Cognition and literature: an interdisciplinary approach to E. Hemingway’s <i>in our time</i>

Abstract The essay shows that adopting a cognitively informed perspective on literature holds significance for scholars in the larger field of cognitive sciences but also for those engaged with broader literary studies, primarily interested in interdisciplinary approaches to literature. I am mostly indebted to the new field of Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS), which promotes cross-disciplinary dialog and tight collaboration between cognition and literature. I interpret Hemingway’s collection of vignettes, titled “in our time” with lowercase letters, as an illustration of cognitive literary analysis. My working hypothesis is that readers comprehend these stories by conceptualizing the numerous spatial mentions embedded in the texts. In the parlance of CLS, they form mental models of spatial environments, crucial for comprehending the complexities of wartime realities. The theory of mental space enables me to prove that the comprehension of the spaces scarred by war is in conflict with our presumed mental models of space. Accordingly, readers of “in our time” engage in a construction of mentally structured models of space that do not conform to normal parameters of spatial cognition. What results from this is a disquieting impression of unnaturalness, as the perceived world seemed to be extremely chaotic. In the end, the reader forms an overarching mental representation, or what I describe as a cognitive map of nightmarish landscapes in “in our time”, revealing a space characterized by spiritual death and modern despair.