Document Type
Article
Abstract
The discipline of literary studies has recently gained powerful allies in the sciences and popular media. Scholars in the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience and cognitive psychology, have newly taken up literature's defense, conducting empirical studies to prove that literature has value—particularly researching whether fiction reading produces empathy. Both the media reports, and the empirical studies themselves, however, fail to acknowledge a long history of literary criticism and theory that articulate similar claims. Implicit in this subtext, is the privileging of empirical over interpretive or theoretical ways of knowing. In this discourse, literary criticism is broadly criticized for its variability and ambiguity. This essay explores convergences between the claims of literary theory and findings in cognitive research regarding the reading process and its effects, particularly immersive fiction reading and the experience of empathy, and points to the potential limits of scientific study for apprehending the full experience of immersion in a text.
Repository Citation
Carr, Jamie. "The Art and Science of Literary Study." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 15, no. 3, 2015, pp. 1–23. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol15/iss3/4