Where is the Cognitive Turn Today? (NeMLA 2024, Boston)

Subject Fields

German History / Studies

Where is the Cognitive Turn Today? (NeMLA '24, Boston MA, March 7-10, 2024)

This panel addresses the current state of the ‘cognitive turn’ in German Studies. Abstracts are invited that utilize approaches from all areas of German studies, and which are founded upon theories from psychology and the cognitive sciences. The panel is open to studies of literature, visual media, visual art, or other aesthetic or cultural products. Potential topics might include the interplay between cognitive studies and illness, trauma, gender, issues of diversity and inequality, disability studies, reader response, ToM, or advertising, among many others. The panel casts a wide net.

The growth and influence of cognitive theories in German studies reflects the significant contributions that our colleagues in fields like psychoanalysis, psychology, and the neurosciences have made towards our collective understanding of the human mind. The importance of mental processing to the construction and experience of cultural products is well established. This includes the mental states not only of the readers and viewers, but those of narrators and authors as well. The discipline of cognitive poetics, while still relatively young, is an example of the cognitive turn in literary studies. As readers in this vein, panel participants will understand texts not merely as examples of cognitive processes made manifest, or as phenomena of mental production. Rather, the language and the text become phenomena of interpretation in a hermeneutic process that leads to a better understanding of reading itself, of the text’s development, and of our own mental states. As Peter Stockwell writes, the cognitive turn engages in “a thorough re-evaluation of all of the categories with which we understand literary reading and analysis” (7).

Please upload an abstract of 300-500 words to the NeMLA webpage here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP

Sources:

Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002.

Contact Email

charles.vannette@unh.edu