Call for Chapters: Cognitive Literary Urban Studies: Embodied Cognition and Narrative Space

We invite contributions for the interdisciplinary volume Cognitive Literary Urban Studies: Embodied Cognition and Narrative Space. Grounded in the framework of 4EA cognitive science (Varela et al. 2006), the volume explores how recipients experience built environments in narratives and make sense of urban issues through affordances, including story and form. Following recent or so-called second-generation cognitive approaches to narratives (Kukkonen and Caracciolo 2014), we seek contributions that explore the reception of urban narratives through 4EA cognition: embodied, enactive, embedded and extended cognition as well as affect. The chapters must demonstrate a clear application of key concepts from embodied cognition in their discussions of the processes and aftermath of interactions with affordances in (urban) narratives. This volume thus expands the discourse on literary urban studies, which has long been examined through the earlier, more structuralist cognitive approaches to literature (Ryan 2014).

The volume brings together more recent research at the crossroads of narrative studies, cognitive theory, and urban humanities, with an emphasis on methods and frameworks that attend to spatiality, sensory perception and material environments. We encourage proposals that examine narrative forms from a wide range of global, historical and media contexts (literary, visual, performative, digital, etc.) as well as engage with other forms of cultural expression. They should also attend to diverse lived experiences shaped by gender, race, class, disability, migration and other intersecting factors. Chapters may be theoretical, methodological or grounded in case studies.

Possible topics connected to 4EA cognition include (but are not limited to):

• Embodied spatial cognition and textual affordances in urban narrative
• Urban atmospheres, affect, memory and experiential traces
• Postcolonial, diasporic and transnational literary engagements with the city
• Narratives of urban trauma resilience, and precarity
• Literary cartography, sensory experience and spatial imagination
• Reimagining public space and the commons through literary and cultural forms
• Intersections of urban cultural geography, neoliberal capitalism and narrative form
• Reading and meaning-making as situated, collective and embodied urban practices
• Empirical studies in recipients’ experiences in narrative space
• Experiential learning and pedagogies of urban reading: teaching literature and the city

Submission Guidelines

Please submit a chapter proposal of 300-500 words, along with a short bio (150 words), to kai.tan@ifaar.rwth-aachen.de cc. kai.tan.qing@gmail.com by 16 June 2025. Proposals must clearly outline the proposed chapter’s central argument, method and relevance to the volume’s aims. Please also include five keywords (listed according to relevance: most to least) and the possible topics (either from the list above or your own description) in each proposal.

Citation style for abstracts and chapters: Chicago

Notification of acceptance of abstract: mid-July 2025

Submission deadline of full chapters (approximately 6000–7000 words): 19 January 2026.

All chapters will undergo peer review. Informal queries are welcome.

The editors are currently in conversation with a respected academic press, and the volume has received preliminary interest. Contributors will be updated as publication details are finalized.

Selected Key Texts for Reference:

Caracciolo, Marco, and Karin Kukkonen. 2021. With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Colombetti, Giovanna. 2017. The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Eckenhoff, Judith, and Kai Tan. 2021. “Space.” In Introduction to Cognitive Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Peter Wenzel, 65–94. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

Gallagher, Shaun. 2017. Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Garratt, Peter, ed. 2016. The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2017. Literature and Emotion. Abingdon: Routledge.

Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kukkonen, Karin, and Marco Caracciolo. 2014. “Introduction: What Is the ‘Second Generation’?” Style 48 (3): 261–74.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mallgrave, Harry Francis. 2018. From Object to Experience: The New Culture of Architectural Design. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes. Abingdon: Routledge. Originally published 1945.

Newen, Albert, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher, eds. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2014. “Space.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Accessed 04 May 2025. https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/space.

Shapiro, Lawrence, ed. 2017. The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. Abingdon: Routledge.

Tally, Robert T., Jr., ed. 2018. Teaching Space, Place, and Literature. Abingdon: Routledge.

Van Peer, Willie, Frank Hakemulder, and Sonia Zyngier. 2012. Scientific Methods for the Humanities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 2006. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Originally published 1991.

Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias. 2009. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge.

Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. London: Palgrave Macmillan.