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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... early modern studies. The interest, encouragement, and persistent questions of Judith Anderson and Gail Kern Paster helped this book find its shape. Emily Bartels, Laura Knoppers, and Naomi Miller are still the best and most dependable ...
... early modern England, has led Shakespearean scholars to form more complex and qualified notion of Shakespearean ... contemporary theory. Using a cognitive literary and cultural theory derived from the cognitive sciences, I want to try to ...
... early experiences of embodiment, which at least some cognitive scientists ... modern period and as those new individuals were represented by fictional ... contemporary materialist theory remains haunted by lingering and unacknowledged ...
... early modern texts. One especially valuable kind of study has pursued the implications of the collaborative nature of textual production in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater and in the preparation of printed texts of the plays ...
... early modern period; however, the body and especially the brain of the author have been signally absent from such studies, largely because of the continuing influence of Foucault and Althusser on theories of embodiment and subject ...
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 |