While the flashlight of science may still be blinded by the fire of the arts, cognitive neuroscience is beginning to warm its fingers. This information gives rise to technology, which exploits these relations. That would turn literature into a kind of science. It is clearly not a collection of useful information about the world. Literature, then, is a technology, a set of techniques for exploiting certain relations between embodied minds, rather than a body of knowledge.
Literature works .
It doesn't transmit information, it acts in the psyche, moves you, plays on you like Hamlet's flute. This point is tacitly assumed yet elided in contemporary cultural studies, which focuses on the ways in which the technology of literature is employed in the service of power. It is this cognitive issue of art that a converging set of disiplines has begun to address. It is this task of reverse engineering that literary and cognitive studies need to take on. .