What happens in our brains when we read a novel, interpret a poem, or respond emotionally to a story? The emerging field of Cognitive Cultural Studies addresses these questions by applying insights from cognitive science to deepen our understanding of literature and cultural productions.
I spoke with Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut and a pioneering figure in this interdisciplinary field. Hogan is the author of over twenty books, including The Mind and Its Stories, Beauty and Sublimity, Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories, and Literature and Moral Feeling: A Cognitive Poetics of Ethics, Narrative, and Empathy. His work spans topics as diverse as aesthetics, nationalism, trauma, and narrative universals, always grounded in a deep engagement with both cognitive science and cultural analysis. Hogan has helped shape the interdisciplinary landscape of cognitive literary studies, while also contributing to ongoing conversations in philosophy, affect theory, and postcolonial critique.
While Cognitive Cultural Studies has flourished in broader literary circles, its potential remains underexplored in Latin American and Iberian studies. This conversation introduces key concepts and approaches that can offer fresh perspectives on themes central to these fields: from memory and trauma to empathy and cultural identity. It provides an entry point for scholars interested in expanding their analytical toolkit. If you are curious about how cognition intersects with the arts, this interview offers a compelling invitation to think differently about the stories we tell and the minds that tell them.
Ricardo Castro (RC): Cognitive Cultural Studies remains a relatively unknown field for many scholars working with Latin American cultural productions. How would you introduce this approach to those unfamiliar with it?
Patrick Hogan (PH): Originally, cognitive science was the empirical study of information processing by the human mind. One way of thinking about it is through contrasts. Cognitive science followed the decline of behaviorism beginning in the middle of the last century. At that time, researchers came to realize that behaviorism artificially restricted the sorts of entities one could address in psychology. In consequence, it effectively prevented the formulation of, in Noam Chomsky’s terms, an adequate explanatory, or even descriptive account of some key aspects of human mental life, such as language. Unlike behaviorism, cognitive science stressed the explanatory role of inner, mental states. (A key text in this shift was Noam Chomsky’s 1959 review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.)
Of course, behaviorism was not the only approach to psychology current at the time. The other influential approach was psychoanalysis. Here, the problem was different, a matter of the lack of solid empirical support and a related overemphasis on motivational explanations. For example, psychoanalysis viewed the human mind as pervaded by unconscious contents (e.g., memories). Empirical research found extensive unconscious activity, though it was principally a matter of processes (e.g., simple processes of altering speech sounds to facilitate pronunciation, as when we pronounce the regular plural marker without voicing—thus, without using the vocal cords–after unvoiced speech sounds, but with voicing after voiced speech sounds, thus cat/cat[s], but dog/dog[z].) Moreover, in psychoanalysis, this unconscious was the product of a motivation to repress what would otherwise have been conscious. In contrast, the “cognitive” in “cognitive science” stressed the acquisition of information, which typically gives rise to conscious contents (e.g., perceptions), but through processes that were at no point conscious and thus were not “repressed.”
As it happens, leaving out motivations is overly restrictive as well. Cognitive science, however, did not solve this problem by opting for the empirically embarrassed, psychoanalytic theory of drives. Rather, it developed affective science, which is in effect a branch of cognitive science treating emotion. Both affective science and cognitive science (narrowly construed) have subsequently incorporated a great deal of (empirically well-supported) social psychology, and more recently neuroscience.
Now, what about cognitive cultural study? In one way, this is straightforward. It is the synthesis of cognitive science with cultural study. But “cultural” here has two importantly different senses. The first is a rather minimal sense, where it signals attention to targets that are cultural in the sense that they involve meaning (in a broad sense)–or more generally human design (in any case, not just matter)–and are typically shared by some community. Thus, it includes the entire range of cognitive treatments of poetry, music, politics, and so forth. So, when I or others argue that the standard poetic line length across traditions is governed by the extent of working memory (see chapter one of The Mind and Its Stories), that is “cognitive cultural study,” by this definition.
The second use of “cultural” here refers to the combination of explanatory principles from cognitive science and culture studies, typically in such a way that each set of principles is understood as modifying the other. This is sometimes referred to as “bio-cultural synthesis.” The “bio” is, of course, short for “biology.” This is because the fundamental cognitive structures and processes are sometimes seen as primarily biological (e.g., as evolutionary adaptations).
