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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... perhaps the archetypal author; the very nature and process of his authorship forms the subject of a recent popularly successful film. However, Foucauldian theory, along with a new emphasis on the collaborative nature of play production ...
... perhaps power itself, and the processes through which it takes discursive form and penetrates the subject, that must remain mysterious, indeed mystified, a mystification that might be threatened by considering how discourse is ...
... perhaps, in a Lakoffian metaphoric structure, “life is a war”) would be associated with appropriate words and formed into a grammatically acceptable sentence.62 The construction of the sentence would probably have involved the formation ...
... perhaps most influentially, in Lacan's application of Saussurean principles to psychoanalysis and Althusser's Lacanian theory of ideological interpellation. Cognitive theory shares both of these assumptions to some extent. It recognizes ...
... perhaps to a lesser extent, debates about the Chomskian proposition that language is essentially an innate, rather than learned, ability.95 Most cognitive sciences, however, posit some form of interaction between culture and organism ...
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 |