Traveling Ever Toward Freedom: A Metaphorical Feminist Study of Colson Whitehead’s the Underground Railroad

There is a growing interest in cognitive approaches to literature in recent years; undoubtedly conceptual metaphor has become one of the favourite topics for analysis. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980), assert that metaphor is not just a matter of words; rather it is inherently conceptual and conceptual metaphors help us comprehend abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones. This article proposes that metaphor is used to overcome the inadequacy of language in the face of indescribable phenomena, such as slavery, racism and multiple oppressions of black women throughout history in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016). Patricia Collins tries to convey through her work, Black Feminist Thought (2000), which will be used here, that all these oppressions exist even today. The result of this study indicates that Whitehead has picked up and given life to the old slavery story to emotionally engage a global audience at the present time, when racial hatred seems to be a thing of the past.

Flocking Together: Collective Animal Minds in Contemporary Fiction

The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups—such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight—is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a fullfledged form of collective cognition. Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective agent (in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker), animals that communicate a shared mind through dance- like movements (in Lydia Davis's The Cows), and animals that embrace a collective “we” to critique the individualism of contemporary society (in Peter Verhelst's The Man I Became). When individuality drops out of the picture of human‐animal encounters in fiction, empathy becomes abstract: a matter of quasi‐geometric patterns that are experienced by readers through an embodied mechanism of kinesthetic resonance. (MC)

The Curse of Realism

This chapter challenges the assumption that throughout history the novel gets progressively better at realism and at matching its language in cognitive processes. It characterises this assumption as “the curse of realism,” which retroactively imposes standards from the nineteenth-century novel onto texts from earlier periods and evaluates them as lacking stylistic and narrative achievements that they never aimed for. A counter-model, based on embodied cognition and predictive, probabilistic cognition, is proposed. This allows cognitive approaches to literature to move away from a teleological perspective (where the novel improves its match with cognition) and towards a dialectic perspective (where literary texts can relate to cognition in ways that are not inherently more accurate than others). This chapter lays the overall theoretical foundations for the case studies in the following chapters.

4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The early novel developed modes of writing that are considered gripping and immersive, because they foreground physical states, meaningful gestures, and emotional excitement. This monograph shows how these changes relate to “embodied” and “enactive” cognition, “embed” themselves into the cultural and material contexts, and “extend” readers’ thoughts. In an investigation of works from Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Burney, it traces the ways in which such “4E cognition” can contribute to a new perspective on stylistic and narrative changes in eighteenth-century fiction. The embodied dimension of literary language is then related to the media ecologies of letter writing, book learning, and theatricality in the eighteenth century. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels real because it is integrated into the lifeworld and its embodied experiences. Together with the issue of realism, this book revisits traditional understandings of the “rise of the novel” and earlier historical perspectives in cognitive literary studies. And the perspective from 4E cognition, it is argued, opens links to book history and media ecologies that can launch historically situated cognitive approaches to literature.

Complexities of cognition in poetic art: Matthew Arnold's “The Last Word”

The cognitive complexity of Matthew Arnold's poem “The Last Word” has resulted in diverging literary critical evaluations. By applying several cognitive approaches to the poem, I develop a reading that reveals the poem's underlying coherence. I then address the question of how that reading might reflect Arnold's own intentions and motivations in responding to adversaries of his social criticism. In doing so, I hope to present a way of showing how both cognitive approaches to literature and traditional literary expertise complement each other in contributing to our understanding of the complexities of human minding: the integration of sensations, emotions, and conceptual reasoning that constitute the way we experience and interact with each other and the world of which we are a part.

A Narrative of National Reform: Quanto vale ou é por quilo? (2005)

Quanto vale ou é por quilo? tells the story of two groups of characters: one that profits from the continued misery of much of the Brazilian population, and another that tries to expose and punish those in the private and political sectors who are responsible for such exploitation. By exploring parallels between a time marked by African slavery in Brazil and the presumably more illuminated present, the film attempts to lay bare a systemic social and economic disparity that continues to be intertwined with race. This article hypothesizes that the narrative locates the solution for some of the nation’s woes in the realm of social identity. More specifically, it argues that the film proposes that the country’s pernicious inequities are grounded in the perpetuation of nefarious and persistent attributes in understandings of Brazilianness among much of the population. If Brazil is to improve, the film advises, then prevailing definitions of the national group must be modified. Drawing on research in social psychology, and work in the area of cognitive approaches to literature and culture, this article seeks to decipher what sort of intervention on identity the film is making, and which of its elements might lead to influencing viewers’ social identities.

Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious

This essay argues that cognitive approaches to literature are less widely used than they might be if they offered a hermeneutic practice in addition to providing insight about the ways in which texts are produced and read. It offers a history of the spatial metaphors of surface and depth that structure Jameson's interpretive practice in The Political Unconscious, arguing that Jameson deploys spatial metaphors in order to negotiate aporiae that are not reconcilable in theory.