Affect studies and cognitive approaches to literature
pp. 113-133
in: Thomas Blake (ed), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Offering a brief survey of cognitive literary studies, this chapter traces the field's emergence from psychological and phenomenological approaches to literary studies, and it describes a variety of influential approaches within the field as well as perspectives on the prospects of the approach. Taken together, cognitive literary theories offer a wide-ranging investigation of the forms and status of knowing in relation to narrative. Turning to affect theory, this chapter explores its studies' contrasting emphasis on how personal and social experience is shaped by forces not reducible to conscious knowledge. After reviewing a key critique of the theoretical basis of such work, this chapter describes affined political and aesthetic projects between well-known statements about affect theory and the approaches and positions adopted by cognitive literary scholars. Emphasis is placed upon how conceptions of the social, material, and virtual inform the projects of cognitive literary studies. It considers how recent scientific accounts of affect that emphasize the role of emotion in shaping thought and memory, and recent philosophical interest in embodiment and enactivism, might promote linkages between the two fields of inquiry.