I plan to open up issues like: What is going on when we are "rapt" or "absorbed" in a literary work? Why do we so easily accept the unrealities of fantasy, science fiction, or fairy stories? How are literary characters like and unlike real people? What is the effect of sitting in an audience? How do we acquire a persistent personality and with it a style of reading and writing? Do cultural materials have an evolutionary effect? All cultures do literature--is literature something in our human genes? This is an exploratory seminar in a relatively new field, the application of cognitive science to our understanding of literary creation and response.

    We will not be reading literature as such--I assume you have done a lot of that--but we will be discussing your experience as readers. We shall be reading such people as: Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff, Hanna and Antonio Damasio, Jerry Fodor, Steven Pinker, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. And we will be reading some people who have begun to apply these ideas to literary and aesthetic questions: Patrick Hogan, Mark Turner, Ellen Dissanayake, Ellen Winner, and myself.

    This seminar comes out of the last three decades' explosion of knowledge about the brain. In 1998, for example, there was a large, multi-session Forum at the MLA devoted to this topic, and there are several web sites continuing to develop it and also, of course, books and articles. I believe literary people will find the topic more and more relevant to thinking about literature.

    Because it is an exploratory seminar, I hope for a good deal of improvisation as we find this or that author or topic fruitful. Because a term paper is not appropriate for this level of this subject, there will be an hour exam (20%) and final exam (60%). Grades will be based on those plus my estimate of how much you have learned and how well you have participated in class and online discussion. If you wish to write a term paper, we can arrange that, but the final exam is obligatory.

    You can contact me at nholland@ufl.edu, and my home page is: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh. The syllabus for the course will be at: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/sem05/memo-s05.htm. The syllabus for an older version of the seminar is available at www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/seminar/memo-s02.htm.