Cognitive Approaches to World Literature

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The course is designed to enable students to use cognitive neuroscience to read world literature. It's centered around two general issues: how our hunter-gatherer brain supports the production of a wide range of literatures and how the study of literature, in turn, can be used to understand our species' cognitive design. This approach introduces students to cutting-edge interdisciplinary research. Studying literature from across the globe together with cognitive neuroscience will also explain how universal cognitive capacities actually support local environmental variations in language, script and genre. Students can use this foundational survey course to take specialized classes on literature and emotion, and storytelling and the brain.