Knowing subjects: Cognitive Cultural Studies and Early Modern Spanish Literature by Barbara Simerka (review)

REVIEWS 110 Simerka, Barbara. Knowing subjects: Cognitive Cultural Studies and Early Modern Spanish Literature. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2013. 259 pp. ISBN 978-1-55753-644-0 Knowing subjects is a book that suggests, within the scope of “Cognitive Cultural Studies,” a new and different approach to a series of literary characters belonging to early modern Spanish dramatic and narrative texts. Well-known from her previous work, Discourses of Empire (2003), and many other essays on Golden Age Spanish literature, Barbara Simerka devotes her new book to analyzing how such popular and over-studied characters as the pícaro, galán, and dama develop acts of mentalizing.That is, how do these characters think and consequently perform within a given social milieu. Her focus is on texts that depict new forms of social interactions in urban and court society. She takes the reader back to seventeenth century Iberia and places her in the field of cognitive sciences. By examining a suitable set of examples, Simerka deals with strategies such as Mind Reading (MR) or Social Intelligence (SI) that are used by the main characters of a few dramas, romances and treaties in prose. She provides a range of situations that help the reader understand the striking relationship between Golden Age literature and culture through the lens of twenty-first century cognitive sciences. Simerka begins with a list of abbreviations and definitions. This is a huge help to the cognitivist-illiterate reader, who can refresh her memory by going back to the beginning and rereading what MI stands for (Machiavellian Intelligence) or “Theory of Mind” (ToM) means. In addition, the first chapter is devoted to the origins of cognitive sciences during the WWII era, and to highlight the links between cognitive and cultural studies. In this respect, she points to Lisa Zunshine’s paradigm of “cognitive cultural studies” which takes into account the “interconnectedness of the evolved human brain, social communication, and aesthetics” (4). Simerka’s study follows the steps of scholars who have applied the aforementioned methodology to texts written in other spaces and eras, borrowing the model and thereby enriching the field with a set of Spanish texts. As she herself declares, “I propose a tripartite system of ‘mutually goading’ transformation, entailing: an embodied, networked, and highly flexible cognitive structure strongly predisposed to cultural interaction; a newly urbanized and imperial social structure; and literary texts that foreground anxieties about cognitive activity” (5). RESEÑAS 111 Paying attention to devices such as the ‘deceiver deceived,’ or enredos, Chapter 2 focuses on how cognitive mechanisms such as ToM or MI are presented through gender-biased filters in urban courtship drama. Chapter 3 refers to recent research on poverty, hunger, and charity to explain the connections between new social discourses regarding indigence and to understand the cognitive skills that a pícaro must acknowledge in order to survive in an increasingly stratified urban society. Likewise, Chapter 4 compares the figures of the pícaro and the cortesano, bringing into focus the strategies both follow when climbing the social ladder. In Chapter 5, which treats dramas, Simerka analyzes skepticism and gender through the contemporary contextualist model and revises the concept of honor in a few texts of Zayas, Lope, and Calderón. Chapter 6 reads Lope’s Lo fingido verdadero as an example of the major problem concerning the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction; this quarrel can help us understand religious conversion and metatheater. Last but not least, Chapter 7 is dedicated to Don Quijote, underlining Cervantes’s modern representation of narrative entertainment and reading practices as forms of engagement with fiction that will be found in later writers. The author clearly states on several occasions that her approach is a “deliberate reaction of Foucaldian and New Historicist models that posit humans as powerless or hapless in the face of structures of domination” (21). However, she tries to stress in every chapter the way in which authors both support and challenge a culture of discipline, and how they do this by employing a specific literary form. Through the interdisciplinary focus of cognitive cultural studies, the links between an urbanizing culture and its hierarchies, subject positions, and social anxieties can be delineated...