Knowing Subjects. Cognitive Cultural Studies and Early Modern Spanish Literature by Barbara Simerka (review)

Barbara Simerka’s Knowing Subjects introduces a particular facet of cognitive studies to scholars and students of early modern Spanish literature and culture. For that reason it requires a reviewer to explain how her topic relates to the vast new area of interconnected studies across the humanities and neurological sciences. In effect, her method is a literary and cultural analysis familiar to most scholars but with added insights from studies of how human mind-brains process life and art. Simerka begins with a list of abbreviations and cognitive terms sculpted to the topics and works she will discuss. These focus on mind reading, theory of mind, social intelligence, and Machiavellian intelligence. In a recent conversation, she indicated that cognition in her subtitle means “knowledge,” as in the “Knowing” of her title (July 12, 2014). Simerka describes it as “a meta-awareness of one’s mind” and “one’s being aware of how one is thinking.” In effect, she is referring to the 5% of cognition that we call our “reasoning” and “intelligence.” Thus she implies that literature and culture present evidence based on some of the unconscious 95% of cognitive processes, including different emotions, levels of empathy, and processes of perception.

Simerka’s first chapter introduces her methodology. The most thorough and broadly authoritative source she cites is Howard Mancing’s manuscript Voices in Everything. This comprehensive compilation of evidence is essential reading for cognitive approaches to culture and literature. Mancing’s accounts of contexts and interconnectedness demonstrate how human mind-brains of individuals in their societies, cultures, and literature continually emerge through biological and ecological adaptations. Even more importantly, applications of these discoveries in cognitive literary and cultural scholarship should radically change the profound mistrust and lack of scientific knowledge among literary scholars. Simerka describes the new approach to textual analysis as “neither deterministic nor bio-reductive; it seeks to incorporate new knowledge about the brain and about human cognitive practices into the already interdisciplinary practice of cultural studies” (5). Even though her chapters might read like normal cultural and literary analysis, Simerka’s readers should keep the non-deterministic and non-reductive nature of the cognitive revolution in mind if they are to prepare for the long-range legacy that the new field will have as we expand knowledge of and appreciation for early modern Spanish works in context.

Chapter one introduces how her knowledge-and-reasoning approach to cognition will focus on “mind reading” (MR) and “theory of mind” (ToM) as “a supplement to, and not as a replacement for, current historically based and ideological approaches” (4). As in Lisa Zunshine’s edition of Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, the paradigm Simerka adapts “takes into account the interconnectedness of the evolved human brain, social communication and aesthetics” (4). In short, these are the 95% of body-brain processes that make possible scholars’ interpretations of the 5% of cognition and reasoning that are consciously manifest in cultural and literature. Indeed, most of the scholars she cites in the volume are offered as cultural evidence that Simerka’s approach to cognition and literature is contextually based.

In Simerka’s second chapter, “Theory of Mind, Social Intelligence and Urban Courtship Drama,” the rational definitions of cognition are used to interpret gender and culture as reflected in early modern Spanish dramatic texts. In this regard, Simerka wisely focuses on three female Spanish dramatists and their implied knowledge of mind reading (MR) as demonstrated in their characters. Although Simerka does not explain that MR abilities differ among individuals in their life experience observing bodies and faces, she applies psychological theories of MR. For example, the theory of mind (ToM) used by writer Ana Caro for her character Leonor in Valor, agravio y mujer is classed as Theory Theory. Another type of ToM, Simulation Theory (ST), is detected in Simerka’s treatment of characters in Angela de Azevedo’s El muerto disimulado. Explanation of both types of ToM are skillfully interwoven in her...