Second Workshop:
Literary History and the Brain
Cognitive science typically assumes that the mental structures it studies
are invariant over historical time, while literary history tends to adopt
the contrary presupposition, that nothing historically invariant comes
within its purview. We would like to challenge both of these assumptions,
and to forge a middle ground where culture can be shown both to emerge
out of and also to feed back into the structure of the brain. Work at the
intersection of literary studies and cognitive science has to date tended
to adopt a synchronic approach, focusing on subjects such as figurative
language, narrative, genre, or poetics. At the same time recent studies
in Cognitive science demonstrate an increasing awareness of the importance
of historical and other contingent factors in the development and "attunement"
of mental structures. How might such factors be taken into account by cultural
historians working with cognitivist paradigms or presuppositions? The three
proposals for this panel represent three distinct, but compatible, attempts
to situate identifiable cognitive structures and procedures, as concretely
embodied in literary texts, within their historical contexts.
