURRENT SOCIAL CRITICISM
In the 1970s, spurred by second-wave feminism and a resurgent Marxism, social

change emerged as an important goal of literary criticism, with ideology critique
being viewed as the primary means of producing it. Judith Fetterley, to take a
prominent feminist example, declared in 1978 that "at its best, feminist criticism
is a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it"
(Fetterley 1978, viii) and by the 1980s, many critics were boldly embracing social
change as a central goal of literary criticism. Frank Lentricchia's widely read
Criticism and Social Change (1983) echoed Fetterley in asserting that "the point is
not only to interpret texts, but in so interpreting them, change our society." Len
tricchia maintained that ideology critique, through exposing the social struggles
that canonical literature and interpretation worked to obscure, would help "spot,
confront, and work against the political horrors of one's time" (1983,10-12). Simi
lar positions were taken by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981) and
by Terry Eagleton in the "Political Conclusion" to Literary Theory (1983) and in
The Function of Criticism (1984),' as well as by other feminists, such as Patrocinio
Schweickart, who wrote in 1986 that "the point is not merely to interpret lit
erature in various ways; the point is to change the world" (Schweickart 1986, 39;
emphasis in original). But as these critics and others recognized, if literary study
is to contribute to social or political change, it must do so by changing readers:
"Literature acts on the world by acting on its readers," as Schweickart put it (39),
thus producing "new forms of subjectivity," to use a phrase of Foucault's adopted
COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 39.4 Fall 2012

Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286
© West Chester University 2012

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Mark Bracher | ESSAYS 85
by Eagleton (1984,116).2 And ideology critique lacked a theory of subjectivity, as

Jameson famously declared of Marxism in particular.
The logical place to look for such a theory was of course psychoanalysis,
and Jameson, in particular, explored the possibility of adapting certain psycho
analytic concepts to the needs of social criticism. The problem with this tack,
however, as Jameson observed at the beginning of his essay on Lacan, was "the
difficulty of providing mediations between social phenomena and what must be
called private, rather than even merely individual, facts" (1982, 338). And such
mediations were not forthcoming. Julia Kristeva's claim in Revolution in Poetic
Language (1984) that disruptive linguistic practices in avant-garde poetry produce
new forms of subjectivity with revolutionary ramifications had little evidentiary
support. The work of the most prominent American psychoanalytic critic of the
1970s and 1980s, Norman Holland, purported to demonstrate that reading expe
riences don't change people or even engage them in collective concerns so much
as offer them an opportunity to rehearse their own idiosyncratic identity themes
(Holland 1975 and 1982), a conclusion that made the possibility of a psychoana
lytic mediation between the psychological and the social appear highly unlikely.
Nor has the work of the most prominent psychoanalytic cultural critic of the
past two decades, Slavoj Zizek, offered any strategies for producing new forms of
subjectivity that would lead to social change. Indeed, as Rita Felski has recently
noted, psychoanalysis is not "especially well suited for fine-grained descriptions
of the affective attachments and cognitive reorientations that characterize the
experience of reading a book or watching a film" (2008, ix).
Although lacking a comprehensive theory of subjectivity, social critics have
recognized that faulty knowledge about certain groups of people plays a major
role in social injustice, and these critics have worked diligently and effectively to
identify, expose, denounce, and correct inaccuracies, distortions, and omissions
in people's beliefs about women, non-heterosexuals, and non-white, non-Euro
pean, and non-middle-class people. These efforts have not produced the desired
results, however, and there is good evidence that they are incapable of doing so,
because faulty knowledge and beliefs about other people involve more than fal
sifiable propositions that are susceptible to correction by rational argument and
evidence (see Meyers 1994, Gardner 1989, Levy 1999, Smith and DeCoster 2000).
Foucault recognized this fact, and it seemed for a time that Foucauldian theory
might be able to mediate the psychological and the social in a manner that could
constitute a basis for an effective criticism for social change. Foucault appeared
to offer a remedy for both the inefficacy of ideology critique and its theoretical
deficiencies, deficiencies magnified by Foucault's stinging criticism of Marxist
notions of history, ideology, and power, all of which he demonstrated to be more
multifarious, 'micro-physical,' and mutually interconstitutive than ideology cri
tique had acknowledged. With regard to literature specifically, while both Marx
ist and psychoanalytic theories had failed to provide a convincing explanation of
how literature or criticism of it could alter readers' forms of subjectivity in ways
that would lead to social change, the Foucauldian discourse-knowledge-power

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86 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 39.4 Fall 2012
triad seemed to provide the basis for such an explanation. Discourse (including
literature and criticism) not only serves and expresses power, it also embodies
and produces it, by constructing and regulating knowledge, a central element of
subjectivity and thus a key determinant of behavior.
New Historicist criticism enthusiastically embraced these ideas. Drawing on
Foucault's re-conceptualization of power as a network of capillary forces with
multiple types and points of generation, transmission, and resistance—includ
ing discourse, along with other techniques, technologies, apparatuses, practices,
and disciplines—rather than as a monolithic force emanating from a single
source such as the state, New Historicism offered a significant advance in our
understanding of literature's relation to power.'More specifically, in focusing on
the ways literary texts engage with "the processes by which social subjects are
formed, re-formed, and enabled to perform" and in "foregroundting] the differ
ential subject positions from which readers read, and into which they are maneu
vered during the process of reading" (Montrose 1989,16 and 26), New Historicist
criticism appeared to possess the means by which literary study might promote
the new forms of subjectivity that would lead to significant social change.
Here too, however, practice failed to achieve the goal. New Historicist criti
cism operated on the assumption that "construing literature as an unstable and
agonistic field of verbal and social practices" would "bring to our students and
to ourselves a sense of our own historicity, an apprehension of our positionings
within ideology" (Montrose 1989, 30). It thus "demonstrates} the limited but
nevertheless tangible possibility of contesting the regime of power and knowl
edge that at once sustains us and constrains us" (31). The problem here is that
even if criticism does successfully "démonstratif} the ... possibility of contesting
the regime of power and knowledge," we are still left a good distance from social
change. For simply being aware of the historicity—the arbitrariness, contingency,
and socially constructed nature—of our social positionings and our subjective
dispositions does not in and of itself lead to the sorts of changes in emotions and
behaviors toward other people that result in social change.
This is the impasse not only of New Historicist criticism specifically but also
of Foucauldian theory and practice generally: while it can produce intricate and
massive archaeological excavations, which can in turn facilitate the construc
tion of genealogies that reveal the arbitrary and constructed nature of regimes
of truth and knowledge that had appeared natural, universal, and/or immutable,
such exposure does not by itself even change these regimes, much less alter
behavior. And Foucauldian theory is finally incapable of providing a strategy for
doing so.4 The reason lies not only in Foucault's aversion to making normative
judgments,5 which any agenda of social change necessarily presupposes, but also,
and more crucially, in the fact that his theory fails to provide an adequate media
tion of the psychological and the social. More specifically, Foucauldian theory,
like Marxist theory and psychoanalysis, cannot explain how reading and ana
lyzing literary texts and other discourses can produce the sorts of alterations
of knowledge and belief that will lead to the kinds of behavioral changes that

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result in social change. And in the case of Foucauldian (and Marxist) theory, this
inability is based on a more fundamental deficiency: the absence of an account
of the operations of the human mind. For although Foucault emphasizes the role
of discourse, knowledge, and other implements of power in producing the soul
(psyche), he says little about the nature of this psyche or how it variously pro
duces, maintains, transmits, is produced by, and sometimes alters specific forms
and elements of discourse, knowledge, and power. As J. M. Balkin has pointed
out, "Foucault does not seem to have any theory of internal mental processes or
cognitive structure He simply takes for granted that mechanisms of socializa
tion and cognition supply whatever is necessary for disciplines of power/knowl
edge to have their requisite effects" (Balkin 1998, 267). This is a fatal deficiency,6
for as Balkin rightly contends:
disciplines and practices cannot have these effects unless they are understood and
internalized by individuals with a cognitive apparatus. Social construction on the
order that Foucault proposes requires elaborate mechanisms of understanding
that must perform a great deal of work in shaping and constituting the individual's
identity and thought. Foucault's account lacks any description or concern with
these internal cognitive processes [that account for] how each individual processes
information.7 (Balkin 1998, 267)
Thus literary criticism after Foucault still lacks a viable, coherent strategy for
facilitating social change, because it still lacks an understanding of how dis
course—including literature and literary criticism—can (re)form subjectivity in
socially consequential ways.
WHAT COGNITIVE SCIENCE OFFERS SOCIAL CRITICISM
Cognitive science can offer valuable resources in this regard. Research has clari
fied four crucial features of social cognition—the processes through which we
perceive, understand, and judge other people—that can provide the foundation
for a more effective practice of social criticism. This research indicates, first,
that the ultimate source of distorted, harmful assessments of the Other is not
stereotypes per se, but certain faulty "knowledge" or beliefs about "human
nature," or persons in general, that are often embedded in stereotypes and that
also operate independently of stereotypes (see Levy 1999; Henry et al. 2004).
Second, this research has emphasized that our knowledge of people, including
this faulty knowledge, exists not just in propositional form but also in multiple
other forms that are often more powerful determinants of behavior than propo
sitional knowledge is. Third, cognitive science has revealed that knowledge is not
simply a static, continuously existing entity stored in some warehouse of memory;
instead, like memory itself, knowledge is produced or assembled for the nonce by
information-processing routines (themselves the result of countless neural net
works distributed throughout the brain) that are activated whenever we assess
other people's behavior or nature. And fourth, these information-processing
routines, along with the multiple other types and forms of knowledge that both

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govern them and are (reproduced by them, cannot usually be altered by the
operations of critique—that is, by evidence, argument, or the possession of cor
rect propositional knowledge. Rather, they must be altered through retraining,
ideally in conjunction with the development of metacognition. Consider each of
t-hp<5f» nnints in t-nrn.
FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS ABOUT PERSONS
Four key faulty assumptions about persons have been identified that lead people
to support harmful and unjust social policies, institutions, and structures:8
1. Autonomy: an individual's character is the primary cause of his or her behav
iors and life outcomes; circumstances play no significant role in determining one's
behaviors or destiny.
2. Essentialism: upbringing and environment play no significant role in forming

one's character; individuals themselves bear the primary responsibility for the
type of person they are.
). Homogeneity, people can be adequately categorized as simply good or bad—as in,

