ABSTRACT
In this book I’ve tried to show one way in which the cognitive sciences can enrich literary studies, and I’ve set out some of the insights into Kafka’s writings that become accessible when we embrace the implications of a number of insights from second-generation cognitive science. These are, firstly, that in visual perception, external reality isn’t represented pictorially, but enacted; secondly, that emotion isn’t separate from reason or action, but tightly bound up with both; and thirdly, that cognitive perspectives are always situated and action-driven, but never purely neuro- or ocular-centric. All these points are true of human cognition in many of Kafka’s fictions as well as in the real world, and understanding these texts as—amongst the many other things they are and do—characterised by enactive qualities in their evocation of perception and emotion allows us to understand them as cognitively realistic. This in turn yields hypotheses about the experience of reading Kafka, an experience that I’ve suggested may be internally contradictory: a feeling of being compelled but also unsettled.