In some ways, it is uncontroversially true that cultural practices particularize cognitive operations. Even so, putting it this way is, I fear, prone to mislead us. I say this for four reasons. (I have discussed these issues at length in the current issue of Style [vol. 58, no. 3 {2024}], which is devoted to debating the views I have advocated on this topic.) First, “culture” is perniciously vague. It can refer to, for example, a society’s recent history, its current musical preferences, its politeness conventions, and countless other aspects of life in that society. Second, we tend to assume that other cultures are more internally uniform than they are, and we tend to define that uniformity by reference to the ideas of dominant groups. (For a valuable treatment of the assumption of cultural uniformity, see Moody-Adams.) Third, we tend to assume that culture is always a source of difference between societies, sometimes unfathomably profound difference. But it is probably more often a ground for convergent development as people encounter the same physical laws, the same dynamics of group interaction, and so forth. Finally, the mere mention of “culture” tends to trigger identity categories and the associated divisions of in-groups and out-groups. For example, groups often differ in diet. My guess is that they are relatively unlikely to kill one another over such differences when they are referred to as “differences in diet.” However, as the conflict over beef in India suggests, once these dietary differences come to be seen as markers of an identity contrast between two cultures, violence becomes far more likely.
RC: Your work spans literature, cognitive science, and philosophy. What inspired you to integrate cognitive science into the study of literature and culture?
PH: Actually, the development of my interests went mostly in the opposite direction. I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate, then entered the doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. However, I was particularly interested in phenomenology and psychoanalysis. It didn’t seem that I would be able to work with Paul Ricoeur at Chicago and there was no one else there who was active in these areas. More generally, at that time, it seemed that I would be able to work on phenomenology and psychoanalysis far more readily in a literature department. On the advice of Walter Ong, a sort of informal mentor for me at the time, I went to the State University of New York at Buffalo. This was particularly due to its program in the psychological study of the arts, which combined psychoanalysis with cognitive science—well, at least Norman Holland did this. In any case, while at Buffalo, I basically took all literary theory courses. This had the effect of making me nostalgic for the rigor of analytic philosophy, as I had encountered it in Chicago.
While at Chicago, I had also sat in on Jim McCawley’s linguistics classes, which I found very intellectually stimulating. Due to this exposure, I began to read other works in linguistics, primarily by Noam Chomsky, with whom I often disagreed, but who I felt had the most rigorous and most creative intellect that I had ever encountered. Though I have read many other great thinkers since then, I have never altered this assessment. Later, I got to know Noam fairly well and we corresponded extensively over the course of three decades. At Buffalo, I met Lalita Pandit (a graduate student from India, later my wife) and she encouraged me to read more broadly in cognitive science (not only linguistics). My first book, The Politics of Interpretation (1990), was also entirely theoretical. It was only later that literature got added—mostly due to the fact that I was teaching literature.
RC: What are some key concepts or frameworks you’ve developed or utilized in your work?
PH: I’ve made use of concepts from virtually every area of mainstream cognitive and affective science—from the varieties of memory, to the processing of spatial relations, to kinds of conceptual subsystems, etc. What I draw on depends mostly on just what topic I am considering. Like many philosophers, especially in the analytic tradition, I most often set out to resolve some problem in a particular domain. By “resolve some problem,” I do not mean “give the final word” on the topic. Rather, I hope to establish a basis for future development in an ongoing research program.
For example, in Beauty and Sublimity, I consider our sense of beauty, which is to say our feeling of aesthetic delight. Simplifying a bit due to this being an interview and not a book, we could summarize that argument as claiming that aesthetic delight is elicited by a target (e.g., a poem, a painting, or a piece of music) with some combination of the following relations to a recipient: 1) A cognitive part comprising non-habitual categorization, which takes one or more of the following forms: a) pattern abstraction (e.g., the comprehension of unanticipated variations on a theme in music), b) assimilation to a prototype or average case (e.g., the representation of a human face that avoids disproportion in its parts or their relations to one another through a process that is very close to simple averaging), and c) identification of an exemplar (e.g., in an imitation of style). 2) An emotive part comprising a) interest and ideally, but not invariably, b) activation of the attachment system. I then go on to show how this sort of account explains the data regarding aesthetic experience, allows for rational discussion of aesthetic value, suggests ways of treating experiences we consider sublime (rather than beautiful), and so on.
The theoretical ideas that I take up in the treatment of beauty, then, are all drawn from cognitive science. I should, however, underscore something about this use of cognitive theory that even cognitive literary critics do not often appear to recognize. This account of beauty makes a contribution to cognitive science as well. In other words, the benefits are not all in one direction. I do not mean only that, if correct, it explains a very large area of human life, though that is hardly insignificant. I mean also that it has consequences for the more fundamental ideas that it deploys from cognitive science. For example, theorists sometimes argue that semantics should invoke only one type of concept (e.g., exemplars). Assuming my account is valid, however, it suggests that all three types—pattern abstraction, prototype assimilation, and exemplar identification (see Murphy and Hoffman 166)—have aesthetic consequences. This provides evidence that all three are part of our mental architecture, which is to say that none of the three is redundant. More generally, the cognitive scientific study of culture is part of the same research program as other forms of cognitive scientific work. As such, it contributes regularly, at various levels and degrees, to that program.
