Theory of Mind (ToM) is what enables us to “put ourselves in another’s shoes.” It is mind reading, empathy, creative imagination of another’s perspective: in short, it is simultaneously a highly sophisticated ability, and a very basic necessity for human communication. ToM is central to such commercial endeavors as market research and product development, but it is also just as important in maintaining human relations over a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, it is a critical tool in reading and understanding literature, which abounds with characters, situations, and “other people’s shoes.” Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly apparent that reading literature also hones these critical mind reading skills (Oatley 2009; Mar, Djikic, Oatley 2008; Zunshine 2006).
In her popular book Mindreading: An Investigation into How We Learn to Love and Lie (1997), the primatologist-journalist Sanjida O’Connell defines ToM as:
the mechanism we use to understand what is going on in other people’s heads. How we react to one another socially is the most important aspect of our lives. Without an understanding of what people think, what they want and what they believe about the world, it is impossible to operate in any society. Theory of Mind is the name given to this understanding of others. It is the basic necessity of humanity and is understood the same way the world over. (2)
O’Connell’s use of vocabulary here reflects terms we use frequently in everything we say and write: understand, think, want, believe. She suggests that these verbs have “become invisible” and that “We interpret people’s actions using words that describe their mental states so often that we cease to think about what it is we are actually doing” (3). ToM is the core tenet of what is often called folk psychology (or belief-desire psychology): the default understanding that other people are (largely) autonomous agents, that they have mental states commonly called beliefs and desires, and that they are motivated by these mental states. When we rely on our folk psychology, we tend to understand, define, and describe people on the basis of their perceived (or understood) beliefs, desires, feelings, values, experiences, and intentions. It is because we understand people’s actions in terms of these mental states that we explain to ourselves and to each other why people have done certain things, and predict what they might do in certain contexts.
When we read a work of literature, we treat characters as if they were real people, and we ascribe to them a ToM. We could not understand a novel or a poem if we did not do this:
Without our ability to form a theory of mind, human culture would not be possible. Much of the world of literature, drama, and humor relies on the supreme ability of humans not only to create theories about each character’s mind but also to imagine simultaneously how each of these imaginary minds might view the minds of other characters. The tragic nature of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for instance, comes from a series of misconceptions among the characters that only the audience is aware of. Romeo’s suicide is the result of his thinking that Juliet has died, and the audience is aware that if Romeo knew what they knew, this suicide would not have to have happened. To an audience of monkeys, however, Romeo’s actions would make no sense, because they wouldn’t be able to distinguish between their own beliefs and his.
In this way William F. Allman lays out the basic premise that ToM is as essential for understanding a literary work as it is for understanding a verbal utterance or another human being’s motives (68-69).
Psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar attributes to the human ToM the “crucial ability to step back from ourselves and look at the rest of the world with an element of disinterest” (101). Dunbar describes three levels of ToM: 1) the ability to be aware of our own thoughts; 2) the ability to understand other people’s feelings; and 3) the ability “to imagine how someone who does not actually exist might respond to particular situations” (101-2). Elaborating on this third level of ToM, Dunbar states its obvious implication: “we can begin to create literature, to write stories that go beyond a simple description of events as they occurred to delve more and more deeply into why the hero should behave in the way he does, into the feelings that drive him ever onwards in his quest” (102).
While psychologists and anthropologists have long recognized the importance of ToM to literature, it was not until very recently, with the publication of the first monograph on the subject, that literary scholars began to take seriously the implications of ToM. Lisa Zunshine’s seminal Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006) argues forcefully and eloquently that ToM “makes literature as we know it possible” (10). The title of this work announces the author’s basic premise that ToM is not only an essential prerequisite of the reading experience, but also a motivation for reading. Zunshine argues that reading engages and improves mind reading abilities. This presents an argument for an evolutionary bias of the aesthetic experience, which situates literature squarely within the parameters of the essential human experience and not on the periphery as a distraction for people of leisure and means.
