The Human Mind Mapped through Literary Readings

Abstract

Since the 1990s, with the rise of cognitive sciences, there has been a theoretical turn in humanities, with radical consequences for literary studies. They are regarded as vehicles for our everyday conceptual capacities and as products of the human mind, grounded in general cognitive abilities and firmly anchored in the minute architecture of bodies and brains. This major claim changed the nature of how literature is understood, while literary critics have developed new tools to understand the complexities of literary language and cognition. This paper will focus on the newly emergent study of literature with a cognitive lens. More specifically, with the tools and advances of cognitive poetics and narratology to literary reading, it seeks to explain the cognitive mechanisms that become evident in readings. This type of research shows how reading literature offers benefits back to cognitive science and promises to reveal much about how our brain functions.