The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture [Paperback]

This book identifies the 'cognitive humanities' with new approaches to literature and culture that engage with recent theories of the embodied mind in cognitive science. If cognition should be approached less as a matter of internal representation-a Cartesian inner theatre-than as a form of embodied action, how might cultural representation be rethought? What can literature and culture reveal or challenge about embodied minds? The essays in this book ask what new directions in the humanities open up when the thinking self is understood as a participant in contexts of action, even as extended beyond the skin. Building on cognitive literary studies, but engaging much more extensively with '4E' cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) than previously, the book uses case studies from many different historical settings (such as early modern theatre and digital technologies) and in different media (narrative, art, performance) to explore the embodied mind through culture. 

Peter Garratt is Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. He is a specialist in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and has published on writers such as George Eliot, Dickens and Ruskin, and on topics in cognitive theory and the medical humanities. His first book, Victorian Empiricism, was published in 2010.

Chapter 1.The Cognitive Humanities; Peter Garratt.- Part I. Theorizing the Embodied Mind.- Chapter 2. Enactive Cognition and Fictional Worlds; Merja Polvinen.- Chapter 3. The Opacity of Fictional Minds; Marco Bernini.- Chapter 4. 'Un-Walling' the Wall; Barbara Dancygier.- Chapter 5. Textures of Thought; Teemu Paavolainen.- Part II. Reading Culture.- Chapter 6. Extending the Renaissance Mind; Miranda Anderson.- Chapter 7.'Her Silence Flouts Me'; Laura Seymour.- Chapter 8. From World to Worldview; Michael Sinding.- Part III. Cognitive Futures.- Chapter 9. Bayesian Bodies; Karin Kukkonen.- Chapter 10. Emergences; Nigel McLoughlin.- Chapter 11. Autism in the Wild; Nicola Shaughnessy and Melissa Trimingham.- Chapter 12. Hardware, Software, Wetware; Matt Hayler.- Bibliography.