Narrative, Cognition, and Community by Paula Leverage

Narrative, Cognition, and Community by Paula Leverage

Narrative, Cognition, and Community: The Human Reader explores the relationship between literature, cognition, and lived experience, asking why we read and what happens when we do. Bringing literary studies into dialogue with cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, it shows how narrative both shapes and is shaped by memory, perception, emotion, embodiment, and the ways we make sense of ourselves and others.

The volume foregrounds the human reader in an age of machine-learning systems trained on human narratives, inviting reflection on what remains distinctive about human acts of reading and interpretation. Through discussions of literature alongside trauma, legal testimony, embodied health, and twelve-step recovery programmes, it demonstrates that storytelling is central not only to aesthetic experience but also to everyday social life.

As a foundational work in the field of Neurohumanities exploring narrative's role in human engagement with the world, the book argues that storytelling is a fundamental cognitive and social practice, one that assumes renewed significance in the age of artificial intelligence.

Paula Leverage is Associate Professor of French and Medieval Studies, and Director of the Center for NeuroHumanities, at Purdue University, where she teaches literature, film, and neurocognitive studies to graduate and undergraduate students. After graduating from the University of Cambridge, she studied at the University of Toronto, where she first discovered cognitive theory as a doctoral student and Commonwealth Scholar. She is the author of Memory and Reception: A Cognitive Approach to the Chansons de Geste (Rodopi, 2010), and co-editor of Theory of Mind and Literature (Purdue University Press, 2010; second, revised and expanded edition, 2026), and has published extensively on memory, theory of mind, and creativity in journals such as Leonardo, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and French Review.