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. |
From inside the book
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... seems odd.1 Earlier critics used to assume, of course, that Shakespeare had a mind. G. Wilson Knight, for example, could argue that the “imaginative atmosphere” of Timon of Athens “seems to reflect the peculiar clarity and conscious ...
... seem less obviously useful as interpretive tools. Another reason for our neglect of cognitive sciences may lie in their relatively primitive state and in the passionate disputes and disagreements that make their findings so ...
... seems to be our direct perception of reality is in fact “illusory: what we perceive depends on both what is in the ... seem to be “material” in three ways; (1) they emerge from and consist in the neural matter of the brain; (2) they are ...
... seems to some extent to include both cognitive and Freudian versions: “The presence of the unconscious in the psychological order, in other words in the relation-functions of the individual, should, however, be more precisely defined ...
... seems to mean almost the opposite in these two sets of binaries, representing multiplicity and constructedness as opposed to a unified “individual” in one case and representing that experience of unity and wholeness as opposed to ...
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 |