The rhetorical neuroscience of style: On the primacy of style elements during literary discourse processing

Abstract Much work has been conducted in the social psychological sciences both modelling and predicting how the storage and retrieval of images and words in the mind operate (e.g. Baddeley 1974, 2000, Damasio 1999, Barsalou 1999). The focus has largely been on the interactions between short-term and long-term regions of memory. Such studies have also on occasion been complemented by behavioural experiments. More recently, a growing body of work has started to emerge from the biological cognitive neurosciences which looks at these same processes with the aid of scanning technologies (e.g. Dehaene 2003, 2009, Ledoux 1998, Eichenbaum 2011). The questions that will be considered in this paper are can these scientific findings be extended to aesthetic objects that are studied in the humanities, and in particular to the style of literary texts, and also can the way literary style figures operate shed light on how the mind and brain might function.