The name “cognitive literary studies” is of recent coinage, which may seem to imply that this approach to literature is likewise new. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Through two and a half millennia, literary theorists from Aristotle and Longinus to William Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens hypothesized literature’s special capacities to affect our thoughts and feelings and thereby change our minds and hearts. In this sense, poetics—the traditional discipline that treats of the production and reception of verbal art—is and always has been “cognitive literary studies,” advanced under another and more venerable name. | ||
