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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... experiences of perception, thought, and language) is produced by the brain and other bodily systems.4 A literary theory derived from cognitive science, then, offers new ways to locate in texts signs of their origin in a materially ...
... experience of embodiment was constructed by the dominant classed and gendered discursive formations of the period. Jonathan Sawday, for instance, has argued that the Renaissance might be described as a “culture of dissection” that ...
... experience in relation to discourse has paid relatively little attention to the brain, the material place within the body where discourse is processed and therefore where discursive construction, if it occurs, must be located.17 This ...
... experience of embodiment that cannot be assimilated into discourse.23 Wilma Bucci provides a particularly useful ... experiences in the world, a child forms concepts “through image-schemas based on spatial structures.”24 Because most of ...
... experience of an environment.27 More complicated linguistic structures and rational concepts are similarly built up on these basic spatial schemas. Mandler provides as an example the basic image schemas of “containment” and “support ...
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 |