RC: One of your most influential contributions is the exploration of universals in narrative and emotion. How do you balance this with the particularities of cultural and historical contexts?
PH: It seems as if it would be a special problem for the study of universals, as we might be inclined to assume similarity when there isn’t any. But in practice I don’t think it really is a special problem. We are more likely to take another group to be strange and incomprehensible—thus, to overestimate our differences from them—either due simply to out-grouping or due to an initial experience of incomprehension. Take Hindustani classical music. If I am right that aesthetic pleasure comes (in part) from non-habitual pattern abstraction, students hearing such music for the first time may find it boring, in part as they are unable to isolate the relevant structures, such as themes and variations (a form of pattern abstraction), especially if the scale is unfamiliar. They are, then, likely to take their cognitive disorientation to be evidence of an extreme cultural difference. But, if one starts out with more familiar scales before turning to the unfamiliar ones, and if one helps students to recognize the large, structural divisions in the performance of a raga, the number of beats in different drumming cycles, and so on, students can develop an appreciation of the music very quickly. Note that the recognition of such patently cross-tradition features as theme and variations occurs only after understanding cultural particularities, as here. One is very unlikely to recognize universals at all without first understanding their instantiations. This has to be a largely inductive, rather than a deductive process.
As a practical matter, I tend to study aspects of culture that have three characteristics. First, they should bear on the topics I will be discussing. Second, they should be of long standing in the tradition. Finally, I myself should find them illuminating—insofar as they involve descriptive or explanatory claims. So, in teaching and research, I have often drawn on Sanskrit aesthetic theory when treating beauty in early Indian works, and theory of dharma when treating ethics. Certainly, part of the relevance of these theories is due to their enduring presence within the tradition I am studying. But, if I did not consider them to be intrinsically valuable theories, I would not be inclined to draw on them in a sustained way, even for works in an Indian tradition. The fact that a theory arose within a given tradition does not give us a good reason to believe that it will supply us with a valid interpretation of a literary work in that tradition. If literary theories had this consequence, there wouldn’t be any point in developing new literary theories, yet we seem to be quite committed to such development.
RC: Memory and trauma are central themes in many Latin American and Iberian works. How can cognitive approaches, such as theories of emotion and memory, offer fresh insights into these narratives?
PH: There is certainly valuable empirical work on trauma in the cognitive tradition. In my book on Kashmir, I go over some of that work, then set out a more fully elaborated account of trauma as it bears on narrative structure. I go on to consider some literary attempts to represent the conditions in Kashmir since the insurgency began (see 203-215 of Imaging Kashmir).
The two key variables in traumatic experiences are predictability and controllability (see Bașoğlu and Mineli 184). Later, the consequences of the traumatic experience operate, obviously enough, through memory. One type of memory identified in affective science, called “emotional memory,” comprises memories that, when activated, revive the emotion of the experience. Kirby and colleagues point out that in PTSD there is an “impaired regulation of emotional memory” (527). Given this, I go on to argue that there are several properties that underwrite the functionality of the emotional memory system. First, emotional memories are activated in very limited circumstances of threats that are closely similar to the original event. Second, when activated, the memories are integrated into causal sequences, commonly with agents, goals, and so on, which is to say that they are integrated into narratives. Third, the associated emotion is strong enough to motivate action, but typically weak enough to be overridden. I then argue that the impairment of emotional memory can affect any one of these components. Indeed, in PTSD, the emotional memory system tends to be dysfunctional in all three areas. Focusing on the impairment of causal integration, I analyse the use of what I call “disfigured” narrative sequences—narrative sequences that depart from clear causal sequences in sometimes baffling ways—in stories treating the traumatic recent history of Kashmir.
RC: In your view, how does literature foster empathy, and what role (if any) does it play in cultural or societal transformation?
PH: We have two sorts of obstacles to empathizing with other people in ethically desirable ways. The first is that we tend to rely on spontaneous empathy, which has many biases (see Literature and Moral Feeling 207-208). A particularly consequential bias concerns identity categorization. We tend either not to empathize with out-group members at all, or to adopt a non-parallel interpersonal stance toward them, whereby we cognitively empathize but do not emotionally sympathize. (An interpersonal stance is our attitude toward their experience. A parallel interpersonal stance leads us to share the valence of their experience, feeling badly when they are sad, and so on. A non-parallel interpersonal stance is the opposite, as it leads us to respond positively to their sadness.) The second problem is that, even when we engage in effortful empathy directed specifically toward an out-group member and with the intent of adopting a parallel interpersonal stance, we may get things wrong. It seems particularly common for us to err in the direction of over-simplification of the cognition and emotion of out-group members. This over-simplification can be facilitated by generalizations about the culture of the out-group, especially as we tend to view out-groups as more homogenous than in-groups (see Duckitt 81).
