In this Book
- How Do I Know Thee?: Theatrical and Narrative Cognition in Seventeenth-Century France
- Book
- 2015
- Published by: Northwestern University Press
- Series: Rethinking the Early Modern
The classical period in France presents a particularly lively battleground for the transition between oral-visual culture, on the one hand, and print culture on the other. The former depended on learning from sources of knowledge directly, in their presence, in a manner analogous to theatrical experience. The latter became characterized by the distance and abstraction of reading. How Do I Know Thee? explores the ways in which literature, philosophy, and psychology approach social cognition, or how we come to know others. Richard E. Goodkin describes a central opposition between what he calls “theatrical cognition” and “narrative cognition,” drawing both on scholarship on literary genre and mode, and also on the work of a number of philosophers and psychologists, in particular Descartes’s theory of cognition, Freudian psychoanalysis, mid‑twentieth‑century behaviorism, and the field of cognitive science. The result is a study that will be of interest not only to students of the classical period but also to those in the corresponding disciplines.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- p. vii
- Part One. Wars of Cognition in Seventeenth-Century France
- Part Two. Theatrical and Narrative Cognition in Twentieth-Century Psychology
- Part Three. Reading French Classicism, Cognitively: Corneille, Molière, Lafayette, and La Bruyère
- Chapter Six. Molière and the Novel
- pp. 167-198
- Conclusion. “Taking Note” of Personality
- pp. 281-284
- Bibliography
- pp. 303-310
Additional Information
Copyright
2015