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21 results

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Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature
  • Edited by Nicholas Helms, Steve Mentz
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    16 April 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024
  • Water and cognition seem unrelated things, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The essays in this book show how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the 'extended mind' and distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book aims to think 'water' and 'cognition' as distinct critical modes and also to combine them in what we term 'watery thinking'. Water and Cognition brings together cognitive science and ecocriticism to ask how the environment influences how humans think, and how they think about thinking. The collection explores how water - as element, as environment, and as part of our bodies - affects the way early modern and contemporary discourses understand cognition.

  • Introduction : Watery Thinking: Minds and Water In and Beyond the Early Modern Period

  • Edited by Nicholas Helms, Plymouth State University, New Hampshire, Steve Mentz, St John's University, New York
  • Book:
    Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    16 April 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024, pp 11-28

  • Summary

    Abstract

    Water and cognition would seem to be unrelated, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The animating claim of this book shows how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the “extended mind” and other forms of distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book contains contributions by influential voices in both early modern cognitive studies and the blue humanities, but its central project aims not only to think “water” and “cognition” as distinct critical modes, but also to combine them in what this introduction terms “watery thinking.”

    Keywords: cognitive studies, blue humanities, extended mind, distributed cognition, ecocriticism, mindreading

    “O Lord! Methought what pain it was to drown” (Richard III 1.4.21).

    George, Duke of Clarence's nightmare premonition of death by drowning in Richard III does more than foreshadow his demise in a butt of Malmsey wine. The dream showcases watery thinking by displaying myriad ways that water supplies both metaphors about and the matter of thought. As a medium of sensory experience, water in Clarence's dream provides a material baseline, with “dreadful noise,” “sights of ugly death,” and the imagined feel of the “slimy bottom of the deep” (1.4.22, 1.4.23, 1.4.32). As a means of chthonic transport, “the envious flood” of the ocean carries Clarence to death's “melancholy flood” beside the “sour ferryman” Charon at the River Styx (1.4.37, 1.4.45–6). Beyond the infernal river, Clarence voyages to hell to meet Warwick, Prince Edward, and a “legion of foul fiends” that “environed” him in torments (1.4.37, 1.4.45–6, 1.4.58–9). Water carries Clarence's imagined body and sweeps away his imagination. As a type and material substance of environment, water in these passages enables and frustrates movement in both the literal and figurative senses. The fluid medium provides the passage of Clarence's ship to nearby Burgundy, connecting him to the wider shipping paths of the growing (and lucrative) global early modern trade.

  • Chapter 14 - Ice/Water/Vapor

  • Edited by Jeffrey Cohen, Arizona State University, Stephanie Foote, West Virginia University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities
    Published online:
    12 August 2021
    Print publication:
    02 September 2021, pp 185-198

  • Summary

    The most common physical substance on our planet, water touches and shapes human lives, cultures, and histories in all three of its physical states: solid ice, liquid water, and gaseous vapor. Environmental humanities scholarship has focused largely on oceans and large bodies of fresh water. A wider frame for water-focused ecological scholarship should also include gaseous vapor, solid ice, and other less visible forms that water takes on our planet. Engaging in turn with each of the physical phases in which humans encounter water, and distinguishing between salt and fresh liquid water, this chapter demonstrates the range and dynamism of the relationship between humans and this essential substance. The invisible touch of humidity, the glacial immensity of polar ice, the sweetness of fresh water, and the imaginative breadth of the great salt sea all provide matter for environmental analysis. The chapter contains accounts of recent water-focused writings in the environmental humanities, presents a brief literary history of water in its various shapes, and concludes by gesturing toward the possibilities for new work.

  • After Sustainability

  • Steve Mentz
  • Journal:
    PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 127 / Issue 3 / May 2012
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 October 2020, pp. 586-592
    Print publication:
    May 2012

  • It seemed like a good idea while it lasted, but we should have known it could not last. the era of sustainability is over. behind our shared cultural narratives of sustainability sits a fantasy about stasis, an imaginary world in which we can trust that whatever happened yesterday will keep happening tomorrow. It's been pretty to think so, but it's never been so. In literary studies, we name this kind of fantasy pastoral. Such a narrative imagines a happy, stable relation between human beings and the nonhuman environment. It seldom rains, mud doesn't clog our panpipes, and our sheep never run away while swains sing beautiful songs to coy shepherdesses. In this sustainable green world, complicated things fit into simple packages, as literary criticism has recognized, from William Empson's “pastoral trick” (115) to Greg Gerrard's “pastoral ecology” (56–58). This green vision provides, in Gerrard's phrase, a “stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies” (56). That's the dream toward which sustainability entices us. To be sustainable is to persist in time, unchanged in essence if not details. That's not the human experience of the nonhuman world. Remember the feeling of being wet, like King Lear, “to the skin” (Mentz, “Strange Weather”). Changing scale matters, and local variation does not preclude global consistency, but the feeling of the world on our skin is disruptive. Our environment changes constantly, unexpectedly, often painfully.

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