Literary works can be viewed as providing “instructions for mental composition,” in Elaine Scarry’s phrase (244). Insofar as these instructions concern the experiences and goals of characters whom the reader has a tendency to treat as members of an out-group, such literary works take the first step toward fostering empathy. Indeed, they appear to have some genuine success at this level (see, for example, Hakemulder). However, many literary works do not involve characters from out-groups. Moreover, of those that do, many may portray the out-group characters in simplified ways, or in ways that do not involve simulating a subjective life for those characters.
In short, literary works may in principle foster empathic effort and increase empathic accuracy. However, they may do the opposite as well. I believe that there is a tendency for authors to be in effect forced by the process of writing—well, if not forced, perhaps nudged–to engage in effortful simulation of characters and to avoid extreme simplification (see The Mind and Its Stories 212-214). The result is that, on the whole, literary works are somewhat more likely to humanize out-groups than not. Moreover, some works are particularly good at this. But I suspect that, even so, the impact of a work depends significantly on the attitudes and understandings brought to the text by the reader and the approach adopted by instructors, when the context for reading the work is a class.
RC: What emerging trends or ideas in Cognitive Cultural Studies excite you the most?
PH: This is the sort of question one should never answer because one has to mention individual researchers and will always offend someone who isn’t mentioned. So, I will do something else. Since this is an interview for UT Austin, I will confine myself to UT, noting that it is very well situated with regard to emerging trends and ideas in cognitive cultural studies. This is due to work by two of your faculty members: Hannah Wojciehowski, especially through her collaboration with Vittorio Gallese, which takes up the operation of mirror neurons, surely one of the major neurological discoveries of recent decades; and Frederick Aldama, who has worked to expand cognitive literary study beyond the ethnic and generic confines of what was formerly “the canon.”
RC: How do you see this field evolving in the coming years?
PH: I’m no better at predicting trends than anyone else, so I can’t really say anything specific. However, I will say that it will probably have only a relatively weak connection with developments in cognitive science as such. Literary study has its own market conditions for employment and for publication, affected by enrolments, number of majors, sales figures for monographs, and other factors, all of which are just now in the process of being transformed by new technologies. I suspect that some developments in the profession will prove more financially sustainable than others and that those financially sustainable practices will expand. They may involve greater incorporation of the humanities into the sciences through scientist-humanist collaboration, or they may lead to a greater insistence on the distinctive, hermeneutic operation of literary study, or they may fragment into a variety of idiosyncratic approaches, or something else entirely. But I am fairly confident that the development of cognitive cultural studies will result primarily from the political economy of the profession.
RC: A recommended resource for those with curiosity to get an overview of Cognitive Cultural Studies?
PH: My Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists, though more than 20 years old, still presents a reasonable outline of the field. My Emotion and Literature, though obviously confined to emotion, is more up-to-date and detailed. Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics covers a number of literary cognitivists in Great Britain, who are not treated in my two books. For readers who are able to invest more time, Lisa Zunshine’s edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, and The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Emotion, which I co-edited with Lalita Pandit Hogan and Bradley J. Irish provide more extensive treatments of these topics.
Works Cited
Duckitt, John. The Social Psychology of Prejudice. New York: Praeger, 1992.
Bașoğlu, Metin and Susan Mineli. “The Role of Uncontrollable and Unpredictable Stress in Post-Traumatic Stress Responses in Torture Survivors.” In Torture and Its Consequences: Current Treatment Approaches. Ed. Metin Bașoğlu. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 1992, 182-225.
Chomsky, Noam. “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.” Language 35. 1 (1959), 26-58.
Hakemulder, J. The Moral Laboratory: Experiments Examining the Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-Concept. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins, 2000.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2011.
—. Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016.
—. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. New York: Routledge, 2003.
—. Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and Colonialism. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2016.
—. Literature and Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2018.
—. Literature and Moral Feeling: A Cognitive Poetics of Ethics, Narrative, and Empathy. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
—. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
—. Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Identity, and Cognitive Science. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2009.
—. What is Colonialism? New York: Routledge, 2024).
Hogan, Patrick Colm, Bradley J. Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan, eds. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2022.
Kirby, Elizabeth, et al. “Basolateral Amygdala Regulation of Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis and Fear-Related Activation of Newborn Neurons.” Molecular Psychiatry 17 (2012): 527-536.
Moody-Adams, Michele. Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.
Murphy, Gregory and Aaron Hoffman. “Concepts.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science. Eds., Keith Frankish and William Ramsey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012, 151-170.
Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999.
Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: A New Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002.
Zunshine, Lisa, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.