However, the history of scientific inquiry into ToM does not start with human beings, much less with the supremely human creation that is literature. The term itself was coined to describe the inferences and predictions made by chimpanzees. In their classic paper, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” Premack and Woodruff say, “An individual has a theory of mind if he imputes mental states to himself and others. A system of inferences of this kind is properly viewed as a theory because such states are not directly observable, and the system can be used to make predictions about the behavior of others” (115). Their subject, Sarah, was a fourteen-year-old chimpanzee. Sarah was highly trained and famous for earlier work in which she learned to communicate with plastic shapes placed in order. When Sarah was shown videos of a human confronting a problem, her responses indicated she was imputing knowledge and intentions to the human. Premack and Woodruff concluded that the chimpanzee Sarah had a ToM. If questions about ToM were confined to animals, the topic would be of interest only to specialists. But before long, investigators began to ask whether a human necessarily has a ToM. Wimmer and Perner found that a child less than six years old typically seems to believe that if he or she knows something, then everyone else knows it too. Very young children seem not to have developed a ToM, and it also appears that ToM is underdeveloped in autistic people, who often have impaired socialization, imagination, and communication. Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith found that most autistic children are unable to impute beliefs to others, perhaps a source of difficulties in predicting behavior of others.
Investigators suspect that something in the brain changes when ToM develops. In a recent review, Gallagher and Frith conclude that ToM ability is mediated by the anterior paracingulate cortex, with activity of the superior temporal sulcus and temporal poles in a supportive role. Details remain to be settled, but it is remarkable that we are close to discovering how brain activity differs depending on whether or not mental states must be imputed to others.
Complex stimuli are needed for learning how people apprehend the mental world of others. In experiments on ToM, stories are told, videos are shown, and people act out skits. These materials, richer than usual for cognitive scientists, are minimal compared with what literary theorists study, but on the verge. Cognitive scientists notice this, of course, but are reluctant to follow up on their own. As Premack and Woodruff say in their study of mental states, “there are other, more exotic ones [mental states], belonging to the novelist; we will not be concerned with them in this paper” (515).
As we have seen above, the “exotic” mental states Premack and Woodruff impute to the novelist are beginning to be investigated, along with the mental states of the readers who make sense of the novels. For example, Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds proposes that readers construct an embedded narrative for characters from references scattered throughout novels that then permit readers to enter their story world and minds.
Studies in ToM and literature belong to a relatively new area of investigation that brings an understanding of cognitive scientific studies and neuroscience to the reading and interpretation of literature. This “cognitive turn” in literary theory started during the 1980s and was influenced by work in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson). In very recent years the field has expanded rapidly, as more scholars seek new perspectives beyond post-structuralist and social constructionist models of literature.
Theory of Mind and Literature is a timely contribution to the field in advancing current research on reading mental states in fictional characters. However, it is important to recognize that while mental states in novels may appear “exotic” in comparison to any mental states imputed to or by chimpanzees, there is, in fact, nothing even vaguely exotic about mind reading in literature. As Mark Turner has so convincingly argued in The Literary Mind, the cognitive mechanisms for understanding literature are precisely those we employ in quotidian tasks. Lakoff and Johnson’s work on metaphors likewise demonstrated before Turner that human thought processes are largely metaphorical. Literature, as observed above, does not belong to the category of decorative vanities with which we populate our world, but is germane to our human condition. As such, perhaps it may be considered to be a form of distributed cognition, or an agent of what Alan Palmer calls “intermental thought.”
It was in order to explore the implications of ToM for literature and literary theory that the international conference on “Theory of Mind and Literature” was held at Purdue University in November 2007. The idea for this conference emerged during the Literature and Cognitive Science Conference at the University of Connecticut in spring 2006, which was the first North American conference to offer a forum to scholars working at the intersection of two disciplines with increasingly good reason to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. The two most popular areas of research at the Literature and Cognitive Science conference were conceptual blending (a general theory of cognition proposed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier to describe the “blending” that underlies thought and language) and ToM. The aim in bringing a conference on Theory of Mind and Literature to Purdue University was to maintain the momentum of the first conference’s intellectual stimulation, while offering opportunities to explore more deeply one particular subdomain of cognitive literary theory through a tightly focused theme.
The academic collaboration and discussion that set in motion a cascade of ideas and exciting research at the first conference on cognitive literary studies at the University of Connecticut, and the first conference on Theory of Mind and Literature at Purdue, illuminate the essays presented within this volume, which hopefully conveys the excitement of pioneering work in a new area of research.
