Neurocognitive literary criticism emerged as a field of enquiry in the late 1990s.Traditionally, the term ‘cognitive’ referred to ideas of thinking and inference but in this new field it frequently refers to mental phenomena other than thinking, such as feeling, perception, unconscious memory and kinesis. The interest in cognitive processes in literary studies reflects a major shift in thinking in the late twentieth century called the ‘cognitive turn’. This course will provide students with an opportunity to interrogate how the mechanism and function of mind and brain can illuminate literary studies.