An apt icon for this innovative collection might be the figure of a bridge. That impresa would stand for the linkages drawn between literary criticism and brain science, which until recently have been widely separate domains. It would also symbolize the diligent, constructive efforts of its contributors to build on the work of first-generation New Humanists by beginning to make testable claims to be vindicated by experimentation.

At the risk of over-wringing my trope à la Polonius in Hamlet (1.3.108–9), it might be interesting to speculate on how these researchers would treat my make-believe bridge from a cognitive point of view. The linguists might unpack how it operates as a conceptual metaphor. Those more attuned to fiction, conversely, might explore particular episodes involving bridges, such as the intense, emblematic crossing of the sword-bridge by Sir Lancelot as he pursues Queen Guinevere in the medieval Arthurian romance Le Chevalier de la Charrette by Chrétien de Troyes. Psychologically inclined investigators might run fMRI tests to study how gephyrophobic readers are emotionally triggered by descriptions of dangerous crossing, while those with a background in media studies might compare changing attitudes as depicted in the late colonial epic ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ and the new international mini-series mystery ‘The Bridge’.

What this book actually consists of are fifteen essays as well as an introduction by the editors that examine various ways cognitive science and literary studies might go together. Broadly speaking, they tend to present promising novel theories supported by illustrative test cases. For instance, in Chapter 12, ‘How Readers’ Lives Affect Narrative Experiences’, Richard Gerrig and Micah Mumper take up the important question of how to make general critical claims given the subjectivity of personal responses, by considering different readings of contemporary novels. For example, in A Nearly Perfect Copy, cognoscenti who recognize a snide comment referring to an actual living artist will respond differently than those unaware of his real existence (p. 248). Several cognate themes recur in different chapters, including that selfsame equilibrium regarding taste. The emotional aspects of reading figure prominently; overlapping this issue is an interest in how literature simulates phenomenological experiences, and how it utilizes our capacity to understand and empathize with other people. (The basic ability to recognize that our conspecifics have their own private, individual thoughts, feelings, desires, fears, goals, and identity is known as ‘Theory of Mind’, and it is a big deal in psychology now.) Whether or not immersion in books does in fact improve empathy and Theory of Mind are currently hot questions in the field, resonant in a few pieces here. Another central theme is the move towards an empirical science of reading, especially prominent in Chapters 3, 9, 11, 12, 14, and 15. The last two chapters present current neurolinguistic research on word-processing, and perhaps not by accident, seem open-ended regarding new directions in neuroaesthetics vis-à-vis the verbal arts. In fine, Cognitive Literary Science offers something like a mosaic or collage representing where things stand at present.

The strongest chapters delve into the very heart (to speak figuratively, of course) of what gives stories their specialness. In Chapter 7, ‘Cognitive Science and the Double Vision of Fiction,’ Merja Polvinen unpacks the enactive, imaginative, “seemingly paradoxical mental state … required of us when experiencing” a fictional text (p. 142). She builds on both classic traditions of how people respond to stories and suggestive recent neurophysiological studies of what brains are actually doing when processing ‘make-believe’ narratives so as to extend and deepen our understanding of what seems almost magical. From the perspective of enactive cognition, the act of reading stories is formative as much as it is informative (p. 142). Chapter 11, ‘Embodied Dynamics in Literary Experience’ by Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., also usefully draws on experimental data in support, and utilizes another element of the au courant 4E paradigm, namely, embodied simulation. (4E cognition takes the mind to be embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended.) Here, Gibbs contends that embodied simulation plays a crucial role in how actual flesh and blood readers imaginatively project themselves into written works. This applies not only for, say, highly energetic action sequences like Beowulf’s fight with Grendel, but also right down to apprehending metaphors based on physical movement, like “his heart soared when he received her billet-doux”. This occurs because we deploy areas in the brain dedicated to perceptual and motor systems when thinking about motion. It is a suggestive, engaging argument.

Chapter 13, ‘On Truth and Fiction,’ by Keith Oatley, is truly a standout. Against those who question the value of serious reading, a position hearkening back to Plato’s Republic, he asserts its worth. Oatley maintains that stories do indeed make us smarter and better overall. He also brings in empirical findings in support of his proposals that the ludic mental disportation we get from mimetic narrative enhances our Theory of Mind and capacity for sympathy, increasing our all-important social expertise. The arts precipitate a deep transference in the minds of observers:

In the 1580s, Sir Philip Sidney had responded to misomousoi, ‘poet-haters’, by penning his Defence of Poesy (by ‘poesy’ he meant all genres of creative imaginative literature); Oatley’s piece amounts to a credible, substantial update for our times, in which after five centuries of existence, the humanities are fast becoming an endangered species.

