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Lecturer in
Cognitive Science
tel: 216-368-0115
office: Crawford 604B
vera DOT tobin AT case DOT edu
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Vera Tobin
PhD in English Language and Literature, University of Maryland
Research interests: Social cognition, joint attention, pragmatics and discourse analysis, cognitive approaches to language and literature
My research is primarily dedicated to using linguistics and cognitive science to explain basic phenomena in literature, its production, and its reception. I give special attention to issues in social cognition, especially the way that language is used to coordinate attention, and to twentieth-century British literature and reading communities. Like many of the modernist authors that I study, I also have a weakness for--and interest in the mechanics of--detective fiction and thrillers of the period.
Some projects currently underway
Literary joint attention:
This is a multi-part study, begun in my dissertation, of the literary mechanics of our uniquely human cognitive ability to conceive that we are attending to the same object or idea as another person, not just simultaneously but also jointly, and working to achieve that situation. This intersubjective triangulation is crucial for language and representation. As such, it is a fertile site for literary creativity, experimentation, and anxiety.
Cognitive biases and narrative structure:
While successful communication seems to require high levels of intersubjective coordination, there is also a large body of evidence that this coordination often fails in specific ways and that communication can go on regardless. In particular, a pervasive egocentric bias known as the "curse of knowledge" can get in the way of accurately assessing what other people know or believe, and can lead us to misjudge how transparent our own and other people's intentions really are. Narratives can exploit this bias to generate impressive and satisfying aesthetic effects.
Readers and irony:
Traditionally, accounts of irony in linguistics have concentrated on what is known as "verbal irony", or sarcasm. In collaboration with Michael Israel, at the University of Maryland, I have been working on a major project to provide a cognitively realistic account of verbal, dramatic, situational, and cosmic irony within a single unified framework. Our account builds on theories which treat irony as a form of echoic mention or pretense, but draws on a much broader range of ironic phenomena. Related research includes work on cognitive biases as tools for generating ironic distance, and the study of conventionally ironizing narrative elements as structures susceptible to semantic bleaching.
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