Affective Dissonance and Literary Mediation: Emotion Processing, Ethical Signification, and Aesthetic Autonomy in Cervantes’s Art of the Novel

• Published in: Cervantes (Gainesville, Fla.) Fla.), 2012-03, Vol.32 (1), p.201-230
• Main Author: Wehrs, Donald R
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1547-1616); Cervantes, Miguel de; Ethics; Mediation; Novels; Spanish literature; Zunshine, Lisa
• ISSN: 0277-6995; 1943-3840; 1943-3840
• DOI: 10.1353/cer.2012.0003

Contrastively, taking such somatic disturbances to be morally and cognitively significant may well bring one's perceptions, projects, and self-image into question. [...]experiencing the pain of another may direct medial pre-frontal cortex activity toward enhanced recogni- tion of the target of perception's full humanity. Drawing on theory of mind cognitive research, Lisa Zunshine argues that one of the novel's distinctive generic attributes is the intensity with which it calls upon us to exercise our cognitive aptitude for "mind-reading"; that is, our ability to come up with "theories" of how other people's minds work (Why We Read Fiction 3-17). [...]she says, novels call upon us to engage in "meta-representational" thinking, to hold an im- age in our mind while tagging its source as external both to ourselves and to independent reality, as in having a mental image of one person which we attribute to the "view" of another person (4-5, 47-51, 75-76).15 Part of the pleasure of reading Don Quijote rests in "tagging sources," in perceiving how inventively Don Quijote and others interweave mul- tiple worldviews belonging to diverse cultural milieus and discourse genres, such as Don Quijote's making Ovid's account of the Golden Age explain the origin of chivalry (1.11:104-06; 1.11:59-60).16 Beginning with Don Quijote himself, characters are apt to lose sight of the meta- representational texture of their own consciousnesses, forgetting that others are the source of their ideas, images, and linguistic formulae. Ricote describes his religious deficiencies in terms that reveal, in- dependent of his intentions, sincere and humble piety. [...]what the reader understands (i.e., that the expulsion is both unjust and stupid, since it deprives Spain of such good men as Ricote) from a representa- tion that is not, strictly speaking, a meta-representation is reinforced by Sancho's recollection of the daughter's departure from the village: By putting us affectively at odds with egocentric emotion processing, spontaneous ethical responsiveness to others allows us to distinguish, in life as in literature, between representations whose meaning is gen- erated from within and representations whose meaning depends upon a meta-representational frame, be that an interested "point-of-view," a cultural-ideological tradition, or a metaphysical hermeneutical schema. [...]as both Fuentes and Ferry intimate, the movement of Cervantes's narrative toward the art of the novel implies the co