"We are good, peace-loving people; they are evil people who hate our freedoms."
4. Atomism: individuals are fundamentally separate and competitive, not united

and cooperative. Life is a war of each against all, and any cooperation is merely a
means of furthering one's competitive advantage.
Each of these beliefs has been shown to be false and to lead to the sorts of inac
curate judgments about other people that result in harmful and unjust social
actions, policies, institutions, and structures.
Because of space limits, I will deal here only with the assumption of auton
omy, but the other three assumptions lend themselves to similar treatments, as I
argue elsewhere (see Bracher 2006 and 2009). The autonomy assumption consti
tutes the core of the American Dream and its valorization of independence and
self-reliance, and it leads to conclusions such as, "If you work hard enough, you'll
make a good living {whereas} if you are poor, you have only yourself to blame"
(Zinn 1995, 3). Empirical studies have revealed that such judgments lead people
to support social policies, institutions, and structures that neglect, punish, and
oppress the people who are so judged, including the poor, the unemployed, the
homeless, the sick, and the imprisoned (Weiner 1995). Empirical research has also
demonstrated that such judgments are often faulty (see Ross and Nisbett 1991,
Milgram 1974, Zimbardo 2007, and Doris 2002), that Americans are more prone
to such judgments than individuals in East Asian cultures (Choi et al. 1999), that
such faulty judgments can be prevented by helping people learn to recognize and
take account of the situational determinants of others' behavior and destiny, and
that such training reduces neglectful and punitive actions toward stigmatized
groups (Guimond et al. 1989,132 and 137 and Lopez et al. 1998, 321).

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Mark Bracher | ESSAYS 8 9
TYPES AND FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE
One reason such flawed and harmful judgments about individual responsib
are difficult to prevent is because the faulty assumption of autonomy is encod
in numerous different types and forms knowledge. Knowledge exists in t
basic types, corresponding to three fundamental categories of memory:
1. Specific instances, or exemplars, which are a function of episodic mem
systems,9
2. Abstract knowledge, including general types, or prototypes, which are a function

of semantic memory, and
3. Know-how, including information-processing routines, which are a function of pro

cedural memory systems.
Exemplars are memories of particular individuals and events, while prototypes

are composites of multiple exemplars that form in semantic memory when a criti
cal mass of exemplars for a particular category are encoded in episodic memory.10
Information-processing routines are a form of procedural knowledge that, like
other instances of procedural knowledge such as those involved in playing a
musical instrument or driving a car, operate largely automatically and outside
of awareness—as exemplars and prototypes tend to do as well. Information
processing routines can, however, be influenced and altered by both semantic
knowledge and episodic knowledge, such as when we conform our perceptions
of a newly encountered person to coincide with the features of a prototypical or
exemplary individual."
Together, these three types of knowledge, along with more abstract, preposi
tional knowledge, constitute cognitive schémas. Cognitive schémas, in my usage
of the term,12 are functional (rather than neurological) constructs'3 designating
the multiple types and forms of previously acquired knowledge concerning a
particular category, which are 'stored in' multiple systems and locations in the
brain and which guide the processing of information about each phenomenon
we encounter. Thus whenever we encounter or think of a person (or an object,
action, or event), one or more cognitive schémas are activated. These schémas
are absolutely essential to our functioning in the world; they are what enable us
to quickly identify and appropriately respond to people, objects, and events. But
essential as they are, they can also distort our perception and understanding by
causing us to ignore important information, falsely infer or suppose facts that do
not exist, or connect or dissociate bits of information in tendentious, flawed, and
harmful ways. It is the operation of cognitive schémas that makes all our percep
tions, representations, and judgments of other people subjective and tendentious,
rather than universal and objective (which is not to say that all perceptions and
judgments are equally flawed and harmful).
Each type and form of knowledge contained in a cognitive schema is thus a
kind of prejudice, or prejudgment, that can function to exclude, distort, or even
fabricate crucial information about other people. Moreover, each of the three
types of knowledge exists in multiple forms, each of which can exert significant

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distortive pressure on our information processing in any given instance, resulting

in harmful and unjust emotions and actions concerning other people.'4
Exemplars: A vivid specific instance, or exemplar, can exist in multiple forms,
including our episodic memories (which are themselves reconstructed for the
nonce whenever they are recalled—see Hogan 2003,161) of particular episodes,
life stories, individuals, body images, signifiers, emotions, and actions. A faulty
belief or 'knowledge' such as that of autonomy—the assumption that individ
ual behaviors and life outcomes are determined by character and not circum
stances—can operate in each form of exemplar, as in the following instances,
found in the early pages of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle-.
1. Autonomy episode-. Jurgis works hard on the railroad in Poland, earns good
money, and through his own efforts and conscientiousness manages to outwit
those who attempt to prey upon him and return to Lithuania still in possession
of his earnings.
2. Autonomy life story, a Lithuanian acquaintance of Jurgis's family emigrates to

America and through diligence and hard work prospers there.
3. Autonomous individual: the successful Jurgis—e.g., Jurgis in the early days of his
labor in the meatpacking plant.
4. Body image of autonomy: the huge and powerful Jurgis standing out in the crowd
or effortlessly carrying a hind quarter of beef.
5. Signifier of autonomy: powerful, successful.
6. Emotion presupposing autonomy: Jurgis's pride in getting a job, his contempt

for men who don't get jobs, readers' admiration for Jurgis, and their indifference
toward the jobless.
7. Action responding to supposed autonomy and expressing the emotions thereby

generated: Jurgis struts and swaggers at his own success, scoffs at those who are
jobless, and believes that he can solve his problems simply by working harder.
Each of these exemplars focuses our attention and interest on individuals' char
acter, behaviors, and life outcomes and excludes from our awareness any effects
on character, behavior, or destiny produced by circumstances over which indi
viduals have no control. Any exemplar of this sort can function (often outside
of our awareness) as a template for our perception of other people, causing us to
ignore important information about their circumstances and/or to (inaccurately)
interpolate, infer, or suppose key information about their character that is not
given, and hence to have unjustified emotions about them that may in turn lead
to unjust actions toward them.
Prototypes-. When a critical mass of such exemplars encountered through
direct or indirect experience (including literature, film, television, and hearsay)
are encoded in episodic memory, they form autonomy prototypes such as the fol
lowing, which then come to function as the default knowledge structures guiding
information processing about other people:

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1. Episode scripts such as determination leads to success: character determines

behavior despite circumstances (character >citvtvnstanees »behavior) and behavior
determines success or failure despite circumstances (behavior >circumstances »
success/failure),
2. Life scripts such as the rags-to-riches life story and, conversely, the vice-to-down
fall story.
_j. Prototypical individuals such as the self-made man and the hero who overcomes all
opposition and, conversely, the lazy, self-indulgent ne'er-do-well.
4. Prototypical images such as confident, can-do—as well as, conversely, listless, pas
sive, hopeless—voices, gazes, postures, and movements.
5. Concepts such as autonomy, independence, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency, as

well as derogatory counterparts such as laziness, self-indulgence, dependency, and
loser.
6. Prototypical emotions such as contempt for unsuccessful people and admiration

and pride for successful people.
7. Action scripts (in the form of social practices and policies) of neglect, discipline,
and punishment of the unfortunate (e.g., refusing unemployment benefits) and
further rewards for the fortunate (e.g., reducing their taxes even further).
Such exemplars and prototypes of autonomy control many people's process

ing of information about other people. Thus when such individuals encounter or
think about unsuccessful people—homeless people, for example—the activation
of any one of these exemplars or prototypes can be sufficient to short-circuit
further information search and analysis and precipitate the conclusion that the
plight of these people is their own fault. Such a judgment leads to emotions of
indifference, contempt, or anger, which incline one toward actions of neglect or
punishment.15 Seeing a homeless black man with a young boy, for example, might
remind some moviegoers of the example of Chris Gardner in Pursuit of Happy ness,
who, although homeless and living in subways with his young son, worked hard
and became a successful stockbroker. On the basis of this exemplar, people may
eschew any inquiry into the circumstances of the homeless father before them
and simply leap to the conclusion that he could achieve the same success as Chris
Gardner if he just worked harder. Similarly, many white people for whom the
prototypical welfare recipient (derived in no small measure from fictional exem
plars propagated by politicians such as Ronald Reagan) is a loud, overweight,
self-indulgent, unscrupulous, unemployed, inner-city black mother with multiple
unruly children may conclude that all welfare recipients are lazy and self-indul
gent, and thus deserve not sympathy and aid but anger and discipline. Even when
people possess accurate abstract knowledge that refutes these exemplars and pro
totypes—for example, the knowledge that most welfare recipients are white, not
black; are children, not adults; are employed (if adult), not unemployed; and live
in rural rather than urban areas—the exemplars and prototypes will often over
ride the abstract knowledge and determine their emotions and actions.

