N. N. Holland’s Seminar, Brain & Literary Questions:

” I plan to open up these topics: personal styles; what goes on when we read; Chomskyan and post-Chomskyan ideas of language; cognitive theories of metaphor; the mammalian and neo-mammalian brain; kinds of memory; whether language ability evolved; culture and the child’s growing brain. In this seminar, we shall explore ways in which these new discoveries bear on our understanding of literature and the literary processes of creation and response. We shall be reading such people as: Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Hanna and Antonio Damasio, Jerry Fodor, Heinz Lichtenstein, Steven Pinker, Terrence Deacon, Gerald Edelman, some psychologists of reading, and some people who have begun to apply these ideas to literary questions: Richard Ohmann, Mark Turner, Ellen Winner, and myself.”