Literary scholars have increasingly taken up interdisciplinary frameworks, methodologies, and pursuits in recent years, despite the acknowledged difficulties of "being interdisciplinary" (Fish). It might seem initially surprising, then, that those challenging disciplinary boundaries in literary and cultural studies have shown so little interest in the major interdisciplinary initiative marking the convergence of linguistics, computer science, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and anthropology: the cognitive sciences. This essay traces the history of the early challenge to behaviorism posed by cognitivist work in linguistics and computer science and suggests that literary theory is still bounded by the lingering influence of behaviorist and related paradigms. It argues that recent work by George Lakoff, Antonio Damasio, Gerald Edelman, Mark Johnson, and others, which emphasizes the complex, metaphorical nature of human cognition and its roots in the experience of embodiment, is especially useful for literary study. Cognitive theory can be seen as congruent with some aspects of contemporary post-structuralist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic theory, but also would modify a number of current ideas about cultural construction, the nature of human subjectivity, and the role of language in its development. This essay concludes with a survey and assessment of the most important attempts to date to use cognitive science to discuss literature or literary theory. [M.C.]