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Exemplars and prototypes produce faulty information-processing in two

basic ways.'6 First, they often short-circuit information-processing, triggering
emotions and action tendencies before a more systematic searching, organizing,
and analyzing of information can occur. Whenever a prototype or exemplar is
activated, it provides default values for all relevant knowledge slots, eliminat
ing the need for further information search, inference, and so on. Emotions are
immediately triggered and, along with them, certain action tendencies or even
action scripts (see Fiske 1982). Even when information-processing is not short
circuited, however, each step can be constrained or misdirected by the schema's
exemplars and/or prototypes. Each of the various exemplars and prototypes of
the autonomy schema, for example, can, when primed, influence more system
atic information-processing in ways that prevent people from expecting, seeking,
finding, focusing on, inferring, supposing, encoding in memory, or recalling the
multiple ways in which a person's behavior and destiny are determined by cir
cumstances rather than the person's character.
Information-Processing Routines-. In addition to being influenced by prototypes
and exemplars, each step of information-processing can be misdirected by a faulty
or tendentious information-processing routine encoded in procedural memory
and activated automatically in relevant situations. Thus in addition to correcting
distorting exemplars and prototypes, it is also important to address faulty infor
mation-processing routines directly. Failure to do so is a third reason that the
critique of flawed knowledge concerning the Other often fails to produce social
change. Knowledge of other people is not simply a preconstituted static entity
lying in the vaults of memory waiting to be retrieved and then utilized, altered,
or destroyed; rather, it is a construct produced by multiple information-process
ing routines that are activated whenever we assess other people. As Balkin has
pointed out, "The standard view of ideology as a collection of beliefs" does not
provide an adequate basis for effectively opposing ideology, because the essence
of ideology and the source of its power are "rooted in the very way in which
we are able to process information" (Balkin 1998, 19). To understand ideology,
we therefore have to examine the "psychological and cognitive mechanisms that
produce beliefs. . . . We must break down what previous thinkers have called
ideology into distinct and analyzable mechanisms"—mechanisms that variously
notice, search for, infer, suppose, and remember information that confirms one's
pre-existing beliefs and screen out information that disconfirms one's beliefs (44,
i, 58,102-104).
With regard to the autonomy schema, this means recognizing and addressing
the fact that people operating with autonomist processing routines expect there
to be no significant situational determinants of behaviors or life outcomes, and
because of this expectation, they often fail to notice situational factors even when
they are apparent. As a result, homeless persons are seen as responsible for their
fate due to their own supposed shiftlessness or laziness, and situational factors
that caused the homelessness—such as an accident or illness that rendered them
incapable of working and/or resulted in bankrupting medical expenses—are

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overlooked. When people with the autonomy schema do notice such situational
factors, or are forced to notice them, they often discount their significance and
focus their attention on character traits instead. Thus when people see a person
whose homelessness was caused by bankruptcy due to extreme medical expenses,
they may still blame her for this fate, criticizing her for not having better insur
ance or for becoming ill in the first place.
Because they expect behavior and destiny to be determined by character
traits, in the absence of evidence that such traits played a central role, individuals
operating with the autonomy schema will often search for such traits—but not
for situational determinants. In other cases, people will simply infer or suppose
the existence of character determinants, either because their search for evidence
proved unproductive or because they are so confident in their general assumption
of autonomy that they don't feel that specific evidence is necessary. They will
not, however, make similar inferences or suppositions concerning the situational
determinants of behavior or destiny. Thus when there is no clear evidence that
a welfare recipient is lazy or self-indulgent, many people will simply infer that
she is on the basis of highly ambiguous data, such as the fact that she walks very
slowly or spends a lot of time sleeping. And when there is no evidence even of the
most ambiguous sort to support the inference that a behavior or life outcome
is the result of character rather than situation, the autonomy schema will often
fill the gap in information with the supposition that such character traits exist.
Thus in the absence of any evidence that a homeless person has squandered his
resources on alcohol or drugs, many people will nonetheless believe that he has.
Often people reach or bolster their conclusion by recalling other examples in
which character supposedly determined behavior or life outcome. When they
search their memories, they fail to recall any examples of behavior or destiny
being determined by situational factors. They retrieve exemplars of presumably
lazy, dissolute, or self-indulgent homeless persons, but no exemplars who were
rendered homeless by forces beyond their control. Since the autonomy schema
blocks awareness of situational factors, however, there is often no experience of
such factors to remember. And on those relatively rare occasions when an indi
vidual does notice situational factors, the autonomy schema is likely either to
prevent them from being encoded in memory or cause them to be encoded as special
cases that do not disconfirm the principle of autonomy and that are therefore not
retrieved from memory in future instances where the memory would be relevant.
In influencing each of these steps of information processing, the various
forms of autonomist 'knowledge'—exemplars, prototypes, and processing rou
tines—lead people to continually conclude that the marginalized and stigma
tized individuals and groups they encounter are themselves responsible for their
inferior stations in life and thus deserve no assistance, and that people who have
attained success deserve full credit for their good fortune and thus should not
be subjected to any redistribution of their wealth. This conclusion, in turn, leads
to social policies that stigmatize, neglect, and/or punish the unfortunate and
maintain poverty and inequality (see Fineman 2004, Ryan 1971, and Lewis 1993).

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Correcting people's information-processing to take adequate account of the situ

ational determinants of behavior and life outcomes, which the autonomy schema
prevents them from doing, would thus contribute significantly to social justice
and is arguably a prerequisite for it (see Ryan 1971).
HOW TO CORRECT FAULTY KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION-PROCESSING
Until social criticism can recognize and alter the multiple faulty types of knowl
edge constituting the cognitive schémas that continually produce false conclu
sions about others, it will remain less than optimally effective in its efforts to
promote social change. How to correct these faulty cognitive structures and pro
cesses is thus the fourth and ultimate piece of understanding that social criticism
must take into account.'7 Social criticism can accomplish this task by adopting
and adapting schema-changing principles developed by cognitive therapy, which
has successfully addressed a problem very similar to social criticism's problem
of disabling harmful prejudices, stereotypes, ideologies, and power/knowledge
formations. The clinical problem facing therapists is that certain psychological
maladies, such as depression and phobia, are highly resistant to traditional forms
of therapy, which rely primarily on insight, clarification, and/or confrontation—
therapeutic practices that closely resemble traditional forms of social criticism.
These traditional therapeutic techniques can help afflicted people realize that,
for example, their deep despair about their lives, or their fear of public spaces,
is unfounded and irrational. Despite such realization, however, the patients' per
ceptions, feelings, and behaviors often remain unchanged, just as people who are
convinced that certain prejudices or ideological beliefs are invalid often continue
to perceive, feel, and respond to others in a prejudiced manner. Cognitive thera
pists have gradually realized that to overcome these faulty and harmful percep
tions, feelings, and behaviors, people need to change not just their conscious,
propositional beliefs but the cognitive schémas that continually reproduced
the faulty perceptions, feelings, and behaviors. The result, known in one of its
more prominent forms as schema therapy, is composed of processes that can be
adapted by social and cultural critics to alter or replace faulty and harmful col
lective schémas, including the schémas of autonomy, essentialism, homogeneity,
and atomism.'8
The central process through which a faulty cognitive schema is replaced is
the repeated enactment, in varying contexts, of more adequate versions of the
multiple forms and types of knowledge that constitute the schema. The first step
is to develop people's metacognition by helping them understand and repeatedly
apprehend the faulty and harmful nature of the current schema and how it oper
ates in its various forms of knowledge (exemplars, prototypes, and information
processing routines). The second step, which can be pursued simultaneously with
the first, is to help individuals develop a more adequate replacement schema.
This involves: (a) identifying important types of information that are excluded
by the faulty schema; (b) encountering and committing to memory robust exem

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plars that incorporate this crucial information and then using these exemplars to
process information about other people; and (c) developing and practicing new
information-processing routines that apprehend the information excluded by the
autonomy schema and use it to form judgments of other people. This practice
is enabled by the development of metacognition, the ongoing attention to and
awareness of the cognitive and emotional processes of one's own mind, which
includes recognizing when the old, faulty schema is operating and then inter
rupting and overriding its operation and activating instead the elements and
information-processing routines of the new schema. Repetition of these pro
cesses, which strongly resembles the process of working through in psychoanaly
sis (see Vaughan 1997), must occur until the old schema is no longer cued and the
new schema is activated automatically instead. The more experiences one has of
eschewing the exemplars, prototypes, and processing routines of the old, faulty
schema and activating instead the elements of the new, more adequate schema,
the more powerful and automatic the new, more adequate schema becomes (see
Padesky 1994, 277; Horowitz 1998, 65-69; and Wells 2000,128).
Such repetition is essential because while a single experience may be suffi
cient to correct faulty propositional knowledge, the non-propositional forms of
knowledge cannot be changed by a single intervention. This is because unlike
propositional knowledge, which is encoded in a "fast-binding" memory system,
non-propositional forms of knowledge and their information-processing mecha
nisms are based in "slow learning" memory systems that can only be changed
incrementally, through multiple repetitions (Smith and DeCoster 2000, 127).
More specifically, countering the effects of misleading exemplars requires that
multiple alternative exemplars be encoded in episodic memory, which requires
multiple encounters with multiple alternative exemplars. Similarly, reducing the
effects of distorting prototypes requires the encoding in episodic memory of a
critical mass of alternative exemplars sufficient to produce the construction of
an alternative prototype in semantic memory. And correcting faulty informa
tion-processing routines requires the same sort of practice and repetition that
is required to correct a faulty backhand swing or keyboard fingering technique.
SCHEMA CRITICISM: DEVELOPING MORE ADEQUATE COGNITIVE SCHEMAS
Because of a general lack of understanding of these four points concerning the

forms and types of knowledge involved in prejudice, stereotypes, harmful ideolo
gies, and oppressive regimes of power/knowledge, social criticism today still lacks
an optimally effective methodology for promoting social change. The under
standing of these four points provided by cognitive science, however, provides
a basis for formulating such a critical methodology. The following draws on this
understanding, together with the narrative practices of major texts of protest lit
erature, to develop a new critical methodology, which I will call schema criticism,
that works to replace faulty and harmful cognitive schémas with alternatives that
produce more adequate understanding of others and thus foster more just socia

