The age of “polit­i­cally charged” analy­ses of lit­er­a­ture has passed and the lat­est phase is that of analysing fic­tion through the lens of evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy, look­ing at how the brain processes lit­er­a­ture.

Humans can com­fort­ably keep track of three dif­fer­ent men­tal states at a time, Ms. Zun­shine said. For exam­ple, the propo­si­tion “Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked choco­late” is not too hard to fol­low. Add a fourth level, though, and it’s sud­denly more dif­fi­cult. And exper­i­ments have shown that at the fifth level under­stand­ing drops off by 60 per­cent, Ms. Zun­shine said. Mod­ernist authors like Vir­ginia Woolf are espe­cially chal­leng­ing because she asks read­ers to keep up with six dif­fer­ent men­tal states, or what the schol­ars call lev­els of intentionality.

It’s a short arti­cle, and left me want­ing more. More will no doubt come when this field matures.

via Arts and Let­ters Daily