Theory of Mind and Literature is a collection of nineteen essays by prominent scholars working in the field of cognitive literary studies. The essays, by literary scholars, linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers, range widely across national literatures (Spanish, French, German, British, American), genres (theatre, poetry, science fiction, novel), and historical periods (from the Middle Ages to the functional brain imaging of the twenty-first century), illuminating the central, enduring importance of ToM to our human condition.
Theory of Mind and Literature aims to explore the functionality of ToM as a concept in literary studies, and the scope of its usefulness across a wide range of contexts. Among our interests in assembling this collection of essays are the following objectives: to introduce readers to the myriad ways in which ToM can illuminate critical readings of literature; to present models of how to approach literary texts from a cognitive perspective; to extend the scope of the Theory of Mind and Literature Conference beyond the four days of the conference itself by sharing the insights and perspectives of the new research presented there with a wider audience; and to promote cognitive literary studies in general.
The book is structured thematically, with the nineteen essays organized into five sections. The first section, “Theory of Mind Now and Then: Evolutionary and Historical Perspectives,” features essays by four of the leading scholars currently working in the field: Keith Oatley, Alan Palmer, Mark Turner, and Lisa Zunshine. The following four sections each contain four essays (with the exception of the section on Theory of Mind and Literary / Linguistic Structure with three essays), which cohere thematically under the following headings: “Mind Reading and Literary Characterization”; “Theory of Mind and Literary / Linguistic Structure”; “Alternate States of Mind”; and “Theoretical, Philosophical, Political Approaches.”
The opening section, “Theory of Mind Now and Then: Evolutionary and Historical Perspectives,” introduces some of the central concerns in current discussions about ToM and literature, and in cognitive literary studies in general: evolution (Oatley, Turner, and Zunshine), embodied cognition (Zunshine), distributed cognition (Palmer), and blending theory (Turner). Keith Oatley’s “Theory of Mind and Theory of Minds in Literature” reviews work on evolution, narrative, and ToM. Despite the advantages to having a ToM, data show that humans are “good at theory of mind, but not that good.” For millennia, humans have supplemented meager facts about thoughts and feelings of others with knowledge gained from experience in worlds of narrative. Fiction simulates an entire social world, presenting a “theory of minds,” not only a “Theory of Mind.” It is natural to claim that social understanding benefits from reading fiction, and recent data support this.
Alan Palmer’s “Social Minds in Little Dorrit” continues Oatley’s emphasis on pluralities of mind within fictional social worlds by exploring the workings of social or public minds and intermental thought in the story world of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Alan Palmer contends that while traditional narrative theory privileges an “internalist” perspective on fiction, it is important to recognize that novels are largely invested in social minds, and that an “externalist” perspective, which studies the aspects of the mind that are “outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied, and engaged,” uncovers much unrecognized subtlety. Through careful, close readings, he demonstrates how characters form intermental units that are capable of communicating through facial expressions, looks, and signs, and how Dickens’s prose represents socially distributed cognition. He also draws attention to Dickens’s awareness of physically distributed cognition. In conclusion, he theorizes that eventually, after many more analyses of minds in novels, it may be possible to identify differences among novels, novelists, and literary periods in their emphasis on inner, passive, introspective, individual thought on the one hand, and outer, social, intermental thought on the other, and to attribute these differences to historical, cultural factors.
The essays by Mark Turner and Lisa Zunshine both emphasize cognitive processes integral to everyday living that are manifest in the ways in which we read and construct literature and art: in Turner’s essay, “conceptual, and double-scope, integration”; in Zunshine’s, the physical body’s relation, and perceived relation, to the mind and mental states. In “The Way We Imagine,” Mark Turner describes the mental operation of “conceptual integration,” a cognitive procedure by which conceptual arrays are combined to produce new mental spaces. Particularly important is “double-scope” integration, a hallmark characteristic of human beings. Turner proposes that this ability arose some fifty thousand years ago in the Upper Paleolithic age, and discusses how these double-scope blendings are constructed, and the implications of recognizing this process.
