Cognitive Cervantes: Cervantes and Cognitive Literary Studies

Cognitive literary studies is an interdisciplinary endeavor that brings together humanistic and cognitive scientific knowledge and methodologies to explore the complex intersection of the mind/brain and literature.  Recent anthologies and introductions to the field include among others:

• Gavins and Steen’s Cognitive Poetics in Practice (Routledge, 2003)
• Herman’s Narrative Theory of the Cognitive Sciences (CSLI, 2003)
• Richardson and Spolsky’s The Work of Fiction (Ashgate, 2004)
• Gottschall and Wilson’s The Literary Animal (Northwestern UP, 2005)
• McConachie and Hart’s Performance and Cognition (Routledge, 2006)
• Zyngier et al’s Directions in Empirical Literary Studies (John Benjamins, 2008)
• Brône and Vandaele’s Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps (Gruyter, 2009)
• Aldama’s Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts (U Texas P, 2010)
• Boyd et al’s Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (Columbia UP, 2010)
• Zunshine’s Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
• Leverage et al’s Theory of Mind and Literature (Purdue UP, 2011)
• Jaén and Simon’s Cognitive Literary Studies (U Texas P, forthcoming 2012)

“Cognitive Cervantes” represents the first effort to bring together the work of scholars examining Hispanic literature and more specifically Cervantes’s writings in relation to human cognition.

Topics and approaches addressed may include, but are not limited to: cognitive poetics; cognitive historicism; cognitive narratology; evolutionary literary theory; conceptual blending; embodiment; theory of mind; schema theory, prototype theory; reader response issues such as narrative empathy, the paradox of fiction, and immersion.

Essays should engage with both Cervantes’s scholarship and cognitive literary studies, be between 7,000 and 8,000 words, can be written in English or Spanish, and must conform to MLA style (for more information, see Cervantes’s style guide).