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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... possible subjects?” (138). Now, questions such as these have become common starting points for several approaches to Shakespearean and other early modern texts. One especially valuable kind of study has pursued the implications of the ...
... possible before: “Complete enumeration, and the possibility of assigning at each point the necessary connection with the next, permit an absolutely certain knowledge of identities and differences.”58 Foucault is, of course, concerned to ...
... possible to discern a split between cognitive scientists who view the brain as essentially computerlike—logical, mechanistic, processing (not creating) objective reality—and those who stress that brain function is biological, embodied ...
... were largely conscious. However, since the brain has billions of neurons working simultaneously to perform different functions instantaneously, it is only possible for us to be conscious of EMBODYING THE AUTHOR-FUNCTION 17.
Reading with Cognitive Theory Mary Thomas Crane. ously, it is only possible for us to be conscious of a tiny fragment of these processes after they have occurred.74 As Antonio Damasio puts it, “The present is never here. We are ...
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 |