Senida Poenariu reviews Literature and Art as Cognitive Objects

Patricia Kolaiti. Literature and Art as Cognitive Objects: From a Poetics of Language to a Poetics of Action. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 245 pp.

Review by Senida Poenariu

14 August 2026

This book revisits one of the main problems of (literary) theory and the philosophy of art in the second half of the twentieth century: What makes art and literature a distinct and unique kind of action? The question of literariness, arthood, or the essence of art is reconsidered here from within the dazzlingly fashionable framework of the cognitive turn after other turns (linguistic, referential, ethical/moral, and others) had already enjoyed their moment at the forefront of theoretical reflections on art and literature. What distinguishes the present approach is that it pushes its implications toward a more radical claim: the redefinition of art itself in ontological terms, where explanatory models of mind are transformed into foundations for what art really is.

Situating itself in the lineage of the cognitive revolution, this study builds especially on Noam Chomsky’s account of the productivity and plasticity of the human mind, on Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s “relevance theory,”[1] as well as on a poetics of the mind.[2] It is, in the end, an attempt to identify the cognitive processes through which the human mind produces art and literature.

Moving beyond artefact and receiver-oriented models and presenting itself as one of the first systematic and empirically testable creator-oriented accounts in literary theory and the philosophy of art, this study departs from the artefactual and structural properties of the artistic object “towards literature and art as a case of human agency” (p. 2). It presents a “naturalistic investigation,” via Chomsky, embedded in a mentalistic and internalistic theory as a way of demonstrating that art and literature “are natural objects entrenched in and descended from material operations in the human mind/brain, amenable to naturalistic investigation in line with the methods of the natural, cognitive and life sciences and suitable for two-way interdisciplinary interaction with the empirical and cognitive paradigms” (p. 109). Yet, while its originality lies in placing authorial consciousness within a cognitive and evolutionary framework that claims to be empirically testable, the rhetoric of novelty largely bypasses an entire tradition of reflection on creative consciousness from the phenomenological criticism of the Geneva School and Georges Poulet to the hermeneutic approaches of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Surely a dialogue would likely have enriched the theoretical account of artistic agency and interiority. The same happens in the discussion of embodied cognition, developed with no engagement whatsoever with Maurice Merleau-Ponty or in the treatment of empathy without any reference to Martha Nussbaum.

What distinguishes artworks and literary texts from other kinds of objects is therefore not their material or textual makeup but the fact that they originate in what the author calls “artistic thought states/processes” (p. 105). In this sense, the study proposes not just a poetics of mind but a poetics of action, relocating the ontology of art from the finished artefact to the cognitive action-process. Such a perspective allows Patricia Kolaiti to address a longstanding problem in aesthetics made inescapable by Marcel Duchamp: how two perceptually indiscernible objects can nevertheless differ ontologically, or, in her own terms, “What is it that makes the one object an artwork while its perceptually indiscernible twin is a mere thing?” (p. 16) For once, the answer is straightforward: their different cognitive histories and the distinct action-processes involved. The “artistic thought states/processes” are defined as “psychologically and metaphysically real entities”—spontaneously caused, complex and relevance-yielding mental operations grounded in full-blown agency rather than incidental or naive creations (p. 55). These processes involve not simply a representation but what Kolaiti calls “aspectual representation,” that is, a nontrivial way of seeing real-world objects—a reformulation of Shklovskyan defamiliarization.

From here, the book advances toward one of its most ambitious theoretical claims: the construction of a genuinely cognitive ontology, or even a cognitive metaphysics, of literature and art. If the metaphysical status of an artwork derives from its relation to universal mind-internal mechanisms that generate artistic thought states/processes, a renewed form of essentialism now understood in relational and cognitive rather than formalist terms takes place. Against postmetaphysical suspicion toward essences, the author advocates for the legitimacy of “cognitive essences,” claiming that literature and art constitute exemplary case studies for a metaphysics adequate to a “mind-full world” (p. 105). Although the study anticipates and counters familiar objections regarding universalism and methodological circularity, several theoretical loose ends nevertheless remain—for instance, the speculative leap from cognitive explanation to ontology and, most obviously, the difficulty in empirically demonstrating a stable category of specifically artistic mental operations across historically and culturally heterogenous forms of art. Also, the final two chapters are the most theoretically adventurous, giving the impression the theoretical imagination moves faster than the empirical evidence currently available.

Yet, it is precisely this intellectual risk-taking that makes this volume a significant intervention in interdisciplinary debate, introducing a two-way model between the humanities and cognitive sciences. Rather than treating literature and art as objects of application, it proposes them as a potential site of theory formation capable of reshaping accounts of mind, language, and cognition. The question is whether this reciprocity holds without blurring the line between cognitive explanation and ontological claim.

[1] See Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Malden, Mass., 1995).

[2] Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (New York, 1996).