Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: An Introduction

Literary studies and the cognitive sciences, pursuing common interests in language, mental acts, and linguistic artifacts, have developed markedly different approaches to similar phenomena of reading, imaginative involvement, and textual patterning. Until quite recently, the distance between them has drawn more attention than their possible convergence (Franchi and Güzeldere ). A number of literary theorists and critics, however, have steadily been producing work that finds its inspiration, its methodology, and its guiding paradigms through a dialogue with one ormore fields within cognitive science: artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, postChomskian linguistics, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. Reuven Tsur () has been developing his ‘‘cognitive poetics’’ since the s; the prominent psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland (: ) demonstrated the advantages of attending to the ‘‘more powerful psychology’’ emerging from cognitive neuroscience in ; Mark Turner (: viii) advanced his far-reaching project of a ‘‘cognitive rhetoric’’ in ; and Ellen Spolsky (: ) trenchantly brought a theory of ‘‘cognitive instability’’ to bear on literary interpretation in . These and likeminded critics respond to the limitations (or, in Spolsky’s case, missed opportunities) of poststructuralist conceptions of meaning and interpretation by questioning the reigning models in the field, whether in the interest of