Cognitive literary criticism has arguably been the fastest growing area of criticism in recent times. A field characterised by diversity, it is unified by an analytical animus: to discover what the cognitive sciences can teach us about art, and what art can teach us about cognition. More specifically, it engages with contemporary neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy of mind, to consider the nature of sociality, empathy, perception, and consciousness in relation to literature and the processes surrounding its production and consumption. In particular, second-generation cognitive literary criticism-which is premised on a model of the mind as embodied, culturally and ecologically situated in a particular environment, and enacted through our interactions with this environment-has revealed the ways in which classical, dualist approaches to literary notions of interiority inadequately represent both human experience and behavior and literary encounters, and the interactions between them. Though controversial, cognitive literary criticism has made significant contributions to the broader field: the synthesis of cognitive science with the literary produces a model of knowledge able to move between objectivity and subjectivity, synapse to syntax, the empirical to the experiential.The field has been developing since (at least) the 1980s, with the work of Norman Holland deploying cognitive neuroscience as a powerful hermeneutic tool in literary analysis. In concert with the development of cognitive science technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and other forms of neuroimaging techniques, interest in cognitive literary studies has expanded exponentially within the last four decades. As Isabel Jaén and Julien Simon argue, "By the end of the 20 th C, cognitive
Fiction has often shown that our sense of time can be affected by the spaces and things around us. In particular, the houses in which characters live can make the passing of time dilate, accelerate, even to seem to skip or stop. These interactions between place and time may represent more than metaphor or literary artifice, but rather genuine cognitive processes of embodied subjective time. This is demonstrated in an analysis of Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses, supplementing traditional stylistic analysis with cognitive poetics to explore an influence of the central house, the Sea House, on the young protagonist’s experience of time. Exploring the text through the fictional mental functioning of a main character offers a new way to understand The Life of Houses, and, more broadly, the cognitive approach set out in this article—one which takes into account various active and interactive influences on subjective time—may have implications for the interpretation of other works which analyse the connections between time, place, and self.
El cuerpo en que nací (2011) de Guadalupe Nettel es un Bildungsroman autoficcional que provoca una serie de cuestionamientos relacionados con el cuerpo y con la mente. La propuesta del título implica un Dualismo Cartesiano: un cuerpo que es un recipiente donde la mente está ubicada de forma circunstancial. Los procesos sensoriales y motores; la percepción y la acción son fundamentalmente inseparables en la cognición vivida. La novela empieza con el defecto físico de la protagonista: ella tiene una mancha de nacimiento sobre su ojo derecho, por lo que tiene que llevar un parche durante la mitad del día. La limitación en sus facultades perceptuales divide su mundo por la mitad. Este aspecto de su cuerpo moldea su forma de ser, y su manera de conceptualizar y experimentar el mundo. Para compensar el sentido de ser dividida: es decir, de ser una media-persona, la protagonista conforma su subjetividad a través de la duplicación. Ella limita a los seres con los cuales puede identificarse: insectos, y otras criaturas que viven marginadas. Por tanto, imitar o simular a estos bichos le da a nuestra protagonista un sentido sólido en un mundo fragmentado, puesto que, dos mitades forman un cuerpo entero. Este equilibrio no es matemático, sino afectivo y encarnado, lo cual revela la filosofía verdadera de la novela sobre el cuerpo y la mente.
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