Cognitive Literary Studies Today will take place on February 21 at 4 pm in the Terrace Room (Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460). A small reception will be held at 3:45 pm. Make sure to arrive early for refreshments and hors d’oeuvre.

Here is a short description of each intervention.

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The Narrative Brain: What we Remember and Learn from Stories.

Fritz Breithaupt

Featuring work done by the Experimental Humanities Lab, the talk will present findings from a large story retelling experiment with 15,000 participants in the fashion of the telephone game. What do people transmit, how do they transform stories, and what role does narrative empathy play in the process?

What Are Writers Talking About When They Talk About Social Cognition? From the Notes of an Interloper

Lisa Zunshine

What happens when a critic decides to test ideas from cognitive literary theory in an MFA seminar?

Chinese Hocus-Pocus: Unnatural Narratives from Socialist Realism to Magical Realism

Haiyan Lee

Can cognitive psychology give us a better account of what happens when we read stories populated by unnatural or counter-ontological things and events? Why we are attracted to such stories? I use a Chinese magical realist novel as a test case to consider the analytical payoff of adopting the cognitive approach.