Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive TheoryHere Mary Thomas Crane considers the brain as a site where body and culture meet to form the subject and its expression in language. Taking Shakespeare as her case study, she boldly demonstrates the explanatory power of cognitive theory--a theory which argues that language is produced by a reciprocal interaction of body and environment, brain and culture, and which refocuses attention on the role of the author in the making of meaning. Crane reveals in Shakespeare's texts a web of structures and categories through which meaning is created. The approach yields fresh insights into a wide range of his plays, including The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest. |
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... agency within a biological body and a cultural matrix. I suggest that cognitive theory offers new and more sophisticated ways to conceive of authorship and therefore offers new ways to read texts as products of a thinking author engaged ...
... agency, containment, and support. Gerald Edelman's theory of “neuronal group selection” attempts to provide a neuroscientific model for the kind of “semantic bootstrapping” described by Lakoff, in which our embodied brains create ...
... agency or a triumph of irrationality. If you do not expect human cognition to be unified or logical, a way is cleared to supplement deconstruction (which essentially rediscovers its fragmentation and irrationality over and over again) ...
... agency. While it is true that many areas of cognitive science share a similar split between innatist and cultural constructivist views of cognition, the cognitive sciences do seem to offer more theoretical orientations that assume some ...
... agency and structure are fused.”73 Cognitive science also offers theories of consciousness that both resemble and differ from currently dominant paradigms. Many researchers in both computer and neuroscience fields seem to agree that ...
Contents
3 | |
The Comedy of Errors | 36 |
Chapter 2 Theatrical Practice and the Ideologies of Status in As You Like It | 67 |
Suitable Suits and the Cognitive Space Between | 94 |
Chapter 4 Cognitive Hamlet and the Name of Action | 116 |
Chapter 5 Male Pregnancy and Cognitive Permeability in Measure for Measure | 156 |
Chapter 6 Sound and Space in The Tempest | 178 |
Notes | 211 |
Index | 257 |