Libraries of the Mind. What Happens after Reading

Abstract

Roy Sommer’s essay “Libraries of the Mind. What Happens after Reading” engages with the nexus between narrative, reading and the future – the resonance of texts in our long-term memory. It explores various aspects of forgetting and remembering literature, including the potential and the limits of empirical and experimental approaches to our Kopfbibliotheken (‘libraries of the mind’). Blending concepts and metaphors from neuroscience, cognitive psychology and narrative theory, the featured article offers a phenomenological account of forgetting and remembering fiction. It introduces the metaphor of “architexture” to describe a hypothetical neuronal trace of our reading experiences, a vital element of worldview curation in a reader’s mind.