Zunshine’s essay, “Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency,” elucidates how the human body functions as a text to be read by others through brief moments of “embodied transparency”—unintentional, physical indications of emotion. Zunshine provides a short overview of ToM before outlining the double perspective that embodied transparency implies: the body might appear to be the window to the mind, but it does not always provide accurate information regarding mental states. Through a variety of examples from literature, painting, and film, Zunshine situates representations of context-dependent embodied transparencies within our cognitive evolutionary heritage. She concludes the essay by suggesting that the double view of the body may be used to productively interpret how other cultural media, such as the disembodied but extremely social network of the Internet, are shaped.
Following the essays by Keith Oatley, Alan Palmer, Mark Turner, and Lisa Zunshine, the section on “Mind Reading and Literary Characterization” illustrates how bringing ToM to literary studies can augment our understanding of the traditional terms of literary analysis such as characterization. This section thus bridges the divide between more traditional forms of literary criticism and a cognitive theoretical approach. Diana Calderazzo’s essay on the 2005 Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, “Theory of the Murderous Mind: Understanding the Emotional Intensity of John Doyle’s Interpretation of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd,” analyzes the processes of mirroring and empathy, which bring the minds of the audience unconsciously into an intense relationship with those of the production’s macabre characters. Her introduction affords a useful overview of the legend of the murderous barber from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, demonstrating the ageless, universal appeal of the grizzly tale, which she attributes to the biological basis of primary emotional response. Drawing on Antonio Damasio’s insights into the body as a theater of the emotions, and Bruce McConachie’s cognitive analysis of theatrical reception, she addresses aspects of storytelling, concepts of obsession and compulsion, and the function of laughter as a foil to fear within Doyle’s production.
Natalie Phillips’s essay on “Distraction as Liveliness of Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Characterization in Jane Austen” continues the discussion of the reception of characters, but in relation to characterization in the nineteenth-century novel. She contrasts the distractible and flexible Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice with her focused and concentrated sister Mary. She argues that the reader’s ToM is stimulated unequally by the two characters, and that Jane Austen uses this imbalance to impress upon the reader the relative complexity of the mind of Elizabeth. Phillips’s analysis shows that understanding a major character in literature requires extending a comparative ToM to minor characters.
The last two essays in this section by Howard Mancing and Paula Leverage continue to investigate ToM in relation to characterization, but focus less on the reader’s use of ToM in constituting the characters, than on the ToM of the characters themselves. Both of these essays analyze literature from a much earlier period: from the early seventeenth and late twelfth centuries, respectively. In “Sancho Panza’s Theory of Mind,” Howard Mancing examines a scene from early in the second part of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615) in which Sancho uses his chivalric ToM developed throughout the earlier parts of the novel to deceive Don Quixote and make him believe that a peasant woman is the incomparable (and imaginary) beauty Dulcinea. Mancing further argues that the subtlety and sophistication of this scene (and others from Renaissance Spanish literature) refute the claim that the presentation of such subtle mind reading did not appear before the time of Jane Austen.
In “Is Perceval Autistic?: Theory of Mind in the Conte del Graal,” Paula Leverage reexamines the characterization of Perceval in Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century Conte du Graal and in the romance’s reception from the Middle Ages to the present. She argues that the dominant perceptions in the Arthurian tradition of Perceval as a naïve, ignorant young man are constructions from later works, which misinterpret the first literary incarnation of Perceval, who, in Chrétien’s romance, displays the behavioral characteristics of an autistic individual. Leverage’s analysis of Perceval as autistic affords a critical perspective that is relevant to many scenes of the romance, which in the past have been interpreted separately, using in each case quite different models to explain Perceval’s behavior. She further argues that ToM is an important concern of the romance as a whole, which explores communication and its failures.
