230633 Contemporary Research Paradigms: Of Brains and Books - The Cognitive Turn (S) (WiSe 2007/2008)

Literary studies have always availed themselves of psychology for the explanation of processes of literary production, reception, as well as for the investigation of characters' mental activities. For the last three decades, mainstream psychology has been dominated by the cognitive sciences. While cognitivism has been accepted practice in (reception oriented) film studies for some time, the study of literary texts building on the foundational work done by cognitivists is still in its infancy, apart perhaps from those contributions inspired by cognitive metaphor theory and work in cognitive stylistics, which are however linked more strongly to linguistics than literary studies. Cognitivism is one major new research paradigm that may well turn out to provide a meta-theoretical framework capable of integrating diverse sub-disciplines in literary studies. In this course, we will study the foundations of cognitive literary studies, investigate the range of possible applications and also discuss the problems of cognitivist approaches to literature that still need to be solved.

A reader containing the most important theoretical texts will be available at the beginning of the semester.