REtrying: The Genre of Romance from the Round Table to Around the Pool

The limits of human understanding are the perennial concern of the genre of romance in both tragic and comic versions. It isn’t surprising, thus, to find parallels between romance motifs and cognitive science theories of knowing. This article discusses Jackendoff’s gradient categorization, the speech act theories of Austin with revisions by Searle, and the developmental psychology Theory of Mind, as the building blocks of our current embodied understanding of understanding in examples from Malory’s Morte Darthur, Cavell’s comedies of remarriage, and Mike Nichol’s The Graduate. The recent predictive processing hypothesis, however, at once the most detailed in neurological terms and also the most abstract, describes human cognitive competence itself as a romance. The hypothesis demonstrates the centrality of error in human cognition by describing mistakes as the trigger for a loop of correction and revision. It allows us as literary scholars to appreciate how artists have rewritten the romance story fitting the genre to current concerns, while remaining true to its cognitive base. Romance is itself the story of being human. We make mistakes, but we are evolved to correct them. Romance is the genre of retrying.