Kafka's Cognitive Realism

Description

This book uses insights from the cognitive sciences to illuminate Kafka’s poetics, exemplifying a paradigm for literary studies in which cognitive-scientific insights are brought to bear directly on literary texts. The volume shows that the concept of "cognitive realism" can be a critically productive framework for exploring how textual evocations of cognition correspond to or diverge from cognitive realities, and how this may affect real readers. In particular, it argues that Kafka’s evocations of visual perception (including narrative perspective) and emotion can be understood as fundamentally enactive, and that in this sense they are "cognitively realistic". These cognitively realistic qualities are likely to establish a compellingly direct connection with the reader’s imagination, but because they contradict folk-psychological assumptions about how our minds work, they may also leave the reader unsettled. This is the first time a fully interdisciplinary research paradigm has been used to explore a single author’s fictional works in depth, opening up avenues for future research in cognitive literary science. Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Cognitive Realism, Kafka, and Literary Studies 1. Realism, Cognitive Realism, and Kafka 2. Methodology and Relation to Other Areas of Literary Studies 3. Embodied Cognition 4. Embodied Cognition and Language 5. Embodied Cognition and Literary Language 6. Why Vision? 7. Vision in Kafka Studies 8. Kafkaesque Dualities 9. Chapter Outlines 1 Perception without Pictures 1. Reading and Pictorialism versus Enactivism 2. Pictorialism 3. The Literary History of Pictorialism 4. Realism and Pictures, in Practice 5. The Philosophical and Scientific History of Pictorialism, and Emerging Non-Pictorial Strands 6. Enactivism: A Solution to Pictorialist Problems? 2 Re-Envisioning the Imagination 1. Kafka’s Diaries, Letters, and Fictions 2. Arts and Sciences in Kafka’s Era 3. Kafka, Pictures, and Perception: Overview 4. Problems of Pictorialist Conceptions of Vision, the Imagination, Language, and Consciousness 5. Recognising the Problems of Pictures 6. Kafka’s Enactivist Solutions to the Pictorialist Problems 3 Kafka’s Poetics of Perception in Der Proceß 1. Non-Pictorial Evocation of Perception 2. Linguistic Means of Engaging the Reader 3. Evoking the Fallibility of Non-Pictorial Perception 4. The Impossibility of Linear Narratives 4 Feeling from New Perspectives 1. Emotion in Kafka 2. Emotion in Literary Studies 3. Enactive Emotion 4. (Emotional) Engagement with Others 5. Reflection 6. Emotion, Action, and Perspective 7. Character, Self, Emotion, Action, and Perspective Conclusion: Cognitive Realism in Kafka and Beyond Appendices 1. Empirical Study: Readers’ Responses to “Schakale und Araber” (Jackals and Arabs) 2. Empirical Study: Readers’ Responses to Das Schloß (The Castle) Bibliography Index