“Literary Interpretation” and Cognitive Literary Studies

In the discussions of cognitive literary studies in this and earlier volumes of Poetics Today, there regularly seems to be at least a fairly broad consen-sus as to the significant differences between the typical literary-humanistic and the typical scientific approaches to making claims about a given object of study. Even if the object of study is the same—in this case, literature—a humanistic approach nonetheless seems to establish the validity of its claims in ways quite different from those of a scientific approach. Supporters of cognitive literary studies commonly feel that literary study can benefit from theories and practices that are more in line with the methods of science. To these scholars ’ minds, we can have a reasonable blending of humanis-tic and scientific discourses as long as we are careful about how we bring the approaches together and about what we can expect their blending to reveal. A cognitivist approach to literary interpretation will try to base its claims on relatively solid scientific fact while not failing to treat the text as literature, which is to say as more than a product of biological processes. On the other side, as with theHans Adler and SabineGross () response to the recent Poetics Today special issue (, no. [spring ]), ‘‘Literature and Cognitive Revolution,’ ’ we have at least the guarded conviction that the two approaches may simply be incommensurably different.We cannot really hope for a blending that will work. The split between the ‘‘two cul-tures’ ’ of the sciences and the humanities that bothered C. P. Snow in remains in place. Poetics Today : (Summer ). Copyright © by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.