Witty Fools and Foolish Wits: Performing Cognitive Disability in English Literature, c. 1380-c. 1602

fools;cognitive disability;wit;songs;medieval English literature;early modern English literature;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language and Literature

Heetderks, Angela M.Sanok, Catherine ;

University of Michigan

关键词: fools;    cognitive disability;    wit;    songs;    medieval English literature;    early modern English literature;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language and Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/110491/amariem_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

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

【 摘 要 】

AbstractWitty Fools and Foolish Wits: Performing Cognitive Disability in English Literature, c. 1380–c. 1602 argues that the figure of the premodern literary fool serves as an avatar for cultural concerns about the frailty of cognitive ability. The performances of even the wittiest fools are best contextualized within the full range of the premodern literary tradition, which often depicts fools as morally suspect representatives of cognitive alterity and agents of social disruption. Fools’ performances of songs and verbal wit position them as figures who are both cognitively disabled and hyper-abled—that is, extraordinarily gifted. Literary texts regularly portray fools as figures who are either cognitively disabled by their own moral fault, or else counterfeiters of hyper-ability.Chapter 1 examines the pseudo-Chaucerian Tale of Beryn’s two theoretical models of cognitive disability. The poem’s employment of the medieval topos of the ;;five wits,” or five senses, proffers a theory of fully embodied cognition and adduces a pervasive, societal model of cognitive disability. Chapter 2 shows how the medieval romance Robert of Sicily frames a king’s folly as a form of cognitive disability that imperils the institution of the monarchy itself. Chapter 3 examines the morality play The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art (1569), demonstrating how the fool’s singing of solfège and nonsense syllables registers as ;;bable”—that is, ;;bauble”/;;babble”—and arguing that the play identifies such foolish ;;bable” as the cause of cognitive, linguistic, and educational failure. Chapter 4 argues that in Twelfth Night (c. 1602), Feste’s performance of songs and wordplay register as non-rational counterpoints to the forms of rational discourse valorized by handbooks on early modern masculinity and aesthetic creation.In the texts I examine, audiences attempt to read fooling as either the cause of fools’ own cognitive disability or the evidence of fools’ counterfeiting of hyper-ability. Premodern attempts to insist on these categories reveal deep social concerns about the impossibility of managing—or mending—cognitive difference. Yet fools themselves challenge such simplistic categories: their performances of fooling gesture toward a conceptual landscape that provides ample room for many forms of cognitive variation and expression.