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SUMMARY:Reading Kafka Cognitively - Emily T. Troscianko\, St John’s Coll
 ege\, Oxford
DTSTART:20140127T170000Z
DTEND:20140127T183000Z
UID:TALK50172@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Erica Wickerson
DESCRIPTION:We can’t read in any way other than cognitively\, of course\
 , but for much of the 20th century this fact was not reflected in academic
  discourses on literature\, which tended to prioritise more complex theore
 tical frameworks over the specifics of text-reader interactions. Over the 
 past three decades or so\, cognitive literary studies has\, albeit with ma
 ny different emphases and commitments\, begun to work through the implicat
 ions of acknowledging that literature exists only through our cognitive en
 gagement with it. Recent rapid advances in many of the fields grouped toge
 ther under the heading of the ‘cognitive sciences’ make this kind of i
 nterdisciplinary dialogue much more viable and fruitful now than it was ev
 en 20 years ago. In this talk I use Kafka’s works as a case study to sho
 w how a scientifically informed cognitive approach can help us better unde
 rstand literary texts and readers’ potential interactions with them\, in
 cluding in an empirically testable sense. My approach tries to keep things
  simple by applying relevant scientific theories and findings directly to 
 the analysis of textual features\, through the lens of what I call ‘cogn
 itive realism’. I give examples from the realms of vision and imaginatio
 n\, emotion\, and cognitive pathology\, and in general advocate an approac
 h to cognition that takes seriously its embodied and enactive essence.
LOCATION:326 Raised Faculty Building
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