Description
Book SynopsisConsiders the brain as a site where body and culture meet to form the subject and its expression in language. This book takes Shakespeare as a case study, and demonstrates the explanatory power of cognitive theory. It reveals in Shakespeare's texts a web of structures and categories through which meaning is created.
Trade Review"
Shakespeare's Brain will inevitably be described as a 'cognitive' analysis because it pays attention to cognitive aspects of meaning, but it is no less 'historical,' 'theoretical,' and 'nterpretive'. The book gives rich treatments of the historical aspects of the plays and their production, the history of criticism, and literary theory. To this richness it adds the embodied mind of the writer writing, and the ways in which the plays investigate what is involved in conceiving of oneself as an embodied mind. Shakespeare's Brain offers old wine (Shakespeare) in new bottles (cognitive science), giving us not only a picture of the future of cognitive literary study but also some valuable new interpretations of the plays."
—Mark Turner, University of Maryland"Mary Thomas Crane lays out with easy authority and admirable lucidity what criticism might hope to gain from considering the insights of cognitive neuroscience. Taking on a wide range of experimental and theoretical cognitive science as well as the beginnings of its absorption into historical and literary studies, she proves to be a gifted explainer. Moreover, her 'adjustment' of Saussure, Lacan, and Derrida has an unassuming brilliance, bold but modestly teacherly, controversial without being controversialist."
—James Richardson, Princeton University"The implications of Mary Thomas Crane's approach are manifold and momentous, and she presents these in an introduction as striking for its lucidity as for its significance. Crane's scholarship is rich and extensive, and the book is beautifully written."
—Judith H. Anderson, Indiana UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction Shakespeare's Brain: Embodying the Author-Function 3 Chapter 1 No Space Like Home: The Comedy of Errors 36 Chapter 2 Theatrical Practice and the Ideologies of Status in As You Like It 67 Chapter 3 Twelfth Night: 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
