scholarly journals Embodiment and the Animal in Guadalupe Nettel’s El matrimonio de los peces rojos

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (16) ◽  
pp. 239-277
Author(s):  
Isabelle Wentworth
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Hierarchical Network ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
Opaque Surface

This article explores an interaction between posthumanist and cognitive discourses through the work of award winning Mexican author, Guadalupe Nettel. I focus on her 2014 anthology, Natural Histories, rereading the central motif of the narrative, that animals ‘are like a mirror that reflects submerged emotions or behaviours that we don’t dare to see’ (Nettel, 9). This ‘reflection’ is not simply the image of the human reflected off the opaque surface of the animal, but rather the humans themselves act as a mirror, simulating the behaviour of the animals with which they cohabit. This can be read as a literary representation of a neurophysiological phenomenon — embodied simulation, an internal mimicry, either perceptible or imperceptible, performed when watching others completing certain tasks, movements or expressions (Gazzola et al. 2007; Uithol et al. 2011; Iacoboni 2009). In particular, the first story, ‘El matrimonio de los peces rojos’, depicts a profound human-nonhuman embodied resonance that moves between linguistic, narratological and characterological levels. A cognitive critical approach to the mirroring between animals and humans in the stories reveals the particular intersection between new paradigms in cognitive science, animal studies, and posthumanism that the anthology develops, each of its narratives intertwining mind, body and nonhuman other in a non-hierarchical network.

scholarly journals Snaking into the Gothic: Serpentine Sensuousness in Lewis and Coleridge

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Jeremy Chow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
The Erotic ◽  
Gothic Studies

This essay charts the ways late-eighteenth-century Gothic authors repurpose natural histories of snakes to explore how reptile-human encounters are harbingers of queer formations of gender, sexuality, and empire. By looking to M.G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) and his understudied short story “The Anaconda” (1808), as well as S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel (1797–1800), I centre the last five years of the eighteenth century to apprehend the interwoven nature of Gothic prose, poetry, and popular natural histories as they pertain to reptile knowledge and representations. Whereas Lewis’s short story positions the orientalised anaconda to upheave notions of empire, gender, and romance, his novel invokes the snake to signal the effusion of graphic eroticisms. Coleridge, in turn, invokes the snake-human interspecies connection to imagine female, homoerotic possibilities and foreclosures. Plaiting eighteenth-century animal studies, queer studies, and Gothic studies, this essay offers a queer eco-Gothic reading of the violating, erotic powers of snakes in their placement alongside human interlocutors. I thus recalibrate eighteenth-century animal studies to focus not on warm-blooded mammals, but on cold-blooded reptiles and the erotic effusions they afford within the Gothic imaginary that repeatedly conjures them, as I show, with queer interspecies effects.

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice through Critical Animal Studies

2015 ◽  
pp. 188-207
Author(s):  
Carol Gigliotti
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Environmental Damage ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Human Animal

Critical animal studies (CAS) is a critical approach to human-animal relationships and explicitly committed to a global justice for animals, humans, and the earth. This essay argues that the global animal industrial complex, as well as the increasing global cultural push to eat meat, are inordinately causing calamitous current conditions of human-caused climate change and species extinction, as well as increasing poverty, hunger, disease, environmental damage and unprecedented animal misery and slaughter. Influenced by critical theory from the Frankfurt School and feminism, among other sources, CAS specifically critiques capitalism and globalization in its role in the domination of people, animals and the earth, but also sees the intersections of all oppression anywhere and for whatever reason as motivation for employing the powerful forces of compassion and social justice.

