This book brings together 11 essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and modernism and provides a general and period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays revitalise our reading of Victorian and modernist works in the fields of history of technology, science and medicine, material culture, philosophy, art and literary studies by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world.
This book brings together 11 essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and modernism and provides a general and period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays revitalise our reading of Victorian and modernist works in the fields of history of technology, science and medicine, material culture, philosophy, art and literary studies by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world.
Brings together 11 essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and modernism and provides a general and period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities.
This collection brings together 14 essays by international specialists in Medieval and Renaissance culture to bring recent insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on how cognition was seen as distributed across brain, body and world between the 9th and 17th centuries.
12 essays by international experts look at how cognition is explicitly or implicitly conceived of as distributed across brain, body and world in Greek and Roman technology, science, medicine, material culture, philosophy and literary studies.
This collection brings together 14 essays by international specialists in Medieval and Renaissance culture to bring recent insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on how cognition was seen as distributed across brain, body and world between the 9th and 17th centuries.
Revitalising our reading of 18th century works specifically in the fields of the history of the book, literary studies, material culture, art history, philosophy, technology, science and medicine, this volume brings recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on the distributed nature of cognition. Collectively, the essays show how the particular range of sociocultural and technological contexts of the time fostered and reflected particular notions of distributed cognition.
Marked by a rejection of traditional affiliations such as nation, family, and religion, modernism is often thought to privilege the individual over the community. The contributors to this volume question this assumption, uncovering the communal impulses of the modernist period across genres, cultures, and media. Contributors show how modernist artists and intellectuals reconfigured relations between the individual and the collective. They examine Dada art practices that involve games and play; shared reactions to the post–World War I rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson; the reception of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Harlem Renaissance circles; the publishing platform of the Bengali literary review Parichay; popular radio shows and news broadcasts; and the universal aspects of film-viewing. They also explore radical reimaginings of community as seen in the collective cohabiting envisioned by Virginia Woolf, the utopian experiment of Black Mountain College, and the communal autobiographies of Gertrude Stein. The essays demonstrate that these pluralist ecosystems based on participation were open to paradox, dissent, and multiple perspectives. Through a transnational and transmedial lens, this volume argues that the modernist period was a breakthrough in a rethinking of community that continues in the postmodern era. Contributors: Hélène Aji | Jessica Berman | Jeremy Braddock | Supriya Chaudhuri | Debra Rae Cohen | Melba Cuddy-Keane | Claire Davison | Irene Gammel
"Joins a growing body of scholarship dealing with the productive relationship between literature and cognitive studies while also positing a new theory of modernism. How do we habituate ourselves to environments that are not yet, or no longer, familiar? What is at stake in adapting our behavior to new or changed situations? The present study explores these questions by bringing German literature and thought of the early twentieth century - a time of immense social and material change in Europe - into dialogue with contemporary research in embodied cognition. In six close readings of texts by Vicki Baum, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Dèoblin, Martin Heidegger, Georg Kaiser, and Rainer Maria Rilke, it brings into relief German modernism's concerns over how we adapt our behavior to environments that are new, changed, and/or changing. Rather than emphasizing the alienation and isolation that these texts investigate regarding the modern urban experience, as much of the research on literary modernism has traditionally done, Meindert Peters's book draws out the more dynamic moments of mastery, responsiveness, and cooperation that underpin habituation. Moreover, it extends these questions of habituation to the function of literature itself by showing how modernist forms invite engagement and participation. Habituation in German Modernism not only joins a growing body of scholarship dealing with the productive relationship between literature and cognitive studies but also posits a new theory of modernism"--
Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. The nineteenth century was a moment of extraordinary mathematical innovation, witnessing the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the revaluation of symbolic algebra, and the importation of mathematical language into philosophy. All these innovations sprang from a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice--as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. For Victorian mathematicians, the value of a claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. This concern with formal structure produced a striking convergence between mathematics and aesthetics: geometers wrote fables, logicians reconceived symbolism, and physicists described reality as consisting of beautiful patterns. Artists, meanwhile, drawing upon the cultural prestige of mathematics, conceived their work as a 'science' of form, whether as lines in a painting, twinned characters in a novel, or wavelike stress patterns in a poem. Avant-garde photographs and paintings, fantastical novels like Flatland and Lewis Carroll's children's books, and experimental poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, and Patmore created worlds governed by a rigorous internal logic even as they were pointedly unconcerned with reference or realist protocols. Algebraic Art shows that works we tend to regard as outliers to mainstream Victorian culture were expressions of a mathematical formalism that was central to Victorian knowledge production and that continues to shape our understanding of the significance of form.
