A Review of The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities

Abstract

Cognitive literary criticism has arguably been the fastest growing area of criticism in recent times. A field characterised by diversity, it is unified by an analytical animus: to discover what the cognitive sciences can teach us about art, and what art can teach us about cognition. More specifically, it engages with contemporary neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy of mind, to consider the nature of sociality, empathy, perception, and consciousness in relation to literature and the processes surrounding its production and consumption. In particular, second-generation cognitive literary criticism-which is premised on a model of the mind as embodied, culturally and ecologically situated in a particular environment, and enacted through our interactions with this environment-has revealed the ways in which classical, dualist approaches to literary notions of interiority inadequately represent both human experience and behavior and literary encounters, and the interactions between them. Though controversial, cognitive literary criticism has made significant contributions to the broader field: the synthesis of cognitive science with the literary produces a model of knowledge able to move between objectivity and subjectivity, synapse to syntax, the empirical to the experiential.The field has been developing since (at least) the 1980s, with the work of Norman Holland deploying cognitive neuroscience as a powerful hermeneutic tool in literary analysis. In concert with the development of cognitive science technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and other forms of neuroimaging techniques, interest in cognitive literary studies has expanded exponentially within the last four decades. As Isabel Jaén and Julien Simon argue, "By the end of the 20 th C, cognitive

TEXT reviews October 2022

“…Now in a more enlightened era, neuroscientist Isabelle Wentworth wrote recently in a review of a chapter of mine: "…cognitive science does a lot of speaking about authors' brains, and much less listening. Here we get the opportunity to hear from an author directly as they reflect on their own cognitive processes" (Wentworth, 2021).…”