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This chapter offers a reading of Larry Brown’s 1989 novel Dirty Work, focusing on how it asks readers to willingly identify with the appalling situation that the central character, Walter James, faces toward its end. It argues that Brown not only “lays out a pattern of morally authorized involvement that demands Walter’s murder of fellow Vietnam veteran Braiden as its most logical culmination,” but in so doing forces readers to confront “one of the central issues of Southern history.” Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s work, particularly his publications from the 1970s and 1980s, the chapter analyzes the novel’s “aesthetic” or “virtual dimension.” It also highlights Brown’s play on the idea of place and placement, which subtly underscores his own assertions about the importance of race and class issues, and, finally, explains how Brown’s novel guides readers to imagine themselves into Southern history by offering them an experience of complexity and frustration reminiscent of that of the South.

Wolfgang Iser argues that the fragmentary nature of modern texts allows the reader a certain level of awareness over his or her own interpretive work and choices—which presents a different understanding of the way heterogeneity can shape a subject. This final chapter, however, is focused on the reflection of the experience of reading scholastic encyclopedias—an object itself of Jean de Meun's and Ramon Llull's reflections. Iser's insights are suggestive in that they divert us from thinking about the literary subject solely as expressed in the first person, and allow us to consider a second-person subject brought forth by the text. The chapter suggests, however, that these florilegia open up both first- and second-person subject positions. The second half of the chapter, meanwhile, is devoted to the texts: Roman de la Rose, the Libre de meravalles, and the Arbre de filosofia d'amor and their use of the mirror trope and the mise en abyme or the dramatization of mirror reflection.

The quotes from Stephen Greenblatt and Wolfgang Iser suggest that, despite the apparent gap in time, the voices surrounding these texts are mutually dependent and coexistent. This chapter argues that the dialogism between reader and text identified in these quotes should not blind us to the social process among groups of readers collectively constructing given texts. It aims to address three primary issues: the ways people mark themselves as distinct groups through unique recombinations of various cultural genres; the convergence between the concerns of anthropology and those of literary theory in the study of textual practices; and the anthropological understanding of Judaism, insofar as founding texts are critical to the perpetual recreation of Jewish identity.

Focussing on Wolfe's use of eclectic and archaic vocabulary and nomenclature throughout The Urth Cycle, this chapter argues that such diction establishes a shifting kaleidoscope of adumbration and revelation that confronts the reader with the problem of determining when Wolfe's vocabulary serves to reveal and develop the texts’ themes and when it functions deflectively. It explores how Wolfe's replacement of sf's more usual neologistic experimentation with archaic reappropriations functions analogically, allusively, and thematically. Drawing on the work of Barthes and Iser, the chapter acknowledges that The Urth Cycle appears to be a writerly text par excellence yet rejects this easy conclusion by arguing that the texts’ obscure diction in an explosive textual strategy that leads the reader further from the reality of the narrative's cosmological structure and the god-game played by the Hierogrammates. It argues for a ‘literal’, or ‘vulgar’ (in Shoshana Felman's terms), reading of the texts’ obscure diction rather than an embracing of its discursive effects. It concludes by emphasising that the agents in Wolfe's storyworld act in context, in harmony with their own nature, regardless of their name or title.

The chapter asks in what sense literature can be considered a designer environment. It discusses in particular the role that language, narrative, and fiction play in extending cognitive capacities along the model of a co-evolution between culture and cognition. Foundational accounts of co-evolution are reevaluated from the point of view of cultural critique, as the chapter addresses limitations and proposes adjustments for the case of literature. Probability designs are linked to the argument that fiction emerges as texts give form to the imaginary and release the real from referential constraints. Rather than problem solving and parsing of information, cases that are usually discussed for literary designer environments, it is argued, extend thought beyond the everyday in terms of flexibility and reflexiveness.

This chapter suggests how the neoclassical approach, after its demise at the hands of the Romantics, can live on in today’s cognitive poetics and cognitive literary study. The core principle of vraisemblance is proposed as a conceptualization for a cognitive mimesis that depends both on imitation (or enactment) of the cognitive processes represented and on their structuration in the narrative’s overall design. Neoclassical vraisemblance thus enables literature to be seen as an instrument of exploration through different choices in its situational logic. This logic nevertheless remains precise and can be analyzed, for example, through the neoclassical rules. These rules, it is suggested, can be considered as exemplary cases for bringing together cultural and cognitive dimensions of literature.