Dramatic Minds : Performance, Cognition, and the Representation of Interiority (Austrian Studies in English .105) (2015. 306 S. 210 mm)

This collection adopts a cognitive approach to the study of drama. Analyses range from the medieval stage to 21st century Anglophone drama and provide a cognitive reading of characterisation, interiority, performativity, decoding strategies, empathy, immersion, reader manipulation and audience control. This volume seeks to put drama and its neglected mental dimension into the limelight. While narrative fiction with its intricate ways of rendering consciousness has been deemed an ideal playground for approaches of a cognitivist leaning, the dramatic genre has been all but ignored by cognitive literary studies. Providing insights into such drama-related issues as subject construction, interiority, performativity, empathy, reader manipulation and reception control, the contributions to this collection testify to the richness and variety of the cognitivist enterprise. Contents: Monika Fludernik: Consciousness in Drama: A Cognitive Approach - Eva Zettelmann: Drama and the Representation of Fictional Minds - Gabriella Mazzon: Strategic Communication of Pathos and Suffering in Verbal and Visual Medieval Culture - Elke Mettinger: «Now is this golden crown like a deep well» - Richard II from a Cognitive Point of View - Sabine Coelsch-Foisner: Othello: Personality and Personality Building in Shakespeare's Tragedy and Verdi's Opera - Michael Raab: The Macbeth Trap: Productions of Shakespeare's Play in England, Germany, Austria and Switzerland - Christa Knellwolf King: Une Tempête, Aimé Césaire's Subversion of the Imperial Scripts of Shakespeare's Tempest - Dieter Fuchs: The Script of the Body and the Soul in The Country-Wife and Tristram Shandy: the 'Cognitive Turn' from Restoration Drama to Sentimental Fiction - Caterina Grasl: The (Im)Possible Worlds of Joe Orton: A Cognitive Approach to What the Butler Saw - Bernhard Reitz: «I understand you not, my lord.» - Problems of Cognition and Perception in Tom Stoppard's Plays - Wolfgang J. Lippke: John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy - A Cognitive Approach - Ewald Mengel: Pinter's One-Act Plays One for the Road, Mountain Language, and Party Time in the Light of Conceptual Blending Theory - Merle Tönnies: Between Authenticity and Objectification: Narrating the Self in Contemporary British Drama - Eckart Voigts: «Dennis is a Liar» - Mendacity in the Plays of Dennis Kelly - Christopher Innes: Breaking the Boundaries of Narrative: Post-Dramatic Story-Telling - Peter Zenzinger: Parapsychic Phenomena in Early Twentieth-Century American Drama.