FREN 6260 - Literary Theory and Cognitive Science

(crosslisted)
(also COML 6225)

Spring. 4 credits.

Enrolled students should have a good command of literary theory and/or cognitive science. Conducted in English.

L. Dubreuil.

This graduate seminar would like to offer the possibility of a serious, contradictory and innovative dialogue between ‘humanistic’ and ‘scientific’ disciplines that are often at odds with each other. We are heading toward the emergence of experimental literary criticism, an epistemic discourse that would both preserve the hypercritical potentialities of ‘theory’ and think with the sciences, in order to redefine the stakes of the literary in relationship with animal experience, speculative inquiry, artificial intelligence and robotic models. The first part of the semester will be devoted to the uneven debate between Continental philosophers, literary theorists or critics and cognitive scientists, such as Zizek, Pinker, Malabou, Cary Wolfe, or J.-P. Changeux. The second part will be a kind of collaborative workshop centered on one category or problem of high relevance to literary studies (such as fiction, or the poetic use of language, etc.) Texts of literature, theory, criticism, philosophy and cognitive science will be read in English, with access to the original language, when needed.