“Phenomenal” is a word sometimes used to characterize the growth of public interest in life writing in the first decades of this century. According to Ben Yagoda, “total sales in the categories of . . . memoirs increased more than 400 percent between 2004 and 2008” (Memoir, 28). As Thomas Couser puts it, “memoir now rivals fiction in popularity and critical esteem and exceeds it in cultural currency” (Memoir, 3). Life-writing criticism, too, has undergone a series of expansive changes, first, by turning its attention to “auto/biographical subjects previously silenced, such as women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, and (more recently) children”; and, second, by including “extra-literary discourses–often legal and medical–in their consideration of the limits of (the expression and representation of) subjectivities” (McCooey, “The Limits,” 277)

One aspect of life writing that has received little attention is cognition. This is particularly striking because one of the leading figures in the field of autobiography studies, Paul John Eakin, compellingly theorized “a neurobiological approach to self and narrative” (“What Are We Reading,” 124) as early as 2004. In fact, even before that, in 1993, a foundational book of cognitive literary theory, Ellen Spolsky’s Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind, used the evolution of the genre of American autobiography to discuss “the interface of cultural change and cognitive possibilities” (43).

This is to say that the field of life writing had been poised to develop a wide-ranging cognitivist inquiry into “embodied selfhood” (Eakin, Writing, 92) before the “cognitive turn” of the field of literary studies at large. That this inquiry did not materialize and that the idea that research in the cognitive science of memory and consciousness may be relevant for students of auto/biography seemed to have never caught up with scholars of life writing, can be viewed as either ironic or mystifying. But whatever we think of this omission, the proposed panel now has an opportunity to redress it, with the added advantage of being able to build on the field of life writing’s new openness to a variety of extra-literary discourses and concerns.

Here is what we don’t want this special session to do. We don’t want to offer a series of “cognitivist” readings that would merely add to the rapidly-growing pool of literary-critical interpretations of various texts in the category of life writing. Instead, we want to broaden the purview of cognitive literary theory by turning to genres that push against the generic and disciplinary boundaries of literature. This is to say that we believe that life writing is uniquely situated—when considered from a cognitive perspective—to put new pressures on familiar assumptions about genre, narrative, neuronormativity, and aesthetic pleasure.

Our panel aims to achieve a twofold goal. First, we hope to develop a series of compelling theoretical models for thinking about life writing from a variety of cognitive perspectives. Second, we hope to expand cognitive literary studies to include paradigms that, on the one hand, are uniquely responsive to genres of life writing, and yet, on the other, would impact the disciplinary trajectory of the field at large. Hence our emphasis on a combination of well-established and relatively new cognitivist approaches: neuroaesthetics (Otis) and cognitive narratology (Zunshine), but also predictive processing (Spolsky) and cognitive disabilities studies (Savarese).

Laura Otis shows how memoirists encourage their readers to recreate their own past bodily sensations, especially multi-modal sensations (such as vision and touch) that blend in lived experience. Lisa Zunshine draws on research on the role of social cognition in the construction of episodic memories for her analysis of autobiographical novels set against the background of oppressive political regimes. Ellen Spolsky explores the role of predictive processing in ghostwritten autobiographies. Finally, Ralph Savarese builds on experiments in which scientists used fMRI to converse with patients in a persistent vegetative state, to argue that ordinary memoir is no different from what occurred with patients who “willfully modulated [their] brain activity.” Thinking about the role of alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) for producing mental imagery, he argues, might help us to think through the relationship between cognition and generic innovation while, importantly, making room for neurodivergent writers.

Given that the panel is conceived as polemical as well as expository, the presenters will keep to a 13-minute time limit in order to encourage a critical follow-up about opportunities and challenges of using cognitive literary criticism to meaningfully intervene into issues that have been animating life-writing criticism over the last two decades.