Understanding as Transformative Activity: Radicalizing Neo-Cognitivism for Literary Narratives

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Mikkonen’s new book and his emphasis on understanding should be regarded as an important contribution to the contemporary debate on the cognitive value of literary narratives. As I shall argue, his notion of understanding can also help explain how literature is existentially valuable. In so doing, his account can support a radicalized contemporary neo-cognitivism according to which literature can affect us existentially and lead to a personal transformation.

Related collections

Most cited references 16

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Book: not found

Transformative Experience

L. A. Paul (2014)

0 comments Cited 51 times – based on 0 reviews

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Book: not found

Philosophy, Literature and Understanding : On Reading and Cognition

Jukka Mikkonen (2021)

Challenging existing methodological conceptions of the analytic approach to aesthetics, Jukka Mikkonen brings together philosophy, literary studies and cognitive psychology to offer a new theory on the cognitive value of reading fiction. Philosophy, Literature and Understanding defends the epistemic significance of narratives, arguing that it should be explained in terms of understanding rather than knowledge. Mikkonen formulates understanding as a cognitive process, which he connects to narrative imagining in order to assert that narrative is a central tool for communicating understanding. Demonstrating the effects that literary works have on their readers, he examines academic critical analysis, responses of the reading public and nonfictional writings that include autobiographical testimony to their writer’s influences and attitudes to life. In doing so, he provides empirical evidence of the cognitive benefits of literature and of how readers demonstrate the growth of their understanding. By drawing on the written testimony of the reader, this book is an important intervention into debates on the value of literature that incorporates understanding in new and imaginative ways