She studied at Smith College and eventually graduated with honors from McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 1964 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.
The senior faculty, many world experts in their fields, were challenged by the younger scholars who championed the generative linguistics of Noam Chomsky.
After these lectures, the couple attended gatherings at the home of Professors Charles and Flo Voegelin in order to discuss the cross-disciplinary applications of the linguistic theory from the lectures, an experience which inspired Spolsky to go beyond the limitations of New Criticism which were the norm in most departments of English and to integrate new theoretical ideas into her work.
This linguistic influence became a part of Spolsky's dissertation which was an early semantic analysis of Old English poetry from the Exeter Book.
[9][10] In addition to her scholarly monographs, she has edited several collections of essays emerging from conferences sponsored by the Lechter Institute at Bar-Ilan.
[12] Spolsky also presents pastoral literature and panoramic paintings in order to show how visual works which distanced themselves from intellectualism and didacticism provided solace by offering muted knowledge to those in the midst of reformation conflicts regarding word and image.
[16] The works that Spolsky explores in this book included many cases of the mental leap of faith or a deus ex machina ending where only divine intervention can resolve the problems of the plot.
[17] Additionally the artwork of Susannah's false accusations and the trial in the concluding portion of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia both rely on the intervention of a godlike figure or prophet in order to resolve the narrative.
[19] In Word vs Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare's England, Ellen Spolsky expands on the themes of her earlier works: "the modular mind" in Gaps in Nature (1993), language in Satisfying Skepticism (2001), and vision in Iconotropism (2004).
Spolsky expands on how the neurological conflict between vision and language is played out soon the stage, as there is a dissonance between what you hear in the theater and what you see.
[21] For example, The Rape of Lucrece can be read as "toggling between abstraction and concretization"[22] as art does, but the poem also plays to cognitive hungers specific to the time in which it was written.
Spolsky's examples of grotesque art are: Michelangelo's statue of the nude risen Christ (1514–20) in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome and by Shakespeare's Cymbeline (1609–10).
Professor Spolsky has positioned herself on the frontier of a new kind of literary criticism; one that also questions what features are innate to our cognitive function.
She is mainly interested in how the brain functions in the context of literary criticism, that is to say what influences our perception and reality and how that informs the way that we process new ideas.
The current importance of Spolsky's work exists in her ability to draw information from biological, social, and literary history.
She crafts a strong argument for the importance of art and literature as both reflective and integral pieces of culture without which we would exists in a world of immutability.