The Verbal Dynamics of Literature: An Interpretation Based on Verbal behavior

Abstract

Literature is one of the themes that is dear to psychology. B. F. Skinner, the proponent of radical behaviorism, devoted himself to literary activities before turning to psychology. He was a diligent reader of literary periodicals and an incipient writer of fictional stories. Despite the failure of his career as a writer, the author did not give up on literary issues in his trajectory in psychology. Furthermore, Skinner also paid particular attention to literary issues within the scope of his theory of verbal behavior, presented in the book Verbal behavior. However, the mentions of literary issues throughout Verbal behavior are mainly dispersed, discussing elements such as prose, poetry, fiction, the writer, and the reader in passages that are not strictly intended to examine literature per se. This lack of systematization makes it challenging to understand literature globally from a Skinnerian perspective and to assess its heuristic potential to contribute to the psychological discussion of this topic. Given this, this theoretical study proposes a radical behaviorist interpretation of literature based on the systematization of Skinner’s references to the theme in Verbal Behavior’s book. To this end, excerpts from the book with allusions to literary issues were identified, searching for the radical’s “liter”, “writ”, and “read” through tracking resources in the digitalized file of the book. The excerpts found were categorized according to four dimensions of analysis: writer’s behavior, literary work, listeners’ behavior, and literary verbal community. The results of that systematization showed that the complexity of constructing a Skinnerian definition of literature is due to its contextualist aspect, which prevents a literal transposition of the speakerlistener-verbal community logic to the writer-readers-literary community dynamic. Based on this, it was possible to identify that the core of a radical behaviorist interpretation of literary verbal behaviors is the dynamic and complex interrelationship between the writer, the literary work, the readers, and the literary verbal community. In this quadripartite relationship, the interaction between the behavior of the writer (as speaker and listener) and close readers (as speaker or listener) is governed by practices of the literary verbal communities and subcommunities to which they belong. These communities and subcommunities, with their unique norms, values, and interpretive strategies, shape the production and reception of literary works, thereby influencing the behavior of the writer and readers. The product of this interaction, the literary work, controls the behavior of close and distant readers, generating, in these readers, emotional reactions (among other aspects), through a series of literary resources that typify the literary work (e.g., the presence of metaphors, symbols, and magical mands). Skinner’s approach reveals the dynamic and complex interrelationship among writers, readers, literary work, and the literary community, a testament to his contextualist perspective on literature. This perspective not only enriches our understanding of literature but also challenges criticisms that question Skinner’s ability to explain artistic achievements such as literature.