Cognitive Theories of Genre: The Prototype Effect and Early Modern Spanish Tragedy

2012 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Simerka
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Prototype Effect ◽  
Cognitive Theories

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Knoll
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
John Lyly ◽  
Cognitive Theories ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Considerable Length ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Erotic Desire

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive and philosophical approaches, this book advances a new methodology for analysing how early modern plays dramatize inward erotic experience. Grounded in cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors—motion, space, and creativity—that shape erotic desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Although Lyly and Shakespeare wrote for different types of theatres and only partially-overlapping audiences, both dramatists created characters who speak erotic language at considerable length and in extraordinary depth. Their metaphors do more than merely narrate or express eros; they constitute characters’ erotic experiences. Each of the book’s three sections explores a fundamental conceptual metaphor, first its philosophical underpinnings and then its capacity for dramatizing erotic experience in Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s plays. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare provides a literary and linguistic analysis of metaphor that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, even of pleasure itself.

Equeer

2016 ◽  
pp. 346-362
Author(s):  
Karen Raber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Embodied Mind ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
Cognitive Theories ◽  
The Way

When Hotspur imagines his final battlefield encounter with Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry 4, he specifically characterizes it as one between two ‘hot horses’ as well as their two riders. Past scholarship on the queer relationship between Hotspur and Prince Hal has overlooked the way it channels desire through these equine partners. This essay uses cognitive theories of embodied mind alongside accounts of early modern horsemanship to locate Hotspur and Hal in a chivalric tradition that dissolves the boundaries—physical, cognitive, and erotic—between human and animal. This essay argues that to fully appreciate the genuinely provocative range of the play’s queer potentialities we must consider how it represents the distribution of desire, identity, and agency across both bodies and species.

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