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practices, policies, institutions, and structures. Schema criticism works to pro

vide people not with more accurate and complete information about the Other
but rather with the capabilities and habits of mind that will enable and incline
them to acquire this information for themselves whenever they take the measure
of another person. This learning to automatically perform new information-pro
cessing routines, like the learning of any performative routine, whether cognitive
or physical, requires practice rather than merely the passive reception of informa
tion and explanation.
Schema criticism can (and should) be practiced effectively by critics and
teachers in all humanities and social science fields, as well as by intellectuals and
activists operating in the public sphere. Literary study, however, offers a privi
leged venue for this mode of criticism. This is because literary texts, unlike the
discourses of other disciplines, repeatedly engage readers with all the types and
forms of knowledge that constitute cognitive schémas and that must be replaced,
altered, or overridden in order to correct faulty information-processing. More
over, certain types of literary texts themselves enact a proto-schema-criticism,
promoting the replacement of certain harmful schémas by: (a) demonstrating the
faulty and harmful nature of the knowledge they produce; (b) providing more
adequate exemplars and prototypes of all types (episodes, life stories, individu
als, images, concepts, emotions, actions); and (c) repeatedly engaging, and hence
training, readers in more adequate information-processing routines.
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, despite significant flaws in its verisimilitude,
character development, and narrative structure,19 is a good example of how a lit
erary text can help readers replace each element of their faulty autonomy schema
with corresponding elements that apprehend, rather than exclude, the ways in
which an individual's behavior and life outcomes are determined by circum
stances beyond the individual's control. At the same time, the historical recep
tion of The Jungle, which failed to produce the mass outcry that Sinclair aimed to
evoke against the exploitation and brutalization of workers, in stark contrast to
the reaction it did evoke against the contamination of food, demonstrates that
literary texts are usually by themselves incapable of fully developing alternative
schémas in their readers, thus pointing up the need for schema criticism.
THE JUNGLE'S PROVISION OF SITUATIONAL EXEMPLARS AND PROTOTYPES
For each form of non-propositional knowledge, The Jungle provides readers with
multiple exemplars embodying situational knowledge; that is, recognition of the
fact that circumstances over which one has no control can always override char
acter in determining behavior, and can also override behavior in determining
life outcomes. To the extent that any of these exemplars are encoded in read
ers' memories, they can help to correct the faulty information processing of the
autonomy schema as explained above. And if and when the number and intensity
of exemplars for any form of knowledge reach critical mass, they will form a new,
situational prototype for that form of knowledge.

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Episode Scripts: One of the primary means by which The Jungle undermines
the harmful and deficient autonomy schema is by correcting the faulty charac
ter—>behavior—> success/failure episode script (one's character determines one's
behavior, and one's behavior determines whether one succeeds or fails) that is
at the heart of the autonomy schema. This episode script is deeply flawed—and
profoundly unjust—because it leads one to focus, in episodes of success or failure,
on behavior and character and ignore the powerful role that circumstances play
in determining a person's success or failure and thus to blame people for failures
or bad behaviors, as well as to credit people for successes and good behaviors
that were determined more by circumstances than by character. This flawed and
unjust episode script thus needs to be corrected by incorporating into it the role
of circumstances:
^^IRCUMSTANQES^
Character—»Behavior—»Success/Failure
Novels constitute one of the best ways to correct this script, because correc
tion requires repeatedly taking cognizance of the powerful role of circumstances
in episodes of success and failure. The flawed and unjust episode script of the
autonomy schema has been developed by repeated encounters—in direct experi
ence, fictions, hearsay, and so on—with episodes in which instances of success
and failure were attributed primarily to a person's (supposed) behaviors, which
were themselves attributed primarily to character traits, while circumstances
that may have constrained or overridden behavior and character were out of the
picture. Successfully correcting this faulty script requires a similar process of
multiple cognitions of episodes in which the situational determinants of behavior
and outcome are foregrounded rather than elided.
The Jungle promotes the development of this more adequate situational epi
sode script by repeatedly representing the power of circumstances in two types
of episodes: (i) episodes in which circumstances determine behavior in spite of
in which circumstances determine outcome in spite of countervailing behavior

{circumstances >behavior >success/failure). Such episodes function incrementally to
add the role of circumstances to the incomplete script, character^behavior~*success/
failure, and promote the establishment of the situational script as the prototype
for appraising people's good and bad behaviors and successes or failures.
i ne wrwrnnumt* 'ueuuuiur rjuuure stripe is uuiquituus in oinciair s nuvei. ror
example, despite faultless behavior O.e., their best efforts to protect themsel
against fraud) in the purchase of their house, Jurgis's extended family finds
with an old (rather than the advertised new), tubercular structure for which
contract requires them to pay over half again as much as they thought i
costing them (Sinclair 2003, 68-69). Despite working hard at their jobs (an
instance of faultless behavior), Jurgis and Marija—and countless other worker
find themselves in dire straits when they fall victim to accident, their hours

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reduced, or their factories close (69,112, 87). And when their jobs do survive, the
workers themselves are worn down by their work and tossed aside like worn-out
parts (121). Processing multiple episodes such as these, in which the best efforts of
the ablest individuals are thwarted by insurmountable obstacles, and failure and
suffering are the result of circumstances, not weak character or lack of effort, pro
motes the development in readers of a more adequate alternative to the autonomy
schema's effort—>success script for deciding on the causes of success and failure.
The same is true of circumstances 'character >behavior episodes, in which bad
behavior is shown to be a product more of circumstances than of character. Jurgis
begins to drink, for example, not because of weak character (or even because of
the dreadful condition of his life), but because drinking is required where he eats
and cashes his paycheck (Sinclair 2003, 80-81). Similarly, he beats young Stan
islovas not because he is a wicked man but because the boy must be forced to go
to work despite his fear of the cold (after suffering severe, agonizing frostbite),
or the family will starve. And when Jurgis beats Ona's boss Connor, it is also the
circumstances that are the primary cause of his action: Connor has raped Jur
gis's wife Ona, which has understandably enraged Jurgis (147-148). After encod
ing multiple such circumstances 'character-^-behavior episodes in their episodic
memory, readers who have been attentive are more able and more inclined to
apprehend the circumstantial determinants of an individual's behavior and not
automatically attribute it to the person's character.
Life Scripts: The autonomy bias is also embodied in the narrative template
(see Wertsch 2008), or life script, in which multiple episodes of perseverance in
the face of obstacles produces the desired life outcome. This life script of the
autonomy schema is embodied in the rags-to-riches life story of the self-made
man, survival stories of the frontiersman, the homesteader, and the explorer, and
biographies of professional athletes and entertainers recounting their struggles
and triumphs—all of them life stories of one form of success or another. Like
their shorter counterparts, the episode scripts, such narratives appear to embody
evidentiary confirmation of the autonomy assumption that effort and virtue
lead to success, and they must be countered with stories showing individuals
approaching life with the best of intentions and equipped with the best of abili
ties being defeated and even destroyed by forces over which they have no control.
The Jungle provides multiple life stories of this sort, in varying degrees of detail.
Instead of the rags-to-riches story that Jurgis and his extended family expect to
enact, most of them enact a rags-to-rags or rags-to-death story, or even worse.
Jurgis's wife Ona goes from rags to rape to death in an agonizing childbirth; his
father Antanas from rags to a toxic job and thence to death; his two-year-old son
Antanas from rags to drowning in a ditch; the fifteen-year-old Stanislovas from
rags to being eaten alive by rats; and the stout, fiery Marija from rags to prostitu
tion and addiction. By getting readers to encode multiple stories of this sort in
their episodic memory, The Jungle provides them with multiple rags-to-rags-or
death exemplars, which can both guide their future information-processing and
also contribute to the formation of a rags-to-rags or rags-to-death life script to

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counter the myopic autonomy life script as the prototype for framing and evalu
ating people's lives.
Prototypical Individuals-. Prototypical individuals who embody the autonomy
assumption include figures such as the frontiersman, the homesteader, the hunter,
the fisherman, the explorer, the independent farmer, the businessman, the entre
preneur, the self-made man, and the autodidact, as well as negative prototypes
such as the drug addict, the drunkard, the welfare cheat, the criminal, the loner,
and the sociopath. Such prototypes, which are often products of autonomy epi
sode scripts and life scripts, and which function as a similar quasi-empirical vali
dation of the autonomy assumption, must be replaced by prototypical individuals
embodying the determining force of fortune, including the child born with a
silver spoon in her mouth and the destitute victim of bad luck, violence, or indif
ference. Children are particularly powerful exemplars of situationism, since they
are clearly seldom responsible for their life circumstances. In The Jungle such
exemplars include children scavenging for food in the garbage dump (Sinclair
2003, 30-31); the anonymous little boy whose ears freeze on his way to work and
then break off when a man tries to warm them by rubbing them (79); Elzbieta's
young sons Vilimas and Nikalojus, who have to sell newspapers by day and sleep
in doorways at night to help support the family (118); her two crippled sons, Juo
zapas, who lost a leg when he was run over, and the three-year-old Kristoforas,
who lives a wretched life crawling about with a congenitally dislocated hip and
then dies a horrible death after eating contaminated food (123); and her oldest
son Stanislovas, who is put to work on the production line as a cog in the giant
machine and thus has his fate determined:
and so was decided the place in the universe of little Stanislovas, and his destiny till
the end of his days. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, it was fated that
he should stand upon a certain square foot of floor from seven in the morning until
noon, and again from half-past twelve till half-past five, making never a motion and
thinking never a thought, save for the setting of lard-cans. (Sinclair 2003, 71)
The novel is replete with such exemplars, and their presence in readers' memories,
as well as the prototypes they help to form or reinforce, can function to focus
readers' attention on the power of circumstances over human behavior and destiny
when they evaluate the behaviors and destinies of real people outside the novel.20
Prototypical Images: The autonomy bias is also powerfully supported by proto
typical images of the human body, including postures, facial expressions, gazes,
movements, and vocal intonations that express self-sufficiency, domination, tri
umph, complacency, contentment, smugness, and so on. These images embody
the same sort of persuasive force as prototypical individuals (of which they are
often components) and must be countered with postures, facial expressions,
gazes, movements, and vocal intonations that express defeat, exhaustion, and
helplessness and thus reveal the triumph of circumstances over effort and charac
ter. At the beginning of The Jungle Jurgis is the prototypical image of autonomy:
he is a powerful, exuberant, striking figure who towers above the other workers
clamoring for a job and has no difficulty in attracting the attention of the hiring

