The Lechter Institute for Literary Research and

The Lewis Fund for International Conferences

are sponsoring an international conference

Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel  

4-7 June 2001

By investigating the work of fiction, we investigate both its purposes and its processes.  What work does it do, and how does it do it?  What cognitive abilities does it mobilize, like or unlike other kinds of cognition?  What can we learn by approaching these questions from a neurological, a computational, an evolutionary, a pedagogical, or a historical/ cultural level? We are particularly interested, at this conference, to explore texts at the high end of the scale of either formal or philosophical complexity, on the assumption that these are the fictions that provide the greatest challenge to the cognitive/ theoretical description of fictions it is our aim to produce. 

Inquiries to Ellen Spolsky at the Lechter Institute.

Conference discussion forum

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