The third section “Theory of Mind and Literary / Linguistic Structure” continues to probe the relationship between traditional literary criticism and that informed by cognitive science by considering how stylistic elements of written texts such as Free Indirect Discourse (FID) and attributive style mediate the minds of characters, their narrators, and the minds of readers. Jennifer Marston William’s essay “Whose Mind’s Eye? Free Indirect Discourse and the Covert Narrator in Marlene Streeruwitz’s Nachwelt” argues for a reframing of the narrative phenomenon of FID within the context of the cognitive “mind’s eye” metaphor. Through the example of Marlene Streeruwitz’s 1999 novel Nachwelt, which is written primarily in the mode of FID, William illustrates how FID shifts the deictic center and renders the third-person narrator temporarily covert while representing the mind’s-eye view of the protagonist. The unmediated thoughts, motivations, and emotions of the character conveyed by FID prompt the reader’s mind reading processes. At the same time, particularly in a strongly autobiographical text such as Nachwelt, FID allows the author to convey his or her own perspective while maintaining a certain distance from his or her narrator, so that the reader is not encouraged to equate the two positions completely.
In “Attractors, Trajectors, and Agents in Racine’s ‘Récit de Théramène,’” Allen G. Wood provides a close reading of Théramène’s famous récit passage in Racine’s tragedy Phèdre. By applying the cognitive poetic concepts of textual attractors, trajectors, and agents, Wood demonstrates how Racine foregrounds certain aspects to elicit an emotional response in the spectator or reader. Wood contends that the récit functions for Théramène, the guardian of the young prince Hippolyte, as a mind reading device by which he aims to “update” the beliefs of Thésée, Hippolyte’s father, who believes his son to be in love with stepmother Phèdre. At the same time, the passage becomes a mental conduit between the play’s cast and its audience members, who receive insights into the mind of the character Théramène, the first-person narrator for the récit.
The third and final essay in this section, by Ineke Bockting, “The Importance of Deixis and Attributive Style for the study of Theory of Mind: The Example of William Faulkner’s Disturbed Characters,” is a linguistically informed analysis that elucidates how deixis and attributive clauses work to present a fictional character’s ToM. Through a consideration of Faulkner’s characters with cognitive problems, such as the autistic Benjy or the apparently schizophrenic Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, Bockting examines how an unanchored or absent deictic projection can result in a challenging narrative style, but one that reflects the confusion and communicative obstacles faced by these literary figures. Bockting also discusses the significance of attributive verb clauses, which directly reveal characters’ mental experiences, raw sensations, and temporal perspectives.
The fourth section of the book, “Alternate States of Mind,” introduces robots, ghosts, and dream personae, thus expanding the limits of ToM. Orley Marron proposes that we consider what she calls a Theory of Artificial Mind (ToAM) in “Alternative Theory of Mind for Artificial Brains: A Logical Approach to Interpreting Alien Minds.” She bases this ToAM on the stories about human-robot interactions in Isaac Asimov’s I Robot and on the adventures of Alice in the books by Lewis Carroll. We use our ToM in natural, nonconscious ways when dealing with other people, but this is not adequate for understanding the cognitive processes of nonstandard human minds. When dealing with robots or the fantasy inhabitants of Carroll’s worlds, Marron suggests, we must more consciously be aware of the types of logical, deductive steps one must go through in our mind reading processes.
Mikko Keskinen’s essay “Reading Phantom Minds: Marie Darrieussecq’s Naissance des fantômes and Ghosts’ Body Language” introduces the concept of mind reading in relation to ghosts, which is taken up again in the fourth essay of this section by Klarina Priborkin, who writes about the ghost in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Keskinen is exploring the limits of mind reading in a situation in which body language has been silenced. In Marie Darrieussecq’s novel Naissance des fantômes (1999), the female narrator’s husband has disappeared. It is unclear whether he has died or simply disappeared. This ambiguity is the premise of the novel as the wife tries to impute intention and emotion to her absent, ghostly husband through ToM. The novel recounts the narrator’s efforts to read her husband’s mind, basing her inferences on memories, since in her husband’s corporeal absence, she cannot read his body language. Keskinen draws a comparison between the narrator’s reading of the paranormal with reading fictional characters in general, since in both cases “Theory of Phantom Mind” equals “Practice of Absent Body,” and suggests that we supplement Fludernik’s “natural narratives” and Richardson’s “unnatural narration” with the supernatural aspects of narrative fiction.
