Mind Brain and Literature

Catalog description

This is an interdisciplinary course on the human mind. The main aim is to encourage an understanding of the range and richness of the ways in which the human mind has been conceptualized across the boundaries of literature, cognitive neuroscience and literary theory/philosophy. It is designed to provide students with an opportunity to: 1) learn some of the more significant developments that have emerged from cognitive neuroscience on cognition, emotion, memory, the unconscious, mindreading, visual perception, violence, addiction and sex/gender; 2) relate the scientific findings to larger propositions about the nature and value of human experience found in literary classics; 3) develop skills of practical criticism.'