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ioo COLLEGE LITERATURE | 39.4 Fall 2012
boss (Sinclair 2003, 6, 32). By the end of the novel, however, this image has been
transformed into that of a gaunt, haggard specter who lacks the strength neces
sary to complete a single day's work. Similar exemplary images abound of bodies
that have been worn down, worn out, wounded, emaciated, or literally crushed
by their circumstances of life and work, and these images, when encoded in epi
sodic memory and/or consolidated into prototypical images, constitute powerful
prompts to look for and recognize such circumstances behind the failures we
encounter in real people outside the text.
Concepts: Characterizing people with labels such as autonomous, self-reliant,
persévérant, courageous, steadfast, and successful performatively establishes the
power of the autonomy schema through supposition, eliciting implicit agreement
that the category of autonomy is a valid and important category for perceiving
and judging people's behavior and character. The same is true of negative labels
such as dependent, needy, parasitic, lazy, self-indulgent, and cowardly, which not
only administer social censure but also reinforce the assumption that autonomy
is a virtue, that it is a crucial category of appraisal, that its meaning is transpar
ent, and that its attribution is unproblematic. This hegemony of the autonomy
concept must be countered with concepts recognizing the determinative force of
situational factors, such as luck, chance, mischance, fortune, misfortune, and vic
timization. The Jungle works to dislodge the concept of autonomy—present, for
example, in Jurgis's initial categorization of men who fail to get work as "unfit"
and "broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings" (Sinclair 2003, 58, 23)—with
labels that deemphasize the role of character and underscore instead the role of
circumstances in determining behavior and life outcomes. For example, deso
late workers, instead of being categorized as failures or losers, or "broken-down
tramps and good-for-nothings," are conceptualized as "victims" of the system
(171,299). And the packers, categorized as "captains of industry" in the autonomy
schema, are reconceptualized as "pirates of industry," "foul monsters of sensual
ity and cruelty" (317), "ravenous vultures," "tyrants," "oppressors" (171), "exploit
ers" (296), and "parasites" (320), while "capitalist production" is similarly recast as
destruction, waste (320), and corruption (325), and success is categorized as pride,
luxury, and tyranny (316). By arming readers with such alternative conceptualiza
tions that embody tacit recognition of the role of circumstances in both success
and failure, the novel increases the likelihood that they will escape the myopia of
the autonomy schema when assessing real people outside the novel.
Prototypical Emotions-. Emotions play a particularly important and complex
role in information-processing. First, they are often the product of information
processing, with a particular judgment or constellation of judgments producing
a particular emotion (see Lazarus and Lazarus 1996). Thus the judgment that
people's distress is their own fault will result in emotions of indifference, disdain,
contempt, or even anger, while the judgment that their distress is the result of
factors over which they had no control will produce feelings of sympathy, and
possibly anger at a responsible third party (see Weiner 1995 and Bracher 2006).
But in addition to being the effect of certain (possibly faulty) judgments of respon

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Mark Bracher | ESSAYS ioi
sibility, these same emotions can also be the cause of (potentially faulty) judg
ments of responsibility. This is because we often experience emotions—espe
cially negative emotions such as anxiety and anger—without being aware of their
true causes. We may be angry, for example, because a negligent driver almost
crashed into us on our way to work earlier in the day, but we believe our anger
is the result of what we take to be a hostile gaze of a stranger who just passed us
in the hall. In this case, our anger (due, in fact, to the negligence of the reckless
driver) causes us to misinterpret a certain piece of information (a neutral gaze)
because we need to find a cause for our anger so that we may have a target for
our aggression. We misattribute our anger to an innocent person's neutral gaze
because "people tend to experience their affective feelings as reactions to what
ever happens to be in focus at the time" (Clore and Ortony 2000, 27; cited in
Hogan 2009,175). As Patrick Hogan explains, "once we feel angry, we are likely to
look for a target for our angry aggression ..., [which leads us to} a sort of willful
[albeit unconscious} misattribution" (Hogan 2009, 178). The operation of such
a process, Hogan observes, means that people's personal frustration and anger
can lead them to identify a false cause for their anger, which they then proceed
to attack—as in the false blaming of Saddam Hussein for the 9/11 attacks (178),
or the false blaming of poor and homeless people for their own distress. People
operating with the autonomy schema, which encodes emotions of disdain, con
tempt, and anger in close association with failure, are thus motivated by these
emotions to (mis)attribute responsibility to any party that is labeled a failure—an
attribution that then serves as an appraisal that validates and/or reproduces the
original negative emotion.
Literature can counter this process by using various techniques of emotional
contagion to evoke prosocial emotions such as compassion in association with
the suffering and distress of others. The Jungle operates to replace emotions such
as indifference, disdain, and contempt for victims of bad fortune and confidence,
pride, and self-satisfaction in response to one's own good fortune, which embody,
activate, and reinforce the autonomy schema, with emotions that embody rec
ognition of the powerful role of circumstances in determining both one's own
and others' behavior and destiny; such emotions include sympathy, fear, sadness,
anguish, and anger at fate and injustice, emotions that prompt readers to seek
and find situational causes for characters' distress. For example, in the novel's
opening scene of the wedding celebration, Sinclair evokes compassion and out
rage in his readers by variously describing multiple characters' pain and fear;
by narrating the expressions, postures, or actions of characters which express
these emotions; by having the narrator articulate commiseration, compassion,
and affection for these characters; and by describing the bleak and dire circum
stances and accidents that have produced their misery and desperation. Each of
these techniques works via readers' mirror neurons (see Iacoboni 2009) to pro
duce emotional contagion, and so evoke the emotions of fear, anguish, despair,
sympathy, and/or outrage in readers. The repeated experiencing of such emotions
associates them with their respective objects (workers and other poor people;

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102 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 39.4 Fall2012
capitalists), such that future perceptions and thoughts of such figures may be pro
cessed through these respective emotions. Each of these emotions primes readers
with the idea of external, circumstantial causes of distress rather than internal,
dispositional causes, making them more likely to seek and find external, circum
stantial causes concerning the particular character or characters to which the
novel directs their attention. With enough repetition, this emotional response,
and the ensuing appraisal, can become the default, or prototypical emotion gov
erning the assessment of all people in distress.
Action Scripts: The Jungle promotes the further association of these emotions
with specific forms of helping and aggression, by linking them with particular
actions on the part of Jurgis and other characters, and this process promotes
the development in readers of action scripts that counter those of the autonomy
schema. When one is operating with the autonomy schema, the solution to every
problem is for the individual to 'work harder.' Characters impose this action script
on others and they embrace it for themselves. Jurgis lives by this script for the
first part of the novel. Whenever he encounters difficulties, he considers only one
remedy: working harder (Sinclair 2003,20,22,70). It never occurs to him that the
solution to his difficulties is only to be found in changing the circumstances of his
existence. Pursuing such change is the dominant action script of the situational
schema, however. And in The Jungle, the fundamental circumstance that needs to
be changed is the system of laissez-faire capitalism. The novel thus directs read
ers' sympathy for victimized workers and their anger at the capitalist victimizers
toward the capitalist system itself, rather than at the individual victimizers, who,
as the novel emphasizes on several occasions, are themselves ultimately pawns
in the same game as the workers. Thus the general action script promoted by
The Jungle is to build a society that provides for everyone through education and
organization (300, 318), rather that meting out further harm to the unfortunate,
and additional power and wealth to the already fortunate. In addition to alter
ing readers' knowledge and emotions concerning success and failure and about
winners and losers within the capitalist system, the novel thus also facilitates the
development of a link in readers' minds that connects anger at the oppressive
system and sympathy for its victims to educational and organizational activity
designed to change the system. Thus it strengthens the inclination toward such
action on the part of readers when they put the novel down."
DIRECT TRAINING OF READERS' INFORMATION-PROCESSING ROUTINES
In addition to helping readers acquire alternative exemplars and prototypes con

cerning success and failure, The Jungle also trains them in alternative, less biased
information-processing routines by engaging them in repeatedly enacting the
various information-processing routines that take account of the role of circum
stances in determining behavior and destiny. First, we need to expect there to
be significant situational determinants for every behavior and life outcome. We
must expect that every homeless person, for example, will have encountered one

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or more situations—such as lack of help from family members or social services,

a downturn in the economy, or a bankrupting illness—in the absence of which
the person would not be homeless. We must notice and focus our attention on such
information when it is evident, and when it is not evident, we must search for it,
infer its existence from clues, and suppose its existence in the absence of clues.
Novels like The Jungle help us develop more adequate automatic informa
tion-processing routines of this sort." They do so, most basically, by repeatedly
directing our attention to situational constraints and affordances and their role
in determining characters' behaviors and life outcomes. Most media accounts
of (real or fictional) crime, for example, engage us in attending primarily to the
criminal act and its consequences, ignoring both the situational forces operating
on the criminal and the criminal's experience of these forces. This media focus
not only leads us to commit what psychologists call the 'fundamental attribution
error' (seeing the agent's disposition rather than circumstances as the primary
cause of the action), it also reinforces the deficient information-processing rou
tines of the autonomy schema underlying this error. A novel such as The Jungle,
in contrast, fosters the more adequate attention script of the situational schema
by focusing our attention on the powerful physical, material, social, and cultural
forces bearing down on people who commit crimes, and the resulting physical
and psychological desperation they experience, which may leave them destitute,
with virtually no options other than crime (graft, prostitution, robbery, and
even violence) if they are to survive. This same rehearsal by the novel of situ
ational determinants of behavior and life outcomes also trains our expectations
and our inference and supposition routines, so that after reading several chapters,
we begin to expect circumstances to determine the success or failure of any effort
that struggling individuals make to escape from their misery. And whenever we
encounter a new character, we are able safely to infer on the basis of inconclusive
evidence—and to suppose in the absence of all evidence—that the character's life
condition is largely if not totally the result of circumstances (either fortunate or
unfortunate).
Literary texts can also alter our routines of memory search and retrieval, by
prompting us (through allusion or explicit instructions) to recall certain specific
memories when processing a particular type of situation. Reading The Jungle may
remind readers of the time they lost a job through no fault of their own, or of a
job they had that left them physically or emotionally exhausted and hence not on
their best behavior. Repeated experiences of searching for and retrieving memo
ries of experiences in which one's own behaviors or outcomes were determined
more by one's circumstances than by one's character increase the ease and fre
quency with which such memories will come to mind in the future, and will serve
as a template for processing the Other's situation (see Schank 1999).

