This project is about emotion. Specifically, it is about better understanding how emotion really works inside of us, and how we might track its traces in the footprints that language leaves behind.

To understand how people feel, we must first understand what feelings are. When we feel, what happens inside our bodies? We find from recent brain imaging studies that emotion is in fact a much larger capacity dispersed throughout the brain, and how we feel touches everything we do and who we are. The first organized movement to actually conceptualize emotion as essential to thought was British Romanticism; in a time when the term “emotion” was first entering popular usage in the English language, the Romantic poets tried to express what they felt in order to understand how everyone could feel.

To explore unconscious dimensions of emotion as a cognitive faculty, I closely analyze the work of two Romantic poets, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, formulated around explicit political goals: examining the habits of mind that govern our lives in order to disrupt these habits for a new age. Wordsworth and Shelley at their most radical recognized that powerful emotion could be used as a tool of social change; the only way to convince someone to take up a cause is to make them feel differently about it, and that means examining how they have come to view the world before that moment of encounter.

I argue that we can read unconscious emotion in two different categories of language that corresponds with each poet: deixis (Wordsworth) and metaphor (Shelley). Each category operates on pre-conscious assumptions that we make about the world, which have organically developed from patterns of feeling over time. Tracing how people point to things and people within Wordsworth’s localized ballads reveals how members of a community determine who belongs and who does not. Examining Shelley’s metaphors exposes how metaphorical speech is only successful among those already in on the cultural connotations of an analogy.

Further than these “universals” though, how might another mind experience these emotional moments in text? From this marginalized perspective, what might we come to understand about the neurotypical brain? Across these chapters, I explore how unconscious emotion is tied to language in ways that neurotypical scholarship might not have previously considered.

This chapter is about understanding what emotion is, based on the most up-to-date and widely-accepted research in cognitive neuroscience.

First, I consider the historical development of the word “emotion” itself, not only to establish a Romantic conception of the term but also to highlight its longstanding connections with political action. Next, I detail how neuroscience has advanced our understanding of emotion as a neurological process in the late 20th century by introducing a new conceptual possibility: that emotion may be considered as an unconscious evaluative capacity in the brain rather than solely as disruptive mental states.

Understood in this way, emotion’s interconnections to other everyday cognitive functions such as decision-making, memory, and attention – all of which become engaged in processes of reading – become clear despite longstanding assumptions to the contrary. Finally, I consider manifestations of unconscious evaluation within the English language, especially in the form of deixis. Because deictic terms derive their semantic meaning from context, necessarily developed by a subject position, I propose that deixis itself is linked with the emotional categorizing of the world that humans do automatically.

Ultimately, I argue that deixis can be read as an expression of pre-conscious emotional appraisal, on the basis that indexing demonstrates the direction of a speaker’s attention and imperatively directs a reader’s attention to what is judged as salient. Contrasts against other subjects and objects in the environment reveal that the focus of attention is attached to positive or negative value and allows us to understand basic facts about our world – what is a person? Where are we? What is around me? – in identifying those things. Pronouns like “us,” “them,” “she,” and even “it” demonstrate who we consider to be a person and our affinity with them. Adverbs like “here,” “there,” “now,” and “then” establish a stable setting of time and place needed to orient ourselves. Finally, demonstrative pronouns like “this,” “that,” “these,” and “those” can establish relationality in communicating proximity or distance.

All three of these dimensions inform who we know ourselves to be; attending to deictic utterances therefore reveals much about how an internal worldview is constructed. These subconscious directives can and should be questioned to reveal inevitable biases that come with socialization.

This chapter is all about testing my hypothesis about deixis, which I established in the previous chapter. I chose as my subject of study the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, because Wordsworth proves to be deeply invested in the ways that community is governed by emotion, even unconsciously.

Everyday life is shaped by how we feel about our surroundings and the people within them, even if we are not aware of how we feel in a particular moment. In observing how this happens around him, Wordsworth is especially preoccupied with what he perceives the here and now to be lacking: gestures of pointing “there” to a romanticized and distant “that” dominate the collection as examples of what we should be paying attention to rather than what we are paying attention to. Poems of interest include “The Thorn,” “We Are Seven,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” and more.

