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The past decade has witnessed a growing interest in cognitive approaches within the humanities. Yet particularly in the study of literature, many scholars remain sceptical towards this development. Reasons for this may lie in the field’s lack of a common theoretical framework, or an old-fashioned concern about the ‘infiltration and contamination [of literary criticism] by other disciplines’ (Waugh). Another reason can be found in the epistemological and methodological uncertainties surrounding the intersection of empirical (cognitive) science and (non-empirical) literary studies. Problems such as the ‘explanatory gap’ between mind and brain, or the different aims of scientific and literary research have not escaped literary criticism. They have given rise to a critical debate on the potential, the scope, and the problems of cognitive approaches. This chapter engages with this discussion about general conceptual criteria for the academic meeting of literature and science from the perspective of literary scholarship. Drawing on Patrick Hogan’s model of the structural relationship between different levels of scientific investigation, and the work of critics such as Marie-Laure Ryan, William Paulson, and Patricia Waugh, it aims to outline a set of theoretical and methodological criteria for cognitive literary studies. Specifically, the chapter develops and proposes three broad guiding principles (coherence, moderation, and autonomy) for the design of cognitive approaches to literature. By elaborating on the conceptual underpinnings and the practical consequences of those guidelines, it provides some conceptual orientation for research situated at the intersection of literature and science. In this way, it also aims to undercut some of the methodological criticism directed at this exciting interdisciplinary field of study.

Chapter 1 argues that Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals can serve as a foundational text for a humanities approach to emotion, but only if it is first disentangled from its heavy-handed editor Paul Ekman and his basic emotions program, which has done Darwin a profound disservice. So liberated, the chapter then argues, Darwin's science of emotion provides a reference point for scholars in the humanities now trying to make their literary criticism speak to natural science. The photograph, illustration, and story-filled Expression is both rhetorical and inseparable from its science that we sometimes imagine transcending its bookish material. This chapter recalls how Darwin's Expression foregrounds the inherent rhetoricity of emotion, thereby outstripping Ekman's science of emotion that claims to follow in its wake, and which has recently found some advocates in the new subfield of Cognitive Approaches to Literature. Instead, the chapter argues that Darwin's rhetoric of emotion is remarkably skeptical, which does not diminish its scientific piquancy, but rather aligns it with our situated theories in the science of cognition mobilized, among other places, by the philosopher of biology Alva Noë.

The chapter explores the neglected affective dimension in reader-response frameworks in cognitive poetics and narratology to advance a more holistic model of how readers make sense of stories. Future narratological frameworks need to accommodate emotion-derived reader responses in story comprehension as a complement to traditional, more narrowly intellect-based reader cognitions. The argument is divided into three sections. First, reiterating Stockwell’s conviction that affect is integral to understanding fictional narrative, a theory of ‘literary emotions’ is proposed in order to account for affective reader responses to fiction. A distinction is highlighted between discrete ‘emotionologies’ (i.e. culture-specific forms of emotional sense-making that produce idiosyncratic reader responses) and an evolutionary repertoire of basic emotions that warrants intercultural intelligibility of fiction. Following this exposition, a close reading of James Joyce’s short story ‘Eveline’ (1914) illustrates the interplay of affective and cognitive-rational components in decision-making processes that surface in fictional characters and reading audiences alike. The hapless heroine epitomizes the topical struggle between pragmatic and emotional contemplations as she unsuccessfully strives to break free from stifling personal circumstances. Readers, by the same token, will find themselves hesitant to condemn the heroine’s indecision as their empathic responses towards Eveline influence their evaluation of the fictional other. As a contribution to narratological theory formation, finally, an appendix attempts to jointly theorize affective and cognitive-intellectual reader responses within the unified framework of a ‘natural’ narratology. Monika Fludernik’s model, due to its emphasis on readers’ cognitive-constructivist construals of narrative, provides a theoretical model well suited to accommodating affective reader responses to literature.