The Fantastic and Cognition

What does it mean to read a literary text? What are readers doing during their reading? In this course we will learn about a way of understanding literature based on the study of cognitive metaphor. We will focus on the intersections between literature and cognition, starting from the assumption that our embodied responses shape our comprehension of what we read.

We will start by assessing the sources, influences and history of “cognitive poetics” as a method of literary interpretation. The literary emphasis will be on our responses as we actively read fantastic poems, short stories and plays from the literary traditions of Hispanic and Luzophone Latin America, the US, Canada, Italy and England. We will discuss point of view, conceptual metaphors, the representation of space and time, and the formation of empathy and visual mental imagery in readers. We will learn the characteristics of the fantastic as a genre and its relationship to science fiction, magic realism, the gothic and fairy tales.

If literary texts are objects produced by evolved human minds through language, literature’s visible material, then literature may be not only a primarily representational medium, but one that modifies or transforms representation. Our work in class will continuously question the reach and limitations of bridging what know about the mind from Cognitive Science and Literary studies, in an attempt to widen our interpretative skills of cultural phenomena beyond the literary.