Based on Noam Chomsky’s argument that the faculty of language is primarily a tool of thought whose purpose is to interpret the world, this dissertation argues that reading literature provides a cognitive experience like John Gardner’s “Fictive Dream” that mimics our interpretive experience of the world. Literary experience exploits language as an epistemological faculty that makes aspects of the external world intelligible. Yet the faculty of language is also capable of evoking entirely mental worlds that do not reflect the mindexternal world. Because the literary experience is entirely mindinternal, even the cultural knowledge we bring into play for its understanding still relies on innate features of language. Thus, during the act of reading, we hold this cultural knowledge in abeyance, allowing the text to structure how we bring it to bear on the experience as a whole. A scientific approach to literature can help uncover principles to further elucidate the literaryepistemological experience. Whereas much literary criticism assumes that a critic’s purpose is to mine a text for its deeper meaning, this dissertation argues for a Cognitive Formalist approach in which criticism serves not simply to explain the experience evoked by any particular text according to linguisticepistemological principles, but also to evaluate the moral implications of that specific textual experience. As a means of demonstrating potential implications of a scientific cognitive approach to literary criticism based on linguisticepistemological understanding, the current study offers sample passages from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. These passages allow us to offer first approximations of some explanatory principles of the literaryepistemological experience, such as the importance of fictive time and fictional event sequences, which in turn gives us greater insight into how, for example, verb tense and aspect contribute to the evocation of the action of fiction in the reader’s mind. Ultimately, the fictive vantage point constructed by the text allows the reader access to a complex moral framework in which fictive characters are understood to make choices that will in turn set the stage for the reader’s own ethical reception of the text and the experience it offers. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

x, 197 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation investigates the cultural importance of the "monstrous Other" in postmodern literature, including novels from Sweden, Finland, and the United States. While the theoretical concept of "the Other" is in wide circulation in the humanities and social sciences, the concept has only recently been modified with the adjective "monstrous" to highlight a special case of the Other that plays an important role in the formation of human subjectivity. In order to better understand the representational legacy of the monstrous Other, I explore some of the principal venues in which it has appeared in western literature, philosophy, folklore, and politics. Using a Foucauldian archaeological approach in my literature survey allows me to trace the tradition of the monstrous Other in such sources as medieval bestiaries, the wild man motif in folklore and popular culture, and the medicalization of intersexual embodiment. In all cases, the monstrous Other is a complex phenomenon with broad implications for the politics of subjectivity and the future of social and political justice. Moreover, the monstrous Other poses significant challenges for the ongoing tenability of normative notions of the human, including such primary human traits as sexuality and a gendered, "natural" embodiment. Given the complexities of the monstrous Other and the ways in which it both upholds and intervenes in normative human identities, no single theoretical approach is adequate to the task of examining its functioning. Instead, the project calls for an approach that blends the methodologies of (post)psychoanalytic and queer theory while retaining a critical awareness of both the representational nature of subjectivity and its material effects. By employing both strains of theory, I am able to "read" the monstrous Other as both a necessary condition of subjectivity and a model of intersubjectivity that could provide an alternative to the positivism and binarism of normative subjectivity. The texts that I examine here reveal the ways in which postmodern reconfigurations of the monstrous Other challenge the (hetero)normativity of human subjectivity and its hierarchical forms of differentiation. My reading of these texts locates the possibilities for a hybridized, cyborgian existence beyond the outermost limits of positivistic, western subjectivity. / Committee in charge: Ellen Rees, Chairperson, German and Scandinavian; Daniel Wojcik, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Member, Comparative Literature; Aletta Biersack, Outside Member, Anthropology