A paper describing an undergraduate course on science and literature in the Italian cultural tradition.

Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick

How might literary and cultural spheres intersect with the Anthropocene, the epoch — however defined — of humanity’s detectable influence at geological scale? What forms, genres, objects, and methodological lenses might prove most fertile in mediating between the concept’s abstraction and its concrete entailments for literary and cultural hi…[Read more]

This essay considers the use of “serial thinking”—an approach to representation and cognition that emphasizes repetition, enumeration, and aggregation—in the work of Thomas Hardy. Examining his first novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), it connects Hardy’s approaches to serial thinking with the discourse of Victorian logic (especially the work of J…[Read more]

This essay reads Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry for its “ecological perception”: a perceptual modality involving the dynamic interaction between human bodies and environmental givens or potentialities. Linking Hopkins’s syncretic ideas about perception to the psychologist J. J. Gibson’s account of our sensitivity to environmental “affordan…[Read more]

John Ruskin’s cloud aesthetics develop a coherent, if figurative, inquiry into the nature of human liberty. His changing accounts of cloud formations across Modern Painters gradually place more emphasis on liberty within a framework of restraint and self-government. Attending to the shifting and equivocal senses of liberty in Ruskin’s aes…[Read more]

Departing in some measure from critical views that invoke similar contextual materials, this essay argues for a reevaluation of Hopkins’s debt to scientific thinking in his poetry and poetics. Hovering between competing conceptions of nature’s structure and purpose—evolutionary theory, energy physics, natural theology—Hopkins develops a poetics…[Read more]

This essay considers the significance of rumor in the work of Thomas Hardy, anchoring its claims in a reading of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). I argue that rumor conditions the narrative movement of this novel through its linked operations in social space and bodily sensation. First, I examine the relationship between the movements of…[Read more]

Ruskin and Mayhew together disclose a Victorian ecological discourse attuned to the divergent spaces, varying rhythms, and dispersed networks that compose the urban environment.

a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies

The Oulipo has claimed that foreign member, Italo Calvino, was a key proponent of the clinamen, a purposeful deviation from the strict constraints in which the group specializes. However, upon closer inspection, Calvino’s Oulipian production during his Paris period does not seem to advance a formalized definition of this tool of constrained w…[Read more]

Would you like to get better at mindreading (i.e., at inferring people’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, based on their behavior)? As it turns out, all you would have to do is lower your relative social status. Studies have shown that people in weaker social positions engage in more active and perceptive mindreading than do people in stronger s…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

The New English Dictionary was originally distinguished from an encyclopedia in reach and function by its proponent Richard Chenevix Trench and its principal editor James A. H. Murray as differing in responsibilities: a dictionary described the meanings of words, an encyclopedia described the nature of things. The distinction had philosophical and…[Read more]

Table of contents.