Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism - Hardcover

Cave, Terence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198749414 ISBN 13: 9780198749417

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2016

Synopsis

To speak of 'thinking with literature' is to make the assumption that literature (in the broadest sense) is neither a side-show nor a side-issue in human cultures: it belongs to the spectrum of imaginative modes that includes both philosophical and scientific thought. Whether one regards it as a practice or as an archive, literature is highly pervasive, robust, enduring, and pregnant with values. Thinking with Literature argues that what it affords above all is a way of thinking, whether for writer, reader, or critic. Literature constitutes one of the prime instruments of cultural improvisation; it is the embodiment of a powerful, inventive, and ever-changing cognitive agency. As such, it invites a cognitive mode of criticism, one which asserts the priority of the individual literary work as a unique product of human cognition. In this book, discussions of topics, arguments, and hypotheses from the cognitive sciences, philosophy, and the theory of communication are woven into the fabric of a critical analysis which insists on the value of close reading: a poem by Yeats, a scene from Shakespeare, novels by Mme de Lafayette, Conrad, Frantzen, stories from Winnie-the-Pooh and many others appear here on their own terms, with their own cognitive energies. Written in an accessible style, Thinking with Literature speaks both to mainstream readers of literature and to specialists in cognitive studies.

About this title

Review:

Terence Cave, in Thinking with Literature ... goes inside our minds to map out a new "cognitive approach to literary studies". (Hal Jensen, Summer Books selection 2016, Times Literary Supplement)

the book offers many valuable insights about human cognition and embodiment (British Society of Literature and Science)

About the Author:

Terence Cave CBE FBA is a specialist in early modern French literature, thought, and culture. His major publications in this area include The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance(1979), Pré-histoires: textes troublés au seuil de la modernité (1999), Pré-histoires II: langues étrangères et troubles économiques au XVIe siècle (2001), and How to Read Montaigne (2007). His wider interest in European literature and the history of poetics is represented by Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988), Mignon's Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from Goethe to the Twenty-First Century (2011), and (with Sarah Kay and Malcolm Bowie) A Short History of French Literature (2003). In 2009 he was awarded the Balzan Foundation Prize for 'Literature since 1500', and he is currently director of the Balzan Interdisciplinary Seminar 'Literature as an Object of Knowledge', based at the St John's College Research Centre.

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0198749414
• ISBN 13: 9780198749417
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224