Between the (Head) Lines: Extended Cognition, Print Culture, and Nonhuman Narrative in Ulysses

Abstract

Extended mind (EM) theory, a current topic in cognitive philosophy, argues that minds and mental experience are not bound within individual human brains: any thinking subject is engaged in a complex cognitive network of external technological devices. This essay reads Ulysses’s depiction of cognition through the paradigm of EM. The extended cognition model allows us to perceive the text’s experimental storytelling more fully, and ultimately leads us to an expanded account of mimetic representation of human experience wherein the text itself continually and varyingly conscripts the reader into the process—in this case cognition—being represented.