From the most intimate reading experience with your favourite novel to the debates on the pages of Morgenbladet and in the halls of Litteraturhuset, individually and collectively, literature engages, shapes and connects our thoughts and feelings. In the last two decades, a new research programme in cognitive literary study has been devised that brings literary theory together with psychology and the neurosciences. Cognitive literary study moves towards an understanding of how our imagination and feelings play a central role in human thoughtlife and, despite the tag in the singular, it ranges across a rich portfolio of approaches.
This course revolves around the new answers that cognitive literary study proposes to age-old questions on literature:
(1) Why do we have literature? Does it serve a particular purpose in evolutionary history? What is the role of cultural achievements, such as reading and writing, vis-à-vis basic cognitive and emotional capacities?
(2) How do you run experiments on literary texts? How do authors experiment in writing? How do literary texts invite thought experiments in readers?
(3) Can we connect to other ways of thinking by reading the literatures of another period or another time? Do you feel like a Roman when you read Ovid? Does your experience shape-change as Virginia Woolf's Orlando travels through the centuries in male and female guises?
Moving through these central questions of cognitive literary study, in this course, we develop an account of what the study of literature can contribute to the study of human minds in psychology and how it can intervene in the current public debates around the workings of the brain.
On completing this course, students will
- have sound knowledge of recent developments in cognitive literary study and how they relate to older approaches, such as deconstructivism, close reading and hermeneutics
- develop skills in interdisciplinary literacy and in relating literary phenomena to other scholarly discourses
- get the opportunity to develop arguments about the topic in a clear and convincing fashion