Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature ed. by Isabel Jaén and Julien Jacques Simon (review)

IN 2013 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS and the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts at the University of Osnabrück in Germany announced the book series Cognition and Poetics, a joint project with the stated goal to publish "high quality interdisciplinary research at the intersection of the cognitive sciences and the arts." The present volume appears to be the first in the series, with three more slated for publication in 2017 alone. This is indeed a rapidly expanding field.

Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature is the second anthology that Isabel Jaén and Julien Jacques Simon edit in the field of cognitive literary studies. Their prior one, titled Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions, was published in 2012 by the University of Texas Press. The cognitive approach to literary studies seeks insights gained by the neurosciences on the functioning of the brain and mind to the interpretation of literary texts. The present collection is, according to the book jacket, "the first anthology to explore human cognition and literature in the context of early modern Spanish culture. It features the leading voices in the field, discussing the main themes that this important area of study has been producing."

The anthology consists of an introduction by the editors, eleven scholarly articles, and a pedagogical afterword. The articles are distributed in five sections with discrete titles.

The first section, titled "An Overview of Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature," includes a single article in which Julien Jacques Simon offers an overview of some of the main research topics in the field of cognitive literary studies as explored in the various articles included in this collection, together with the definitions of key concepts, such as embodiment, Theory of Mind (ToM), and empathy.

Section 2, "The Creation of Self," includes three essays devoted to Cervantes's Don Quixote. The first two, by Howard Mancing and Catherine Connor-Swietlicki, focus on the notions of embodied cognition and autopoiesis as applied to the novel. The third essay, by Julia Domínguez, deals with memory and imagination in Cervantes. All three are of negligible interest to the Quixote specialist since the sum total of their insights into Cervantes's masterpiece is that Don Quixote has a body (Mancing), Cervantes uses his memories to enliven his character's experiences (Connor-Swietlicki), and Don Quixote uses memory and imagination to interpret his reality (Domínguez).

The third section, titled "Embodied Cognition and Performance," consists of two essays centered on theater performance. In the first one, "Cognitive Theatricality: Jongleuresque Imagination on the Early Spanish Stage," Bruce Burningham revisits some of the arguments he made in his book Radical Theatricality (2007), applying the concept of "embodied cognition." The second one, "A Mindful Audience: Embodied Spectatorship in Early Modern Madrid," by Elizabeth Cruz Petersen, focuses on embodied spectatorship within the framework of Richard Shusterman's pragmatic somaesthetics, analyzed in its three different dimensions: representational, experiential, and performative. Despite the profusion of awkward terminology used to refer to common concepts, such as "embodied minds" for "persons," or "somatic control" for expressing one's approval or lack thereof by making noise (that is, booing, banging, whistling, clapping etc.), the article comes to the reassuring conclusion that "far from a passive mirror of society, theatre established an active relationship between actors and audiences. The mirror through which the actors and spectators saw themselves was a composite of collective and individual experiences that resulted in a somaesthetic experience for all parties involved" (124), or, in plain English, going to the theater actually means going to the theater, to claim a piece of real estate either on the stage or among the audience in order to see and to be seen, to hear and to be heard, which results in a physical and aesthetical experience for both actors and spectators.

The fourth section, "Perceiving and Understanding Others," includes three articles. The first one, by Judith Caballero, analyzes cross-dressing in...