Literary Studies and Well-Being in the Post-Literature Age

The question of fiction's cognitive affordance and of its instrumentality is now being reframed into a larger scope – that of Literary Studies in relation to well-being the beleaguered Literary Studies now have to account for their utility in a society which can no longer afford the cultivation of reading fiction just for a sense of ethical elevation or a broadening of the mind. As a mind-developing agency, literature and more largely literary studies – with their emphasis on high order cognitive skills and clear demarcation of disciplinary boundaries which trace the realm of literary aesthetics – are gradually giving up their distinctiveness, insularity, as well as unalloyed essence, in order to connect with other communities. By intersecting with interdisciplinary studies, literary studies are re-inventing themselves through new labels such as Cognitive Literary Studies, the Health Humanities, and the Positive Humanities. By doing so, not only are they adapting to their new environment (as evolutionary theory would have it), but they are also coming closer to revealing in a quasi-scientific way what they have intuitively been suspecting all along: that literature, health-wise, has a meliorative power on readers and therefore contributes to human flourishing.