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As a language phenomenon, literature resists being described in terms of linguistic units and structures. Of key importance is the aesthetic experience of language and its uses in context. The experience is particularly dependent on the changing formats of communication, the development of the technologies of production and distribution of texts. This dependency, in turn, creates fresh stimuli for creative experimental work with word and letter. The nature of these processes being largely pre-reflexive invites and presupposes the effort of reflection. The potential for 'self-problematization' contained in a literary text is a crucially important but yet largely unexplored aspect of its meaning and form. It invites a philologist to try out new analytic techniques. Perspectives of present day developments in cognitive literary studies are closely related to the so called 'material turn' and 'experiential turn' in the humanities. The means of poetic expressivity are transformed in the changing media field providing for the increasingly multisensorial experience of writing and reading. The alliance of literary scholarship with cognitive research in embodied and situated knowledge is promising of new fruit.