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SCHEMA CRITICISM
Literature is thus capable of promoting crucial alterations in the multiple forms

of knowledge and information-processing routines that govern our individual and
collective understanding, feelings, and actions concerning other people. Simply
reading literature, however, will not usually suffice to produce the thoroughgoing
and enduring schema changes necessary to underwrite significant social change
for three reasons. First, most people do not read the types of texts that promote
the necessary schema changes. Second, many who do read such texts do not,
without direction or instruction, read with the types of attention and other pro
cessing routines that are necessary for producing such changes. The historical
reception of The Jungle clearly demonstrates this point: despite the novel's multi
faceted challenge, as sketched out above, to the autonomy schema and Sinclair's
express desire to promote concern and outrage over the plight of workers, readers
experienced more concern and outrage over the contamination of food than over
the exploitation of workers. Third, even on those relatively rare occasions when
readers do read the types of texts with the types of processing that promote such
changes, the schema alteration that may occur as a result of reading a single novel
will usually not be thorough or substantial enough to contribute significantly to
the desired social change. This is because changing cognitive schémas, as noted
above, requires repeated use of the new schema in a variety of contexts, ide
ally with a metacognitive awareness of the nature and importance of the specific
alterations in schema elements and information-processing routines that are nec
essary to develop an adequate cognitive schema to replace the faulty one.
Hence the need for schema criticism. Schema criticism is a method for acti
vating, maximizing, and extending the schema-altering processes that certain
literary texts are capable of initiating but are rarely capable, by themselves, of
bringing to completion. While it is probably most effective when employed in
conjunction with the study of literary texts that promote the development of new
exemplars, prototypes, and information-processing routines, it can also be effec
tively employed apart from such study, either in conjunction with the study of
other humanities and social science disciplines or simply as a mode of social and
political discourse in the public sphere. Whatever the context of its use, schema
criticism employs some of the same basic techniques used by schema therapy to
change faulty schémas.
First, it promotes metacognition by identifying cognitive schémas that are
responsible for significant social harm,2' explaining the crucial information that
is being excluded by these schémas, and demonstrating the harm and injustice
that result from this exclusion. Second, it explains the particular schema ele
ments—types of knowledge and information-processing routines—that are
responsible for excluding the essential information. And finally and most cru
cially, schema criticism helps people develop default information-processing
mechanisms (exemplars, prototypes, and information-processing routines) that
take account of this essential information.

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The first step—alerting people to the harm caused by a faulty schema and
explaining the information-processing flaws that lead to this harm—involves
three basic activities, which, in the case of the autonomy schema, include: (a)
highlighting instances (whether in narrative texts or in public policies, institu
tions, or social structures) in which people are blamed, either explicitly or implic
itly (i.e., through the use of autonomist concepts, images, narrated events, life
stories, or emotions), for their behaviors or life conditions; then (b) pointing out
the information concerning situational constraints that is being ignored in this
blaming; and finally (c) emphasizing the harm and injustice that result from this
omission and the blaming that follows.These three activities help people develop
metacognition concerning their own faulty and unjust information-processing,
and this metacognitive awareness help motivate and guide them to correct it.
This metacognition is furthered by the second basic step of schema criticism,
in which the critic works to help people understand how the particular exem
plars, prototypes, and information-processing routines of the autonomy schema
variously exclude, distort, and/or interpolate information in harmful ways, so
that they will be more able to spot these processes wherever they operate and
take appropriate counteraction. Thus when schema critics encounterpropositional
articulations of the autonomy schema—including slogans such as "You can be
whatever you want to be," "We live in a free country," and "Anyone can grow
up and become president"—they point out how these beliefs obscure significant
enabling and/or constraining conditions that are beyond individuals' control.
Schema critics respond similarly to concepts embodying the autonomy schema,
including the notion of autonomy itself, as well as concepts such as self-made
man, independent, loser, and failure. In response to episodes and life stories that
present success as the result of ability and hard work alone, or failure as the result
of personal inadequacy, schema critics indicate how various instances of luck or
chance, in the form of obstacles or opportunities deriving from forces beyond the
individual's control, played a major role in determining the outcome of the indi
vidual's efforts. And confronted with exemplary or prototypical individuals who
have triumphed over adversity, the schema critic explains the role that fortunate
circumstances played in their success and points out, and provides examples of,
the fact that for every champion athlete, movie star, and rock star, and every
successful entrepreneur or professional, there are many individuals who are just
as energetic, dedicated, talented, and/or hardworking who have failed to achieve
such success because they were not fortunate enough to encounter the necessary
enabling circumstances or avoid disabling ones.
In addition to pointing out flaws in information-processing and thus fostering
a metacognitive awareness that motivates correcting the faulty cognition, the
repeated bringing to light of the crucial information that is being systematically
excluded by the faulty exemplars and prototypes also promotes the emergence
of new, more adequate exemplars and prototypes as the default for perceiving,
judging, and responding to other people, both interpersonally and through pub
lic policy. This process culminates in the critic's repeatedly providing multiple

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IO6 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 39.4 Fall 2012
counter-exemplars (current, historical, or fictional) that include the crucial infor

mation about circumstantial constraints that is systematically excluded from
autonomist exemplars and prototypes.
Schema criticism enacts the same two-faceted process of developing meta
cognition and retraining in relation to specific information-processing routines.
It does so by identifying faulty information-processing routines and pointing
out their deficiencies, and by engaging people in repeatedly performing more
adequate routines: expecting, attending to, recalling, searching for, inferring,
vividly imagining, and intensely feeling the situational constraints experienced
by stigmatized people, as well as the situational advantages that successful people
have invariably benefited from. This aspect of schema criticism can be enacted
in response to media representations and other public discourse. Here the
schema critic focuses mainly on developing new routines of attention and recall,
by informing and reminding people of crucial information that is being system
atically excluded from consideration in public opinion, media representations,
news reports, and policies concerning stigmatized and lionized others. People's
expectation, information-search, and attention scripts for the autonomy schema can
be revised by repeatedly reminding them that all behaviors and life outcomes
have significant situational determinants, and by variously exhorting, inducing,
requiring, and/or assisting them (as circumstances allow) to seek out this infor
mation and focus their attention on it. Memory-search scripts are altered by repeat
edly exhorting people to search their memories for instances in which someone's
(their own, or someone else's) success or failure was enabled or produced by forces
beyond their control and then using this exemplar as a template for explain
ing other successes and failures (see Schank 1999). Memory encoding can also be
trained, in order to ensure that individuals remember all the situational causes
they become aware of, which memories then become—first as exemplars and
subsequently as prototypes—templates for future processing. Such training can
take the form of repeated reminders and rehearsals of such causes, admonitions
not to forget them, writing about them, diagrams of them, and (in classroom
settings) by requiring students to recall them for exams. Inferences and suppositions
concerning the causes of fortune or misfortune can be rescripted by constructing
"vivid case histories" and then engaging people in hypothesizing about causal
relations in them (see Anderson and Lindsay 1998,13). This can also be attempted
more directly by asking people to imagine and articulate alternative, situational
explanations of behaviors and destinies in place of standard autonomist accounts
(see Anderson and Lindsay 1998, 20, 24; Beck 1999, 252; and Russell and van den
Broek 1992). The emotions and action tendencies resulting from information-pro
cessing can also be rescripted. Changes in the information-processing steps will
automatically produce a different emotion, which will in turn potentiate a differ
ent action, but it is also valuable to explicitly rescript the new emotion and action
through rehearsal. One technique is to evoke such feelings in people through
emotional contagion, by expressing strong feelings of sympathy and compassion
toward stigmatized and unfortunate others. One can then help people to dwell

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with and own these feelings, and articulate the resultant helping impulse into
specific forms of social action leading to social change.
The cognitive retraining processes at the heart of this development of more
adequate cognitive schémas centers on two basic repetitions: repeated encoun
ters with and encoding of alternative exemplars, and repeated rehearsals of the
more adequate information-processing routines. The latter alters the procedural
memories constituting the various information-processing routines, thus directly
altering the way information is processed. The former alters the composition
of episodic memory, increasing the population, and hence the accessibility and
likely activation, of more adequate exemplars, which in turn enhances the likeli
hood of the formation of more adequate prototypes in semantic memory. When
activated, these more adequate exemplars and prototypes produce more socially
productive emotions and actions, and/or serve as more reliable templates for
information-processing.
SCHEMA PEDAGOGY
While this cognitive training can be effectively promoted in various discursi

settings, it can be optimized in educational settings, where students can be
engaged in practicing situational information-processing routines with regard to
multiple forms of discourse, issues, and contexts (TV programs, movies, new
reports and commentaries, public policies, political debates, etc.). Students ca
also be engaged in recalling, discovering, and/or constructing situational exe
plars and prototypes, and in using them as templates for seeking and findin
all the information that is required to produce an adequate and just assessmen
of other people. One effective activity of this sort is to have students imagi
and write a narrative detailing the present circumstances experienced by re
people—including murderers, rapists, child molesters, and other criminals in
the news, as well as political figures toward whom they may feel animosity.
perform this assignment, students will have to exercise situational expectatio
attention, information search, inference, supposition, and emotion, thus rehears
ing more adequate processing routines. And upon completion of this assignment,
students will have produced and encoded in memory a highly accessible exemplar
of situatedness to be used in processing information in future assessments o
similar individuals.
Finally, students' development of a situational schema to replace the faulty
autonomist one can be further promoted by having them follow a number of
metacognitive scripts not only when reading but also when interacting with or
assessing people in real life. Scripts such as the following can function to guide
(and, through repetition, change) faulty information processing (see Smith and
DeCoster 112,123-125; and Wells 106, i27ff):
i. Monitor your emotional reactions to characters and people, including gut reac
tions to discussions or news reports of current events, social problems, public poli
cies, political candidates, and so on.

