Stone, Bruce. The Lyric Syllabus as Found Object: An Experimental Course on Nabokov and Cognition. 2017

This essay describes an advanced writing course devoted to a controversial topic: the cognitive impact of literary reading, as represented by the works of Vladimir Nabokov. An overview of the class and its innovative assignments reveals how Nabokov’s work can accommodate a wide range of cognitivist approaches, including those of Lisa Zunshine (fiction as a test of “mind-reading” faculties), Joshua Landy (fiction as a stimulant of intellectual capabilities), and Alain de Botton (fiction as a form of armchair therapy). However, the essay culminates with a discussion of the course’s most novel feature: that it simulates, in its curriculum, the phenomenology of literary reading. Part chronicle, part criticism, bridging disciplines and crossing genres, this essay explores both the viability of cognitive literary studies and the possibility of merging aesthetic theory and instructional practice.