Literary Experiments with Cognition

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to contribute a paper to the Special Issue “Literary Experiments with Cognition”.

Experiments with human cognition usually take place in a laboratory. Today, neurocognitive researchers can locate language processes in the brain with unprecedented precision. We now know that understanding words depends on the surprising interaction between what was previously believed to be distinct brain areas. For example, hearing or reading the phrase “life is rough” activates brain regions devoted to touch (Lacey, Stilla, & Sathian, 2012), and moral disgust is connected to visceral stimulation (Sapolsky, 2017). In other words, the sensory experiences of rough surfaces and nausea ground our understanding of these abstract concepts. Similarly, we are able to read because evolution has provided us with an object recognition system, shared with monkeys, that can couple scripts with brain areas (unique to humans) coding for meaning and pronunciation (Dehaene, 2009). When it comes to the sound shape of language, entrainment through rhythm or repetition (the “when”) can determine selective perception and cognition (the “what”) (e.g., Poeppel and Teng, 2020). Understanding language depends on everything from embodied cognition to shape recognition and the processing of phonological patterns.

But, this dynamic nature of comprehension is something that writers experimented with long before scientists began scrutinizing brains with the help of fMRI and PET scans. From the mnemonic phrases of Homeric ballads to the missing vowels of Georges Perec, literature is rich in examples of how language comprehension goes beyond words. That is why an examination of literary form is particularly potent for explorations of the extent to which cognitive processes are integrated.

We invite essays that approach this question from the perspectives of conceptual integration, reader reception, and empirical studies, thus contributing to the growing field of cognitive literary studies (see e.g., Kukkonen et al., 2019; Zunshine, 2015). Topics could include mnemonics, deixis, affordance, narrative structure, and other formal elements that might influence emotions, empathy, attention, or comprehension. We also invite papers that examine the relationship between script and cognition, such as the capacity of language to communicate through both phonological and lexical routes, as well as issues related to translation. We invite a broad range of interdisciplinary papers from any period, genre, and language that speak to how form might experiment with thought.

This is the first Special Issue of Literature devoted to cognitive literary studies. With this issue, we aim to advance the growing field of cognitive literary studies by probing what literature experiments can tell us about cognition. As Guest Editors, we invite contributions from scholars who are committed to interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature, ideally with expert knowledge of both the cognitive sciences and the humanities.

We envision that this Special Issue will include a range of approaches stating how we can integrate cognitive sciences and literary studies in mutually beneficial ways, with a particular focus on formal experimentation, showcasing the range of the interdisciplinary work that is being carried out by cognitive humanities scholars today. Our hope is that this Special Issue will offer fresh perspectives on how we can read, teach, and study literature in the light of the quickly evolving findings of cognitive sciences.

Dr. Christine A. Knoop
Dr. Aili Pettersson Peeker
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Literature is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• aesthetics
• empirical approaches to the study of literature
• cognitive science
• experimental literature
• phenomenology
• prosody
• reader reception
• script