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io8 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 39.4 Fall 2012
2. Whenever you experience a negative emotion toward someone, or whenever you

are inclined to perpetrate or support punishment or aggression toward someone,
ask yourself, "What conclusions have I drawn about the causes of this person's
behavior or life outcome? Have I omitted any crucial information in reaching this
conclusion?"
3. Keep a 'schema diary,' in which you record these reading and real-life experiences
of enacting (or failing to enact) the more adequate and just cognitive schémas.
CONCLUSION
My argument here is that the traditional mode of social criticism, critique, i

which the critic speaks the truth about power, accomplishes very little in an
of itself: 'drive-by' criticism—shooting holes in faulty and harmful beliefs, s
reotypes, or power-knowledge formations—often does little to promote socia
justice. The key truth about power that we need to understand and address is
the way power operates in, on, and through people's hearts and minds. Such
understanding can then be used to help people develop more adequate infor
mation-processing mechanisms, which enable them to construct more adequa
knowledge at every encounter. It is its understanding of this key truth that d
ferentiates schema criticism from social critique, in four crucial ways:
1. Rather than focusing on false and harmful beliefs per se, schema criticism
focuses on general person schémas that produce and maintain such beliefs by pro
ducing faulty perceptions and judgments of other people.
2. Schema criticism recognizes the central role of multiple non-propositional forms

of faulty knowledge: exemplars, prototypes, and information-processing routines.
3. Schema criticism recognizes that these forms of knowledge, and hence the cog
nitive schémas that they constitute, cannot be changed simply through logical
propositional discourse aiming at conveying the truth about others. Rather, such
change requires retraining people's faulty information-processing by re-forming
each form of knowledge that guides this processing.
4. Schema criticism recognizes that such re-forming of flawed cognitive schéma

is accomplished through repeated attention to their flawed and harmful nature
(metacognition) and, even more importantly, through repeated enactment of the
more adequate alternative forms of knowledge (exemplars, prototypes, and pro
cessing routines) that constitute them.
By thus repeatedly engaging students, media audiences, and others in seeking,

attending to, inferring, remembering, categorizing, and responding emotional
to the powerful effects that circumstances have on all behaviors and life ou
comes, schema criticism significantly weakens their faulty information-proce
ing routines and promotes the development of the more adequate routines i
their place. When, after sufficient practice, these more adequate routines become
the default mechanisms for processing information about people, they are aut
matically employed whenever one assesses people. The result is greater socia

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justice, achieved through the more just social structures, institutions, and poli
cies that one comes to support when guided by more accurate and comprehensive
understanding of other people.
In sum, by fostering more adequate person-schemas as the default informa
tion-processing mechanisms governing people's social cognition, schema criti
cism improves people's perceptions and judgments of others. These improved
perceptions and judgments, in turn, reduce people's support for unjust and coun
terproductive social policies, characterized by neglect and punishment of the
unfortunate and further excessive rewards for the fortunate, and lead people
instead to support more just and effective policies, based on compassion and
solidarity, which follow directly from recognizing people's situatedness (as well
as their malleability, heterogeneity, and interconnectedness). In short, the more
adequate person-schemas constitute a psychological basis—and quite likely a pre
requisite—for the development of a more just world. And schema criticism, as a
critical practice that promotes the development of these more adequate schémas,
can make a significant contribution to that end.
NOTES
1 The complex and sophisticated methodology that Jameson set forth in The Political
Unconscious asserted the political efficacy of bringing to light textual traces of social con
flict—in this case, the progressively more extensive conflicts of (i) contemporaneous
political struggles, (2) the more hidden and enduring conflicts between social classes,
and (3) the deep, perpetual conflict among different modes of production—so "that a
Marxist cultural study can... play its part in political praxis, which remains, of course,
what Marxism is all about" (Jameson 1981,76,299). In the conclusion to Literary Theory,
Eagleton similarly argued that criticism could promote social change by revealing "how
{a text's] discourse is structured and organized, and... what kind of effects these forms
and devices produce in particular readers in actual situations" (Eagleton 1983, 205),
chief among which are "forms of consciousness and unconsciousness, which are closely
related to the maintenance or transformation of our existing systems of power" (210).
"Such an enquiry," Eagleton suggested, "might contribute in a modest way to our very
survival. For it is surely becoming apparent that without a more profound understand
ing of such symbolic processes, through which political power is deployed, reinforced,
resisted, [and] at times subverted, we shall be incapable of unlocking the most lethal
power-struggles now confronting us" (Eagleton 1984,124).
1 This realization is present in Lentricchia's search of Kenneth Burke's rhetoric for strate
gies through which readers could be persuaded and transformed, in Jameson's discus
sion of the Utopian element of literature as the means by which readers are moved to
accede to or resist the dominant order, and in Eagleton's claim that literature produces
forms of subjectivity that entail either acquiescence or rebellion.
Jameson recognized that the mere exposure of literature as a hegemonic force is
inadequate to promote social change, and he thus worked vigorously to distinguish his
critical methodology "from those implacably polemic and demystifying procedures
traditionally associated with the Marxist practice of ideological analysis" (Jameson
1981, 281). He argued that in addition to démystification, literary criticism, if it is to
have a political impact, must also bring to light the Utopian elements of texts—that

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no COLLEGE LITERATURE | 39.4 Fall 2012
is, the (often disguised and distorted) means by which literary texts appeal to read
ers' profound and universal need for collectivity and solidarity (284-299). "It is only
at this price," Jameson concluded The Political Unconscious, "—that of the simultaneous
recognition of the ideological and Utopian functions of the artistic text—that a Marx
ist cultural study can hope to play its part in political praxis, which remains, of course,
what Marxism is all about" (299). How exactly this dual bringing to light is to produce
its political effects, however, Jameson does spell out, though the implication is that the
revelation of the Utopian elements serves both a liberating and a motivating function:
liberating insofar as it exposes the seductive means by which texts (and dominant social
orders) recruit the consent of the oppressed (286-287) and motivating by providing a
concrete target, however distorted and as yet unrealized, of the true object of their
obscure but most profound yearnings: solidarity (287-291).
A similar though less elaborate acknowledgment was made by Lentricchia at the
end of Criticism and Social Change when he asserted (ventriloquizing Kenneth Burke)
that "the widening of consciousness" produced by ideological analysis is only "a neces
sary first step to a different kind of praxis" in which we "feel responsible to the larger
social project, the social whole" (Lentricchia 1983, 15:1) and "move inexorably toward
the dream of perfect social organization" (163). "As dialectical rhetorician," Lentricchia
stated (again ventriloquizing Burke), "the revolutionary writer must . . . create a new
social center aligned with the working class by its intellectuals—a critical mass gal
vanized into active 'sympathy for the oppressed and antipathy towards our oppressive
institutions' "(34).
In Eagleton the recognition that ideology critique is insufficient by itself to produce
social change can be found in his contention that "the role of the contemporary critic is
to resist [the dominance of the commodity] by re-connecting the symbolic to the politi
cal, engaging through both discourse and practice with the process by which repressed
needs, interests, and desires may assume the cultural forms which could weld them into
a collective political force" (Eagleton 1984,123).
3 Concerning the influence of Foucault on New Historicists, see Greenblatt 1989, Lentric
chia 1989, and Harpham 1991.
4 This wide gap between Foucauldian analyses and actual social change is evident in the
tentative and hedging language used to describe the significance of genealogical analy
ses. Realizing that they cannot legitimately claim to actually be undermining power,
New Historicists and other social and cultural genealogists are reduced to claiming
only that they are "contesting" it—or rather not even that they are actually contesting
power but merely that they are "demonstrating the limited.. .possibility of contesting" it
(Montrose 1989, 31; emphasis added). Similarly, Nikolas Rose, a leading practitioner
of genealogical analysis, describes his work in terms that position it at a considerable
distance from actual social change: "If the study that follows helps to enhance our
capacity to think about these issues {concerning how subjects are formed], it will have
been worthwhile" (Rose 1999, xxv). Enhancing our thinking about how subjects are
formed is itself a far cry from actually changing this formation, but Rose does not even
hope for this effect; he hopes only that his analyses will help to enhance "our capacity to
think about" them. In another book, Inventing Ourselves, Rose expresses his purpose in
similarly tentative terms: "My aim ... is to begin to question some of our contemporary
certainties about the kinds of people we take ourselves to be, to help develop ways in which
we migjot begin to think ourselves otherwise I... hope that, in rendering the historical

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Mark Bracher | ESSAYS hi
contingency of our contemporary relations to ourselves more visible, [my analyses] may
help open these up for interrogation and transformation" (Rose 1998,1-3).
s Indeed, the Foucauldian view of subjects as nodal points produced by discourse-knowl
edge-power networks might seem to preclude the very possibility of intervention for
social change and to imply that any attempt at intervention is naïve and futile. And
as J. M. Balkin states, "Foucault's conception of a subject completely constructed by
disciplinary practices raises the puzzling question of why one should even care about
what happens to individual human beings if their very individuality is the result of
social practice. If subjects are simply the intersection of various disciplinary practices,
... it is hard to see why we should care about them and their fates... . Perhaps even
more important, even the sympathy we feel for the victims of surveillance, torture, and
other disciplinary practices is simply due to the disciplinary practices of morality and
sympathy that are the product of our own cultural moment" (Balkin 1998,263-264).
6 Balkin finds the fact that it is "actively hostile to offering accounts of the internal pro
cesses of the human mind" to be "the most serious failing of the theory of discourse that
has come to replace the theory of ideology" (Balkin 1998,186).
7 Foucault emphasizes the way that knowledge exercises power by forming the psyches
of those individuals who are the object of knowledge, the known, and neglects the ways
knowledge subjugates the subjects of knowledge, the knowers. Thus the souls of prison
ers (the known) are produced by the disciplines enacting the power-knowledge of the
penal authorities (the knowers). But the prior subjugation of the knowers by this same
knowledge is left unexamined (see Foucault 1979,28-30). Schema theory, in contrast, as
we will see, allows us to understand the power that knowledge exercises first over the
knower and then subsequently over the known, by virtue of the perception, judgments,
emotions, and actions that cognitive schémas produce in the knower concerning the
known.
8 As far as I am aware, these four assumptions are not presented as a group anywhere
in the cognitive science literature, though each has individually received substantial
empirical support; rather, I have identified this group of assumptions as the critical
ones for social justice through analyzing protest novels in conjunction with my read
ing in social cognition research. In so doing, I am following the lead of prominent
theorists in the area of literature and cognitive science such as Patrick Colm Hogan
(2003) and Lisa Zunshine (2006), who have argued that the relation between literature
and cognitive science should not be just a matter of literature scholars and teachers
taking theories and findings from cognitive science and applying them to literary texts.
Rather, it should be a two-way street. Each should learn from the other: each discipline
should function as a source of hypotheses, a testing ground, and a set of challenges for
the other.
5 See Rubin 2006 for an account of how episodic memories are constructed from interac
tions among multiple basic systems.
10 Whether prototypes are enduring knowledge structures or simply epiphenomena
resulting from the simultaneous activation and 'averaging' of multiple exemplars on any
given occasion is a matter of some dispute that does not, however, bear significantly on
the account I give of how they operate or how they can be altered; see Moskowitz 2005,
165-166.
" Such influence can be seen, for example, when political analysts observe that a young
state legislator appears very Senatorial (prototype) or reminds them of a young John F.
Kennedy (exemplar), or when we employ metacognition to explicitly formulate (often

