The Cognitive Turn in Contemporary American Literature (NEMLA 2013)
This panel will explore the 'cognitive turn' in literary studies as it emerges in contemporary American fiction and non-fiction. Since George H. W. Bush declared the 1990's the "decade of the brain," there has been a surge of cross-disciplinary work done at the site of cognitive studies, neuroscience and the humanities. For example, scholars such as Lisa Zunshine and Paul John Eakin have called for literary methodologies that account for cognition and perception in their analyses. Additionally, a growing number of fiction and non-fiction texts use cognitive studies and neuroscientific research to upend generic constraints, as well as challenge assumptions about how we construct, perceive, and describe the world and ourselves within it.