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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... meaning resides in its own structure,” which can then be mapped onto conscious images and eventually language.26 George Lakoff's theories of “experiential” conceptualization also suggest that our most basic concepts—up and down, inside ...
... meaning out 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 ...
... meaning, to be more useful for the interpretation of literary and cultural texts.38 Research on visual perception ... meaning and between meaning and the world. The phonetic form red has no necessary connection with the meaning “red ...
... meaning of the concept itself is grounded in the cognition and experience of human speakers and is structured by ... meanings that are determined by an interaction of the physical world, culture, and human cognitive systems. In Terence ...
... meaning of red is thus produced by an interaction of wavelengths of light, the human retina, a human cognitive system that can extend the concept of red to other, similar but not identical colors, cultural conditions (e.g., the range of ...
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 |