Chapter 5 points in the direction of a novel cognitive, or mentalistic, or producer-oriented account of literature and art that puts the artist/producer at the centre of attention and argues against the binary oppositions between artefact-oriented and receiver-oriented accounts. A producer-oriented approach to literature and art shifts attention away from the artifactual properties of the literary text and its linguistic make-up and allocates it to literature as a case of human agency, introducing a theoretically necessary distinction between literature as an inter-individual and an intra-individual occurrence. This approach sheds new light on a diverse range of literary and art-theoretical issues including much of the literary individual’s discontent with language: it reinstates the issue of linguistic pessimism in a different form, as one that does not necessarily entail the inadequacy of human natural language as a communicative medium, but raises questions about the possible distinctness of literature/art as an action-process, or the distinctness of the literary/artistic mind itself. The chapter advocates this mentalistic – and quintessentially ‘internalist’– view of literature and art in its strongest possible construal, suggesting that there might be uniquely literary/artistic cognitive features or processes that may also amount to special evolutionary adaptations of a certain kind.