Tragic Cognition in Shakespeare’s Othello

Abstract

As the cognitive revolution has begun heavily to influence Shakespeare and early modern studies, related critical methodologies such as psychoanalytic criticism have begun to seem provincial, outworn, or, in some more hostile quarters, simply misdirected. If we are indeed living through a cognitive revolution and “age of the brain,” the time seems appropriate to revisit psychoanalytic criticism, not in order to displace, but rather to supplement, the application of brain science to literary analysis. This book represents the first attempt to bring together cognitive and psychoanalytic criticism, through a startling new analysis of Iago’s character. Iago is a recalcitrant literary figure and neither cognitive nor psychoanalytic theory alone can explain our strange, embarrassed kinship with him, nor the unique ways in which Iago’s very staging of his own catharsis prevents a full purgation of our pity and fear. Through looking at both critical methodologies, Paul Cefalu opens up new insights into the mechanisms of tragic identification and catharsis within Othello.