[from pp. 151-52:]

“Not only do we ourselves treat fictional characters as if they were capable of a broad variety of mental states (as real people are) to make sense of the story when we first read it; not only do we casually refer to these characters’ and the author’s mental states in our subsequent discussions with students; not only do we…[Read more]

Is There Tunisian Literature? Emergent Writing and Fractal Proliferation of Minor Voices.
The article presents the Tunisian literature from the non-local perspective of the global literary market and the circulation of translated literature. The minor status of the studied phenomenon becomes obvious even when the Tunisian literature is compared…[Read more]

This primer in “cognitive cultural studies” explores the cultural fantasy of perfect access to mind through body. It shows that different genres and media—movies, novels, classic Chinese operas, medieval ribald tales, musicals, paintings, documentaries, stand-up comedy, and photography—have different strategies for making us think that we have ju…[Read more]

This article is a review of the Haan-Lewalski OUP edition of Milton’s shorter. The book, I argue, is inexcusably difficult to use, and suggests that perhaps the time has come to replace long, very expensive tomes with digital editions.

Have cognitive scientists misread autism? What happens if, instead of simply accepting such research, literary critics turned to the actual prose and poetry written by autistic authors, such as Tito Mukhopadhyay and Donna Williams? Literary theory may never be the same once it comes to terms with neurodiversity.

Editor’s Introduction to Panic Spring. First published in 1937, two years after Durrell took up residence on the Greek island Kerkyra, Panic Spring broke with the realist tradition in 1930s novels and shows the young author’s first attempts to extend High Modernist innovations in rural and personal landscapes. Cubist, surrealist, and imagist…[Read more]

This is a short introductory essay for _The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies_, published in 2015. The areas covered by _The Handbook_ include cognitive historicism, cognitive narratology, cognitive queer theory, neuroaesthetics, cognitive postcolonial studies, studies in emotions and empathy, decision theory, cognitive disability…[Read more]

“The Secret Life of Fiction” uses cognitive literary theory to critique the failure of “The Common Core Standards Initiative” to recognize fiction as a catalyst of complex thinking in students.

This essay was one of the first to challenge the over-stress on close reading as the key to literary appreciation, by advocating a greater stress on literature’s broader context and its achievement in social, political, and religious terms.

This comparative study in the evolution of subjectivity in European literature during the Renaissance ascribes it to the impact of the Reformation on the public representation of authorial identity, differing from Stephen Greenblatt’s later application of Foucault to six Tudor authors.

This article considers the performances of “animal drag” that appear across the affiliated US media projects of Jackass (the television program and film franchise) and Wildboyz (the television program). Drawing on transgender studies scholarship, as well as recent work in affect theory, animal studies, and environmental studies, Nicole Seymour arg…[Read more]

Commedia dell’Arte was the most influential and widespread theatre movement in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Europe. A considerable part of its popularity can be accounted for by its comic representation of stressful occurrences within everyday life in early modern Europe, including in its representation of the period’s widespread dis…[Read more]

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita…[Read more]

Although the question of the role of empathy in our experience of fiction is currently an active one in psychology, most of the relevant research has been conducted on popular literature and film. This dissertation seeks to change that by using cognitive approaches to literature to examine how and why postmodern texts disrupt the reader or…[Read more]