ABSTRACT
From the old-time trivia of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, down to contemporary liberal curricula, the study of letters has been deemed central to the advancement of learning – inordinately so, judging by the direction of cuts inflicted on today’s colleges. Not necessarily metacritical or even epistemic, goals of belles lettres are, however, largely independent of the goals of the scholarship they spawn. But then, why take literary fiction seriously in cognitive terms? Scientists control their variables by cooking up synthetic environments in the lab. Couldn’t armchair researchers “cook up” heuristic narratives, dispensing with literature altogether?