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ii2 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 39.4 Fall 2012
with the help of teachers or coaches) revisions or alternatives to current procedures (e.g.,
a different fingering technique on a musical instrument or a different swing of a baseball
bat, golf club, or tennis racket). Conversely, information-processing routines themselves
function to produce particular types of exemplars—and hence prototypes as well—by
directing attention to certain features, ignoring or discounting other features, and so
on, which means that exemplars as well as prototypes are always "interpretations" or
constructs, rather than simple reflections, of the phenomena they purport to represent.
" The notion of cognitive schema is sometimes employed virtually synonymously with
'concept,' which in my usage is just one of multiple types of knowledge comprised by
cognitive schémas. Other writers, including Patrick Hogan, use 'schema' to refer to the
most abstract and general forms of knowledge, to be contrasted with both prototypes
(standard or typical cases of a category) and exempla (specific instances of a category). I
follow Taylor and Crocker, Moskowitz, Singer and Salovey, and others in using 'schema'
to refer to all forms of knowledge and information-processing routines concerning a
given category, such that abstract knowledge, prototypes, exemplars (or, in Hogan's
usage, 'exempla'), and information-processing routines are all components of schémas.
My account of cognitive schémas, prototypes, exemplars, and information-processing
is drawn from numerous sources, including Hogan 2001, 2003, and 2009; Taylor and
Crocker 1981; Moskowitz 2005; Schneider 2004; Huesmann 1998; Herbert Bless et al.
2004; Singer and Salovey 1991; and Anderson and Lindsay 1998.
13 When I say that cognitive schémas are 'functional constructs,' I mean that they, and the
multiple forms and types of knowledge they comprise, do not necessarily have a one-to
one correspondence to any anatomical structures of the brain. On the ontological status
of representations and their relation to other levels of analysis in cognitive science, see
Hogan 2003, 3off. and 2009, 27n4, and David et al. 2004.
14 As with the four assumptions discussed above (see note 8), the types of knowledge I
discuss here are not identified as a group by any cognitive scientists so far as I know.
Rather, I have compiled this list by integrating research in cognitive science and in liter
ary theory with my analyses of literary texts concerned with social justice. Concerning
the various specific types of knowledge, see, above all, the discussion of interactive
cognitive subsystem theory (ICS) in Teasdale and Barnard 1993 and the discussion of
associated systems theory (AST) in Carlston 1994. For literature's contribution to vari
ous types of non-propositional knowledge, see Gibson et al. 2007. On prototypical and
exemplary individuals, see Hogan 2004. For accounts of knowledge in narrative form,
see Hogan 2009, Wertsch 2008, Monk 1996, and White 2004. See Smith 1998, Smith
and DeCoster 2000, Huesmann 1998, and Bucci 1997.
15 On this relation between judgments, emotions, and actions, see Lazarus and Lazarus
1996 and Bracher 2006 and 2009.
16 For discussions of this 'dual processing,' see Brewer and Feinstein 1999 and Smith and
De Coster 2000.
17 Some readers may object to my claim that certain knowledge is faulty and that the
cognitive mechanisms and processes that produce it are flawed, arguing that the valid
ity of all knowledge is relative and subjective, and rejecting all claims to any sort of
objective, evidentiary basis for knowledge. My response is that these arguments are
untenable even by those who make them, as can be seen by the fact that the enunciation
of such objections enacts the very assumption that it is attacking: if all knowledge were
arbitrary and ungrounded in any reality beyond the mind that constructs it, then there
would be no grounds for critics' claims that their 'knowledge' concerning knowledge is

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superior to mine. Furthermore, few epistemological relativists take the position that
the 'knowledge' held by racists, sexists, heterosexists, or colonialists concerning their
respective stigmatized Others is just as valid as the knowledge held by their critics
concerning these Others. Nor do such critics argue for the validity of the 'knowledge'
that the Holocaust never happened, that global warming is a matter of personal opin
ion, that AIDS and Katrina were God's punishment of homosexuality, and so on. For
a recent quick but largely serviceable critique of the facile dismissal of notions such
as truth and objectivity, see Fish 2008,120-134. In what follows, I base my claim that
some knowledge and cognitive schémas are faulty and inferior to others on empirical
evidence that these schémas cause people to (a) omit and distort critical information in
the construction of their knowledge of other people and thus (b) treat these others in
ways that are harmful and unfair.
18 The following account of schema change is drawn largely from Young et al. 2003, Beck
1999, Russell and van den Broek 1992, Horowitz 1998, Monk 1996, Singer and Salovey
1991, Wells 2000, Padesky 1994, Teasdale and Barnard 1993, and Sookman and Pinard
1999.
19 Critics have faulted the novel on multiple counts, including the unrealistically unrelent
ing bad fortune and abrupt conversion to socialism of its protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, as
well as the tract-like, sermonizing elements of the concluding chapters. Yet such flaws
have not prevented "the amazing success Sinclair achieved seventy-five years ago tor]
the continued power the text has for readers today" (Elliott 2002, 95). For an analysis
of the novel's weaknesses, see Folsom 2002. For a more positive assessment of Sinclair's
narrative art in The Jungle see Mookerjee 1988. Although I side with the more posi
tive assessments of The Jungle, my argument in this article is not dependent upon this
judgment.
30 For an excellent account of how literary exemplars can affect our evaluation of real
people, see Hogan 2004.
21 For empirical documentation of how such emotions lead to increased prosocial action,
see Weiner 1995 and Batson et al. 2002.
" On realist novels' attention to situatedness, see Pollard-Gott 1993, 505-506, 516.
13 This includes not only the autonomy schema but also the other three general person
schemas (essentialism, homogeneity, and atomism) mentioned earlier. And it also
includes more specific scripts in which these person schémas are embedded, especially
scripts concerning gender and sexual identity and narrative prototypes such as those
identified by Hogan 2009.
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MARK BRACHER teaches English at Kent State University. His most recent books
are Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation (2006), Social
Symptoms of Identity Needs: Why We Have Failed to Solve Our Social Problems, and
What to Do About It (2009), and Cognitive Politics: Protest Novels, Schema criticism,
and the Pursuit of Social Justice (forthcoming 2013).

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SCHEMA CRITICISM: LITERATURE, COGNITIVE SCIENCE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Author(s): MARK BRACHER

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24543364

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DEFICIENCIES OF CURRENT SOCIAL CRITICISM

In the 1970s, spurred by second-wave feminism and a resurgent Marxism, social

COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 39.4 Fall 2012

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by Eagleton (1984,116).2 And ideology critique lacked a theory of subjectivity, as

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WHAT COGNITIVE SCIENCE OFFERS SOCIAL CRITICISM

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FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS ABOUT PERSONS

2. Essentialism: upbringing and environment play no significant role in forming

). Homogeneity, people can be adequately categorized as simply good or bad—as in,

4. Atomism: individuals are fundamentally separate and competitive, not united

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TYPES AND FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE

2. Abstract knowledge, including general types, or prototypes, which are a function

3. Know-how, including information-processing routines, which are a function of pro

Exemplars are memories of particular individuals and events, while prototypes

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distortive pressure on our information processing in any given instance, resulting

2. Autonomy life story, a Lithuanian acquaintance of Jurgis's family emigrates to

5. Signifier of autonomy: powerful, successful.

6. Emotion presupposing autonomy: Jurgis's pride in getting a job, his contempt

7. Action responding to supposed autonomy and expressing the emotions thereby

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1. Episode scripts such as determination leads to success: character determines

5. Concepts such as autonomy, independence, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency, as

6. Prototypical emotions such as contempt for unsuccessful people and admiration

Such exemplars and prototypes of autonomy control many people's process

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Exemplars and prototypes produce faulty information-processing in two

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Correcting people's information-processing to take adequate account of the situ

HOW TO CORRECT FAULTY KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION-PROCESSING

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SCHEMA CRITICISM: DEVELOPING MORE ADEQUATE COGNITIVE SCHEMAS

Because of a general lack of understanding of these four points concerning the

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practices, policies, institutions, and structures. Schema criticism works to pro

THE JUNGLE'S PROVISION OF SITUATIONAL EXEMPLARS AND PROTOTYPES

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in which circumstances determine outcome in spite of countervailing behavior

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DIRECT TRAINING OF READERS' INFORMATION-PROCESSING ROUTINES

In addition to helping readers acquire alternative exemplars and prototypes con

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or more situations—such as lack of help from family members or social services,

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Literature is thus capable of promoting crucial alterations in the multiple forms

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counter-exemplars (current, historical, or fictional) that include the crucial infor

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While this cognitive training can be effectively promoted in various discursi

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