Ecologies of Thought in Early Modern English Drama.

Early Modern Drama;Cognitive Ecology;Theories of Environment and Embodiment;The History of Space and Place;William Shakespeare;Christopher Marlowe;Ben Jonson;John Lyly;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language and Literature

Bozio, Andrew JonathanTinkle, Theresa L. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Early Modern Drama;    Cognitive Ecology;    Theories of Environment and Embodiment;    The History of Space and Place;    William Shakespeare;    Christopher Marlowe;    Ben Jonson;    John Lyly;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language and Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/99866/bozio_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Ecologies of Thought in Early Modern English Drama argues that the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented a site for reimagining the nature of space within early modern culture. In examining the relationship between environment and embodied thought, this dissertation draws upon the central tenets of cognitive ecology, a contemporary theory that foregrounds the mind’s ability to think through bodies, artifacts, spaces, and cultural systems. In turn, the project argues that early modern cognition was ecological by its very nature, using humoral theory, faculty psychology, the arts of the memory, and other materials as historical evidence. By theorizing a transactional relationship between the mind and its immediate environments, this model illuminates what might be called the poetics of emplacement on the early modern stage. That is to say, the ecology of early modern thought reveals the way that disparate elements – from embodied sensations to the qualities of an ambient environment – conjoined to form a sense of place. Individual chapters consider the relationship between contemplative desire and the Neoplatonic cosmos in John Lyly’s Endymion, ecological memory and empire in Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, perception and the phenomenology of place in Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the performativity of Smithfield in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Placing early modern drama in dialogue with the philosophical history of space and place, moreover, this dissertation suggests how untimely theories of emplacement and of embodied location emerged within early modern culture, where culture is less a site for receiving philosophical ideas than a domain wherein these ideas are tested, transformed, or rejected in favor of more organic claims. Ecologies of Thought thereby provides a new template for reading the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It advances a historically nuanced methodology for interpreting the representation of thought on the early modern stage. In short, by drawing attention to moments of emplacement in early modern drama, this dissertation sheds light upon the stage’s ability to represent and to manipulate the ecological nature of early modern cognition.