Husserlian empathy and embodied simulation

2020 ◽  
pp. 095935432096664
Author(s):  
Heath Williams
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Simulation Theory ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Additional Process ◽  
Similarity And Difference ◽  
Interpretive Framework

In this article, I show that Husserl’s account of empathy supports embodied simulation theory. Both Husserl and embodied simulation accounts of intersubjectivity face the difficulty of accounting for the relations of similarity and difference between self and other, but there is ample neurological data available to the simulationist to establish the relations of similarity and difference, and Husserlian concepts provide a useful interpretive framework for this data. I then respond to the criticism that the theory of embodied simulation involves imitation and is therefore indirect and nonperceptual. Yet, some extra process must distinguish perceptual intersubjectivity from nonsocial perception, and the most direct additional process possible is the interbodily resonances of the kinaesthetic system endorsed by both simulationists and Husserl. Husserl gives an account of kinaesthetic sensations amounting to a phenomenological description of embodied simulation. This article exemplifies phenomenological correlationism whereby cognitive science and phenomenology serve to enlighten one another.

scholarly journals Actual research areas in modern foreign literary studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-79
Author(s):  
A. Mustoyapova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Xxist Century ◽  
Critical Approaches

The article describes the types of latest research presented in foreign literary studies at the beginning of the XXIst century. The аuthor focuses on the formation of such critical approaches as cognitive criticism, Darwinian criticism, ecocriticism, human and animal studies. The author focuses on the problems of literature at the beginning of the XXIst century, which are closely related to the latest achievements in neurobiology, cognitive science, environmental and evolution issues. A review of the modern foreign researcher’s works allows us to conclude that they are related to poststructuralist, postmodern, evolutionistic and actor-network theories. The significance of these critical approaches is determined by the fact that they are relevant and applicable for not only literary analysis and literary criticism, but also for research in sociology, psychology and in the field of interdisciplinary research.

Not Coming to Terms: Nonhuman Animals and the Edge of Theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-328
Author(s):  
Juliane Prade
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Anthropological Discourse

AbstractIn the emerging field of animal studies, criticism turns to questions of ethics and animal rights by reading representations of nonhuman animals in philosophy and literature. A rhetoric of coming to terms often shapes such readings and points to a lack of satisfactory answers to two questions: why read nonhuman animals, and why now? These questions are crucial to animal studies but can only be answered by understanding this critical approach as an element of the anthropological discourse, fundamental to philosophy. Examining Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s approaches to thinking about the human-animal relation, it seems that the interest in reading how animals are presented in philosophy is not in coming to definitive terms with this relation or in correcting earlier theories. Rather, it appears to lie in reading the concept of the Animal as marking a limit of terminological language, and thus of theory. The Animal marks the point at which philosophy touches on poetry and withdraws. Criticism is concerned with animals now because the concept of “the animals” keeps casting doubt on theoretical conceptions of the Human and of human language.

The Ape that Captured Time

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Tok Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Animal Kingdom ◽  
Symbolic Communication ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Evolutionary Perspectives

Recent advances in animal studies have established the widespread use of learned, symbolic communication in the animal kingdom (and hence, of some variety of "language"). Meanwhile, Mechling (1989), has argued that folklore, as shared learned traditions, also exists in non-human animals. Considering that many scholars believe that humans are unique in our ability to tell stories, this schism between human and animal, the story and other folklore, has a great deal to tell us about the outlines and origins of humanity. This chapter seeks to integrate arguments from linguistics, archaeology, folklore, and cognitive science from evolutionary perspectives.

Humor, the body, and cognitive linguistics

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrawat Samermit ◽  
Raymond W. Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Real World ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Antecedents And Consequences ◽  
The Relationship

This article argues that the relationship between humor and the body is far more complex, and less linear, than typically presumed in theories of humor. First, cognitive linguistic studies suggest that our folk concepts of humor are fundamentally embodied, as well as mostly metaphorical. Second, psychological research demonstrates that people produce and understand stimuli as being humorous via embodied simulation processes in which they imaginatively project themselves into language or some real world event. Finally, the pervasive influence that bodily thoughts and actions have on humorous experiences greatly complicates attempts to empirically study how humor works and to theoretically describe the behavioral antecedents and consequences of humor in everyday life. Proper recognition of the tight link between humor and the body opens up many empirical and theoretical possibilities for future studies in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science.

