Other websites about cognitive science
Articles on cognitive approaches to the arts
About CAL
The cognitive revolution of the last thirty years has produced exciting
illuminations of the human mind. Scholars of the arts, and of
literature in particular, have begun to make serious contributions to
this profoundly interdisciplinary project. University of Maryland
English professor Mark Turner writes, "The literary mind is not a
separate kind of mind. It is our mind."
The "Cognitive Approaches to
Literature" Working Group will read and discuss foundational texts, explore
potential research topics, and provide feedback on papers in progress.
Members are encouraged to develop relationships with scholars at the UO's
Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences. Key texts include Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book;
Robert Storey's Mimesis and the Human Animal; and Mark Turner's
Reading Minds: The
Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science.
Links to
other sites of interest:
At the
University of Oregon
Center for the
Cognitive Science of Metaphor at the University of Oregon
http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/metaphor.htm
Institute of
Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon
http://hebb.uoregon.edu/index.html
Elsewhere
Cognitive
cultural studies at UCLA:
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/
Cognitive Science, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Houston
http://www.hfac.uh.edu/cogsci/biblio/index.cfm
Literature, Cognition and the Brain at Boston College.
http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/home.html
(Be sure to look through their extensive
annotated bibliography.)
Selected articles on cognitive approaches to the
arts:
Fromm, Harold.
"The New Darwinism in the Humanities, Part II: Back to Nature, Again."
Hudson Review, Summer 2003.
www.hudsonreview.com/frommSu03.pdf
A fine essay, clear enough for a general audience but so richly
informative that it deserves to be read by academics too. Fromm, like
Gillespie (see below), surveys the "small but rapidly growing band" of
literary theorists who engage Darwinian and cognitive science. The essay's
concluding paragraph is a jewel—trenchant,
funny and moving all at once—but, as
the bloggers say, read the whole thing.
Gillespie,
Nick. "Darwin and Dickens." ReasonOnline, November 1998.
http://reason.com/9811/fe.gillespie.shtml
Gillespie, a former graduate student of Robert Storey's, writes an
in-depth but nontechnical overview of the impact that cognitive science
and evolutionary psychology have had on literary scholarship. He reviews
some of the major texts, including Joseph Carroll's Evolution and
Literary Theory, Storey's Mimesis and the Human Animal, Mark
Turner's Reading Minds, and Frederick Turner's Natural
Classicism and The Culture of Hope. Gillespie does a nice job
explaining the multiple schisms between poststructuralist and evolutionary
lit crit; his summary of the
Sokal hoax and its
fallout is especially tasty.
Various
contributors: Thread on "Evolutionary
psychology and the arts" from the
Evolutionary Psychology list
Scroll to the last message in the thread for Joseph Carroll's
Contributions to Adaptationist Literary Study post.
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