Emily Troscianko’s individual input, Chapter 9, ‘Feedback in Reading and Disordered Eating’, possesses a certain positive duality. (This is somewhat ironic given its firm opposition to the obsolete Cartesian mind–body split.) It is based on surveys of readers with eating disorders, which it anatomizes scientifically, making it a model for how the messy, complex, idiosyncratic evidence coming from actual individuals might be usefully categorized, with clear charts of different kinds of germane feedback. It also moves in the direction of helping to establish practical treatments for those suffering from anorexia. As Troscianko states in her concluding paragraph:

Though in our post-truth era, in which education is increasingly valued mainly for its direct monetary value, it can be hard to maintain optimism about the fate of the humanities, one can at least daydream about projects like this one leading to additional support for a wide range of programs promoting literacy education – a reading cure?

Chapters 5 and 6 illustrate some ways this subdiscipline, despite its promise, remains incomplete. These two essays are both by distinguished gentlemen whose previous monographs have done much to establish cognitive literary studies, but their efforts here feel perfunctory. Brian Boyd’s ‘Patterns of Thought: Narrative and Verse’ draws on his two recent books, on stories and poetry, respectively, to explore verbal “art as cognitive play with patterns” in Shakespeare (p. 93). He looks first at Twelfth Night and then at a selection of the Sonnets. His brief treatment of the play seems like a traditional structuralist approach. In light of the latest neurolinguistic findings, it might have been interesting for him to have taken up suit as an image cluster. This leitmotif relates literally to the ill-fitting wardrobes of the veiled Lady Olivia, obstinately mourning her long-dead brother; the disguised, cross-dressing Viola; and the misled, madly attired Malvolio. It also relates to the suit-ability of various matches and the salient, socially critical romantic pur-suits of the characters, issues connected via puns and other verbal echoes. In the Sonnets, Boyd emphasizes the lack of a narrative. To some degree, Shakespeare here diverged from the typical Elizabethan sequences in vogue in which the poet charted out the frustrating courtship of a pulchritudinous but cruel inamorata by her smitten Petrarchan lover. Instead, the focus in on stasis in poems 33–36, and hence how the author devices exquisitely crafted poetic variations on the loving but flawed relationship between the speaker and the object of his affection, expressed in terms of stormy meteorological comparisons. In Chapter 6, ‘Simulation and the Structure of Emotional Memory: Learning from Arthur Miller’s After the Fall’, Patrick Colm Hogan explores a modern American dramatic tragedy. He offers helpful ideas linking passion and absorption (in fiction in general) but his interpretation of the play at hand is not particularly cognitive. Rather it presents a fairly traditional ‘folk psychology’ view of the angry main character Quentin. Hogan’s enquiry would have been sharpened by considering the fact that, in a play, audiences are watching actors who physically embody roles, something rather different than a reader envisioning a character in her mind’s eye from words on the page. Skeptics would find other instances in this volume that likewise appear to be somewhat established interpretations gussied up with a veneer of scientific terminology rather than original insights per se. In both these chapters, furthermore, and indeed throughout the book, tying the investigations to relevant findings in evolutionary biology would surely have strengthened things overall. It feels like something of a missing link or the next span to cross in advancing towards an integrated, consilient, probative science of literary study. It is now acknowledged that humans possess the brains they do due to eons of natural and sexual selection, and a robust field of academics interested in biocultural aspects of civilization have, in parallel to strict neuroscience, been exploring the results.

Also, the first name of the prominent literary Darwinist surnamed Gottschall is Jonathan, not ‘Thomas’ as found on page 28, and the numbering for the examples on page 297 is off, making the ensuing paragraph unclear.

In spite of these potholes, Cognitive Literary Science helpfully advances matters. Besides the particular content of the chapters mentioned above, it bestows additional ‘affordances’, as certain cognitivists would put it. Reflective, inquisitive scholars may benefit from observing how a variety of European, British, and American critics grapple with questions of methodology and evidence, epistemological issues across disciplines, gnosis and praxis, and efforts to explain or justify their findings. On a connected note, the wide-ranging references and citations to research far afield from mainstream Literature or Linguistics, whose very existence is all but unknown in most English Departments, has major potential value. How interesting it might be to peruse Bayesian theories of narrative, a mathematical analysis of the fluid amorous relationship between Laura and Petrarch, or haemodynamic response in the mid-cingulate cortex correlating with immersive reading of Harry Potter (p. 322) (though obviously haemodynamic response in the mid-cingulate cortex correlating with immersive reading of young-adult fantasy has become something of a clichéd viral meme on social media).

This work would be a worthwhile addition to the bookshelves of linguists and academic psychologists concerned with the mind-blowing power of words and stories, by those already traversing the bridge who are trying to keep apace of new directions, and for conventional littérateurs eager to get away from lamestream traditional approaches and learn about the exciting, significant work now being done by these Third Culture cognitivist critics.