This chapter is invested in several key questions: does attention to deixis in Lyrical Ballads alter readings of Wordsworth’s work? Does my framework of emotion-as-judgment elaborate on Wordsworth’s intended poetic purpose? From my readings, might we consider deixis as a point of intervention in understanding how communities are formed? This cognitive approach to analyzing Lyrical Ballads parallels other already well-established lines of inquiry. The act of pointing to something can never be a neutral act, as a subject always does the pointing and thus phenomenologically imparts their value onto the object. Ultimately, I argue that the way that a writer who is dramatizing a moment of encounter with the Other distributes pointing words like “this,” “there,” and various pronouns reveal an underlying emotional system of value built over time that imposes itself upon our relationships: we feel closer to some and distant from others.

This chapter shifts away from deixis to focus on a category of language that is more conventionally associated with emotion in the humanities. Metaphor has in common with deixis the way that it can direct a reader’s attention. However, it has already been tied to conventional humanist understandings of emotion in ways that deixis has not.

Similarly informed by cognitive science, I critically read instances of metaphor as emotional language that we often take for granted (I should clarify that “metaphor” in this chapter refers strictly to the category of cognitive metaphor, rather than the purely aesthetic category of poetic metaphor: I am interested in how metaphor functions within the brain.) A large part of the way we communicate is metaphorical, but these metaphors are so commonplace in everyday expression that we do not often break down the comparisons that we rely on in speaking clearly to one another. Interrogating the relationships between the body and the world around it as well as around other bodies through commonplace “background” metaphors reveals yet another way that unconscious emotional processing shapes our speech.

We become accustomed to thinking of the world around us according to a certain schema that becomes integrated into the way we write, which can sometimes blind us to systemic injustices faced by persons on the margins. In order to understand the assumptions that underlie much of our communication, we might confront these instances of metaphors with a reading style that is atypical, or that does not share those assumptions necessary to interpret metaphors instantaneously.

First, I explain current cognitive theories of metaphor and explore discrepancies in metaphor processing that occur in individuals with autism, demonstrating how metaphorical interpretation is not a straightforward process and should be further investigated. After I establish what we know about how the brain processes metaphor, I trace Percy Shelley’s theory of language at a particular time of composition and compare it to our current knowledge base. Once this baseline about what is and is not true about the mind has been thoroughly explored, I will read the way that Shelley uses metaphor to achieve his ‘radical’ political goals within his 1820 Prometheus Unbound collection, focusing solely on the lyrical poems. After I explore the various assumptions about metaphor that Shelley’s poetry makes (perhaps without realizing), I compare Shelley’s use of metaphor to other literary representations of metaphor, particularly those by autistic poets like Hannah Emerson, that reveal gaps in his theories.

To wrap up the dissertation, first I review the scope of the project:

I have proposed that emotion is an unconscious function of mind that affects other aspects of cognition like decision-making and judgment. Because of this notion of emotion as unconscious, it stands to reason that language – another capacity of mind dispersed widely throughout the brain – would also modify or effect emotion. I thus proposed two categories of language that might further show this link: deixis, or indexing, and cognitive metaphor. My interests in close reading poetry for these forms of language are rooted in advancing the critiques and questions of the Romantic period, but this scholarship should also be part of broader conversations about power and politics. Deixis and metaphor are not merely poetic categories; everyday speech includes both deixis and metaphor, and all manners of people deploy them in every language in everyday interactions.

Considering deixis and metaphor as fundamentally emotional categories in their connections to unconscious habits of mind not only frame language as a tool of individual expression (revealing one’s personal perceptual reality to an Other), but also as a tool of power (structuring one’s world with an utterance). Power in language is not always perceived, but the effects of its exertion are felt nonetheless and have material consequences on our world. The larger investment of this project is not just in revealing how individual speakers reveal their emotional biases to a reader, but also explaining how language comes to dominate others’ perspectives. An individual’s biases can be further guided by the language they encounter outside the realm of fiction.

I end by exploring real-world applications of deixis and metaphor to evaluate how unconscious emotion is often weaponized for political purposes. I then attempt to envision interdisciplinary collaboration with traditions similarly invested in or concerned with these kinds of political machinations by adopting best practices inherent to the discipline, like in anti-racist and Indigenous scholarship.

Lastly, I demonstrate the ways in which Autism Studies in literature might support the missions of these ongoing projects.