COM5223-Literature and Psychology: Minds, Bodies and Books -2025/26

As you're reading this can you hear a voice in your head? When you're immersed in a novel do you form mental images of what you read? Do you feel like you've been transported into a fictional world? This module explores the side of reading usually ignored in both the literature classroom and literary criticism to focus on reading as a lived and embodied experience that involves our senses and emotions as well as our intellect. Drawing on psychology past and present, and including the latest developments in neuroscience, we will read literary texts, and read ourselves reading literary texts.