This essay explores the gap between the abstract ideal of fairness and the bodily materiality of retribution. My aim is to suggest how some current cognitive science affords a helpful way of talking about the breaks between abstractions, or thoughts of fairness, and the judgments and punishments produced by actual legal systems. It is remarkably…[Read more]

The pastoral genre provides cognitive literary historians a clear example of how genre cooperates with and enacts the most basic cognitive tasks of the imagination, namely the ability to toggle between concrete sense data and abstractions. This essay discusses the predictive processing hypothesis and suggest that it offers a usefully revisionary…[Read more]

In her introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Lisa Zunshine, scholar in the field and its best historian, describes cognitive literary critics as working “not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies” (2015). Scholars from m…[Read more]

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

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

Can the Indian manuscript and manuscript library be art? In what follows, I reflect on this question by examining a set of photographs I created for an art project called Manuscriptistan. I explain what it has meant for me to aestheticise Indian manuscript libraries and manuscripts, and I offer some insights about why it is important for scholars…[Read more]

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]

“Selling Science in the 20th Century” was a public talk delivered as part of the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s Saturday Speakers series. The presentation focused on Beckman Instruments, science advertising, the Beckman Historical Collection, and the digitization component of CHF’s Beckman Legacy Project. Audience members also had the opportunity…[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]

When we think we know Fernando Pessoa, a new surprise arises: this time, one related to the genesis of Mensagem, the most established and celebrated book of the Pessoan canon. That book, published in 1934 with a title only finalized at the time of the typographical proofs, was initially called Portugal—an inscription dating from 1910, when P…[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]

This essay analyzes contemporary politics of truth across overlapping contexts: the predicament of whistleblowers, the proliferation of digital disinformation, the extractive imperatives of data economies, and the impossibility of exposing the truth when exposé becomes itself a game. The essay reads the recent cultural and political interest in…[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.

PDF copy of the syllabus for “Mapping Violence,” an undergraduate course co-taught by Profs. Monica Muñoz Martinez and Jim McGrath with Teaching Assistant Edwin Rodriguez. The course draws on and contributes to work from Mapping Violence, a digital restorative justice initiative focused on acts of state-sanctioned racial violence in Texas and…[Read more]

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

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