Abstract
Whether the study of literature can ever be “post-theory” remains an open question. Some have found promising paths to a new literary studies in the cognitive sciences. What forms such paths take, however, vary widely as literary scholars draw from the diverse interdisciplinary agendas of the cognitive sciences (which include such fields as psychology, neurobiology, linguistics, and philosophy). Questions include how the brain processes narrative, how we perceive the printed page, how figurative language is comprehended as something other than simply false, where creativity comes from, and what evolutionary purpose literature serves. While it is therefore difficult to generalize regarding cognitive approaches to literature, we might say they share an interest in “information processing” and the mental structures (whether biological, psychological or cultural) that enable and constrain this processing. In such an approach the arts function primarily as an object of study.