Beckett And The Cognitive Method

Does literature merely represent cognitive processes, or can it enhance, parallel, or reassess the scientific study of the mind? Beckett and the Cognitive Method argues that Samuel Beckett's narrative work, rather than just expressing or rendering mental states, inaugurates an exploratory use of narrative as an introspective modeling technology. Through a detailed analysis of Beckett's entire corpus and published volumes of letters, this book argues that Beckett pioneered a new method of writing to construct (in a mode analogous to scientific inquiry) models for the exploration of core laws, processes, and dynamics in the human mind. Marco Bernini integrates frameworks from contemporary narrative theory, cognitive sciences, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind to make a case for Beckett's modeling practice. Bernini demonstrates how this modeling applies to a vast array of processes including the (narrative) illusion of a sense of self, the dialogic interaction with memories and felt presences, the synesthetic nature of inner experience and mental imagery, the role of moods and emotions as cognitive drives, and the emergent quality of consciousness. Beckett and the Cognitive Method also reflects on how Beckett's fictional cognitive models are transformed into reading, auditory, or spectatorial experiences generating through narrative devices insights on what the sciences can only discursively report. As such, Bernini argues that literature should be considered a proper exploration of the mind, with its own tools and models for cognitive inquiry.

This open access book studies breath and breathing in literature and culture and provides crucial insights into the history of medicine, health and the emotions, the foundations of beliefs concerning body, spirit and world, the connections between breath and creativity and the phenomenology of breath and breathlessness. Contributions span the classical, medieval, early modern, Romantic, Victorian, modern and contemporary periods, drawing on medical writings, philosophy, theology and the visual arts as well as on literary, historical and cultural studies. The collection illustrates the complex significance and symbolic power of breath and breathlessness across time: breath is written deeply into ideas of nature, spirituality, emotion, creativity and being, and is inextricable from notions of consciousness, spirit, inspiration, voice, feeling, freedom and movement. The volume also demonstrates the long-standing connections between breath and place, politics and aesthetics, illuminating both contrasts and continuities.

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media. The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

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.

Samuel Beckett's private writings and public work show his deep interest in the workings of the human mind. Samuel Beckett and Psychology is an innovative study of the author's engagement with key concepts in early experimental psychology and rapidly developing scientific ideas about perception, attention and mental imagery. Through innovative new readings of Beckett's later dramatic and prose works, the book reveals the links between his aesthetic method and the methodologies of experimental psychology through the 20th century. Covering important later works including Happy Days, Not I and Footfalls, Samuel Beckett and Psychology sheds important new light on Beckett's depictions of the workings of the embodied mind.

The aim of this Element is to offer a reassessment of Beckett's alleged Cartesianism using the theoretical framework of extended cognition - a cluster of present-day philosophical theories that question the mind's brain-bound nature and see cognition primarily as a process of interaction between the human brain and the environment it operates in. The principal argument defended here is that, despite the Cartesian bias introduced by early Beckett scholarship, Beckett's fictional minds are not isolated 'skullscapes'. Instead, they are grounded in interaction with their fictional storyworlds, however impoverished those may have become in the later part of his writing career.

"Comics and Cognition: Towards a Multimodal Cognitive Poetics develops an analytical approach to multimodal communication in comics through insights from embodied cognitive science, especially cognitive linguistics and visual psychology. It extends previous cognitive poetic frameworks to the study of multimodality in comics, providing a cohesive analytical framework that also connects comics to other literary and artistic interests. The approach highlights the embodiment of cognition, and how this structures knowledge in long term memory, and activates it through perception, mental simulation, and creative blending. These cognitive processes allow readers to make impressions, predictions, inferences, and eventually conclusions and interpretations about a text. Many of these processes of reader comprehension are unconscious, but emerge into a conscious experience of the multimodal text with a richly construed and nuanced texture. This book unpacks the dynamic interplay between the reader and the multimodal text throughout the processes of multimodal reading, including opportunities for interaction, interrogation, and improvisation of meaning derived from the reader's embodied and textual experiences, tackling crucial features of the comics form, and their impact on such issues as viewpoint, temporality, abstraction, metacommentary, and transmediation. The proposed multimodal cognitive poetics applies to narrative and art comics, in both print and digital media"--