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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... metaphors, functions as a structural element that reflects in its outlines some of the patterns and connections of Shakespeare's mental lexicon. I believe that Shakespeare uses these words as focal points for explorations of the ...
... metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery—all of which go beyond the literal mirroring, or representation, of external reality.”29 According to such a model, metaphor becomes not an aberration from or exception to primarily logical ...
... metaphor, and metonymy are, according to such an approach, not exceptions to regular rules of meaning but are instead manifestations of the ways in which structures of meaning normally work.52 Cognitive linguists have traced a number of ...
... metaphor, and interrelationships between the mind and the world.60 Whereas Foucault was concerned to provide a critique of assumptions about the inevitability and truth of rationalism, cognitive theory moves forward, in a sense, to ...
... metaphorical spaces (sea, arrows) that could be mapped onto a more abstract conceptual space (life is difficult; should I commit suicide?).63 Within those regions of his brain, complex neural networks working simultaneously (and for the ...
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 |