Thinking and the Stage: Cognition and English Renaissance Drama

This panel will investigate how cognition and cognitive properties are
understood and represented on the early modern stage. Cognitive science
indicates that the power of the brain is connective, as it attempts to make
networks of meaning, and that it constructs meaningful narratives based on
sensory responses to the objects around us. A cognitive approach to literature,
particularly staged performance, strives for insight: looking within and
exploring new ways to analyze the literary quality of the mind. What can early
modern theater teach us about the mind? How do playwrights represent mental
life onstage? What are the central metaphors for and representations of memory,
forgetting, and emotion? How do performative and linguistic markers represent
the mental life of characters? What can cognitive studies tell us about early
modern audiences?

Please submit abstracts of no more than 150 words together with a brief CV and a
list of desired audiovisual needs to tzajac_at_english.umass.edu by May 17.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

-The relationship of drama to theories of mind (both early modern and current)
-The permutability of language and cultural objects onstage
-Vision, perspective, and perception (cognitive responses to what is seen and
heard [or not seen and heard] onstage)
-Consciousness
-Emotion, mood, memory, and forgetting
-Developmental timing and cognitive processes
-The materials of identity: minds, bodies, and the construction of the self
-Gender and representations of the mind
-Metaphors for the mind and/or memory
-The space of the theater and the space of the mind

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Received on Fri May 11 2007 - 17:17:42 EDT