scholarly journals “The Boundless Realm Where All Form Lies”. Representing Imagination at the Crossway Between Literary and Neurocognitive Studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renata Gambino ◽  
Grazia Pulvirenti
Keyword(s):  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
Symbolic Constraints ◽  
Elusive Concept

According to ancient texts on poetics, the concept of representation is deeply bound to that of “mimesis;” this last was intended in two main ways: as “imitation” and as “world construction.” In Aristotle's Poetics, mimesis is theorized as the main form of “world simulation,” giving rise to the complex universe of fiction. The concept of simulation plays a pivotal role in the neurocognitive theories on the embodied mind: within this frame, embodied simulation is intended as a functional prelinguistic activation of the human sensorimotor mechanism. This happens not only with regard to intercorporeality and intersubjectivity in the real world but also in relation to the process of imagination giving rise to literary imagery and to the reader's reception of the fictional world, since human beings share a common sensorimotor apparatus. Imagination is a central concept in the recent neurocognitive studies since it plays a core role in human life and in artistic production and reception. Imagination has been considered as a complex emergent cognitive faculty deeply intertwined with perception, memory, and consciousness, shaping human life and transforming the limited horizon of our perceptual affective understanding, being, and acting. Although there is an immense bulk of literature on this topic, imagination is still an elusive concept: its definition and understanding change according to different heuristic frames—mainly the philosophical, aesthetic, poetic, and cognitive ones—giving rise to debates about its modalities and effects, particularly in relation to the construction of aesthetic and symbolic constraints. In this paper, we claim that scientific research may take advantage from the literary representation of the imaginative faculties, which occurs in specific tests characterized by dynamic images and motion. In such meta-representation of the imagination, we witness the phenomenological emergence of endogenous dynamic processes involving a cluster of cognitive faculties, activated by triggering the reader's embodied simulation. One of the main German poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the second part of his masterwork Faust II, intuitively represents the very process of the imagination and its responding to embodied simulation with regard both to the author's creative act and to its reception by the reader. At the crossway between literary and neurocognitive, this study aims to highlight the advantage offered to future transdisciplinary inquiries by the literary representation showing features and dynamics of the still mysterious phenomenon of the imagination.

Language as a mental travel guide

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles P. Davis ◽  
Gerry T. M. Altmann ◽  
Eiling Yee
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Travel Guide

Abstract Gilead et al.'s approach to human cognition places abstraction and prediction at the heart of “mental travel” under a “representational diversity” perspective that embraces foundational concepts in cognitive science. But, it gives insufficient credit to the possibility that the process of abstraction produces a gradient, and underestimates the importance of a highly influential domain in predictive cognition: language, and related, the emergence of experientially based structure through time.

Decellularized bone extracellular matrix in skeletal tissue engineering

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 755-764
Author(s):  
Benjamin B. Rothrauff ◽  
Rocky S. Tuan
Keyword(s):  
Tissue Engineering ◽  
Bone Regeneration ◽  
Tissue Regeneration ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Tumor Resection ◽  
Regenerative Capacity ◽  
Skeletal Tissue ◽  
Large Bone

Bone possesses an intrinsic regenerative capacity, which can be compromised by aging, disease, trauma, and iatrogenesis (e.g. tumor resection, pharmacological). At present, autografts and allografts are the principal biological treatments available to replace large bone segments, but both entail several limitations that reduce wider use and consistent success. The use of decellularized extracellular matrices (ECM), often derived from xenogeneic sources, has been shown to favorably influence the immune response to injury and promote site-appropriate tissue regeneration. Decellularized bone ECM (dbECM), utilized in several forms — whole organ, particles, hydrogels — has shown promise in both in vitro and in vivo animal studies to promote osteogenic differentiation of stem/progenitor cells and enhance bone regeneration. However, dbECM has yet to be investigated in clinical studies, which are needed to determine the relative efficacy of this emerging biomaterial as compared with established treatments. This mini-review highlights the recent exploration of dbECM as a biomaterial for skeletal tissue engineering and considers modifications on its future use to more consistently promote bone regeneration.

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