Continuing the exploration of alternative Theories of Mind in ephemeral beings such as ghosts, psychologists Richard Schweickert and Zhuangzhuang Xi present their research on ToM in dreams. Their contribution, “Theory of Mind and Metamorphoses in Dreams, Jekyll & Hyde, and The Metamorphosis,” looks at metamorphoses in dreams and in two works informed by dreams, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Stevenson, and The Metamorphosis, by Kafka. When a metamorphosis occurs, presumably the inner state of one character is replaced by that of another. But is this noted by the dreamer or author? Schweickert and Xi ask whether an increase in ToM attributions accompanies a metamorphosis.
Klarina Priborkin’s “Mother / Daughter Mind Reading and Ghostly Intervention in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” returns to ghosts, as she shows how Beloved, the ghost of the murdered child in Morrison’s novel, enables the character Denver to acquire the mind reading skills necessary to understand the perspective of her mother, Sethe. Priborkin first traces how intermental thinking shapes the environment in which Denver is raised, contributing to a repression of past black slavery as well as to silence about the infanticide committed by Sethe. Priborkin then analyzes the interactions of Beloved and Denver in the context of ToM, illuminating how Denver’s empathy for her mother did not materialize suddenly and without explanation, but can be interpreted rather as a result of Beloved’s mediation.
The final section of Theory of Mind and Literature, “Theoretical, Philosophical, Political Approaches,” proposes working models for ToM-based analysis developed through functional brain imaging or philosophical inquiry. This section also extends the discussion beyond literature to consider ToM in the political arena, where its role in propagandist agendas is a serious concern. The first essay, Seth Knox’s “Changing Minds: Theory of Mind and Propaganda in Egon Erwin Kisch’s Asien gründlich verändert,” discusses literary propaganda through analysis of the travel book Asien gründlich verändert (Changing Asia), by German writer Egon Erwin Kisch. Specifically, Knox studies the way in which Kisch employs two mind reading techniques: 1) “anchoring” strategies that resonate with the sympathetic reader’s values; and 2) a blurring of the reader’s “source-tracking” ability. With reference to these techniques, Knox adapts Simon Baron-Cohen’s concept of a “Shared Attention Mechanism” to construct a graphic model of propagandist-propagandee relationships. In the three essays that follow, the authors propose further models for investigating ToM, which focus particularly on the relationship between narration, empathy, and mind reading. In “Functional Brain Imaging and the Problem of Other Minds,” Dan Lloyd and his co-authors Vince Calhoun, Godfrey Pearlson, and Robert Astur point out that subjectivity would not be noticed were it not for differences between individuals. This presents a problem for many contemporary attempts to learn about subjective experiences with neuroimaging, because the typical method of averaging over subjects eliminates differences. They discuss an approach in their neuroimaging work in which similar brain images from the same subject at different times are clustered into categories. The passage of the brain from one category to another over time becomes the object of study, and they propose that techniques from narratology may become useful for further development of this approach. Fritz Breithaupt’s “How is it Possible to have Empathy? Four Models” compares sources of empathy using evidence arising in narrative fiction. He notes that three commonly proposed sources are not contradictory, namely (a) empathy from similarity of oneself to others, (b) expectation that empathy extended will be reciprocated, and (c) empathy as a basis for understanding the emotions or predicting the behavior of another. He proposes combining the three in a fourth, (d) empathy arising in a narrative scene. With this proposal, narration enables layers of empathy.
José Barroso Castro’s “Theory of Mind and the Conscience in El casamiento engañoso” opens with a statement by Cervantes from the prologue to his 1613 collection of short fictions, Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Stories). Cervantes claims to have metaphorically placed a billiard table in the public square so that all readers might entertain themselves as they choose with his tales. The author then proceeds to study the mental processes of the two main characters in the story El casamiento engañoso (The Deceitful Marriage), Peralta and Campuzano. Taking a historical perspective, Barroso Castro places his inquiry within the Scholastic and Spanish Golden Age contexts by examining the implications of theologians such as Augustine and Thomas as well as writers contemporary to Cervantes.
The editors of this collection are four Purdue University faculty members who organized the Theory of Mind and Literature Conference at Purdue in November 2007. Paula Leverage, Howard Mancing, and Jennifer Marston William are from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and Richard Schweickert is from the Department of Psychological Sciences. The editors are the founding members of Purdue University’s Center for Cognitive Literary Studies.
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