Performance and Cognition - Edited by Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart - English

Performance and Cognition Edited by Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart

Performance and Cognition: Theatre studies and the cognitive turn
Routledge 2006


Cognitive scientists working in neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and other fields have made rapid strides in the past 20 years in understanding perception, empathy, spatiality, emotions, meaning-making, and many other cognitive areas that are crucial to producing, enacting, and responding to performances on stage. Surprisingly, however, scholars in theatre and performance studies are just beginning to apply these findings to their field. This book invites theatre and performance scholars to incorporate many of the insights of cognitive science into their work and to begin consid- ering all of their research projects from the perspective of cognitive studies.
As well as including a comprehensive introduction to the challenges of cognitive studies for theatre and performance scholarship, the volume fea- tures essays in all of the major areas of theatre and performance. Several of the essays use cognitive studies to challenge some of the key scholarly and practical orientations in theatre and performance studies. The experimen- tally based insights of cognitive science are shown to be at odds with Saussurean semiotics, psychoanalysis, and aspects of deconstruction, New Historicism, and Foucauldian discourse theory. The contributors also apply ideas from cognitive studies to open up the possible meanings of plays to readers, and to illuminate the process of acting through the work of the cog- nitive neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Theatrical response is examined with an essay focusing on the general dynamics of perception, and another explaining the riots that greeted the 1907 production of The Playboy of the Western World through cognitive stereotyping.
Performance and Cognition opens up fresh perspectives on theatre studies – with applications for dramatic criticism, performance analysis, acting practice, audience response, theatre history, and other important areas – and sets the agenda for future work, helping to map the emergence of this new approach.
Bruce McConachie is Professor of Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and specializes in theatre history, theatre historiography and cognitive approaches to theatre. F. Elizabeth Hart is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA, where she teaches Renaissance studies, Shakespeare, and cognitive approaches to literature.

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