NeuroLit?

There's a wonderful discussion in today's NYTimes, http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/can-neuro-lit-cri... which is, in its turn, a response to this article from last week,

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/books/01lit.html

That article features a few intrepid English academics who, in an effort to save themselves from the downsizing of humanities departments everywhere, have created a mashup of literary analysis, evolutionary psychology and cognitive theory.

The sub-head on today's discussion of the new Neurolit theory is "Saving the Humanities?" As with many trends in literary criticism, much of what is described as Neurolit seems crashingly obvious and "done before" at least to me. But I salute the underlying curiousity about how our minds are wired for language, and what that can tell us about the importance of literature.

Best quote in the piece: "What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place. " Elif Batuman