Introduction: The Cognitive Humanities: Whence and Whither?

Abstract

This volume of essays defines the ‘cognitive humanities’, starting from theories of the embodied mind and exploring them in and through cultural artefacts, texts and settings, from the Renaissance to posthumanism. The purpose is to demonstrate how recent interdisciplinary conceptualisations of the mind herald new directions for literary and cultural theory, beyond existing topics in ‘cognitive literary studies’, where much interesting debate has tended to centre on formalist textual analysis, narratology and poetics, mental representation, theory of mind, empathy, the appeal of fictional character, and even evolutionary arguments justifying literature. The essays here respond to a turn towards embodiment, phenomenology and less representationally dependent cognitive models articulated by what Mark Rowlands calls the ‘new science of mind’ or ‘4E’ cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended cognition). Exploring different historical sites, forms and practices (narrative, art, performance), these essays ask what it means to situate notions of embodied cognition culturally, such as the idea that mind is shaped by bodily, affective and material structures, that it enacts a meaningful world, and even that it can be extended into the world beyond the skin. Part 1 features chapters proposing new theorisations of narrative, fictionality, viewpoint and performance; Part 2 examines the particularity of embodied and extended cognition in four examples from concrete historical periods and sites, such as the Shakespearean stage and Romantic-era political discourse; and Part 3 looks at the forefront of interdisciplinary research, across borders with the medical and digital humanities, to show how the cognitive humanities can engage with, and contribute to understanding, complex lived phenomena. Throughout the volume a range of traditions and methods—historicist, philosophical, linguistic, narratological, empiricist—are used to explore the possibilities of a critical cultural conversation with the embodied mind. What is opened up illustrates the scope and potential of the cognitive humanities.