COVER
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
1. Openings
Changing the cognitive environment
Conversation
Ecologies of the imagination
Recognizing life
2. Cognitive Conversations
Literary studies: a cognitive discipline
Bridging the cultures: literature and science
Reflective and pre-reflective cognition
A model of communication
Modes of embodied cognition
Towards a cognitive criticism
3. The Balloon of the Mind
A micro-example: the balloon and the shed
Close reading the cognitive way
Thinking with Pooh: the balloon and the bees
4. Literary Affordances
How to sit on a chaise longue
What is an affordance?
Language as affordance
Literary affordances: conventions, genres
Form as affordance
Cultural improvisation: agency and purpose
5. Literary Imaginations
Imitate the action
Flights of the imagination
Learning to imagine
Cognitive fluidity and epistemic vigilance
Imagination and memory
Competing hemispheres
Images, pale and vivid
6. Cognitive Figures
What counts as a metaphor?
The cognitive fluidity of the metaphorical spectrum
An array of implicatures
Ad hoc concepts and emergent properties
One thing leads to another
The limits of what is communicated
7. Cognitive Mimesis
Gloucester's imagined fall
Mind-reading on the edge
How to step over a chair
Mimesis, kinesis, and empathy
8. The Posture of Reading
The veranda: a cognitive vantage point
A narrative frame for cognitive dissonance
Towards a reflective consonance
9. Literary Values in a Cognitive Perspective
Fungible images
What is literature for?
Downstream conversations
Literature as a cognitive affordance
A sense of wonder: Eeyore's birthday presents
Virtual Manifesto for a Cognitive Approach to Literary Studies
Notes
Preface
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Select Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Concepts and Terms