Description
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 University
About the Author
Mary Thomas Crane is Associate Professor of English at Boston College. She is the author of Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton) and coeditor, with Amy Boesky, of Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski.
Reviews
"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 University
Book Information
ISBN 9780691069920
Author Mary Thomas Crane
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 369g