Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Situated Cognition:
The Literary Archive
Terence Cave
St. John’s College, Oxford
Abstract Literary utterances reflect the situatedness of cognition itself both through
their historico-cultural specificity and through their deployment of highly particular-
ized language. It follows that the literary archive (in the broadest sense, all forms of
storytelling, fiction, poetry, song, drama, and their offshoots) is also a cognitive archive
and that a history of cognition and of reflection on cognition might be traced through
imaginative literature rather than through a history of science, a history of philosophy,
or a history of ideas. In such a project, the local and contextual aspects of the archive
would be taken into account not just as contingent factors but as part of the exercise of
calibrating the cultural reach of cognition: what it is capable of, and its constraints, in
different local ecologies. The literary archive, it will be argued, offers to the interdis-
ciplinary field of cognitive studies a reservoir of potential insights into the embodied
interconnectivity of cognitive process together with a critical language which is en-
active, context oriented, sensitive to the conditions of live cultural ecologies. The essay
features textual examples drawn from the writings of Michel de Montaigne and
Andrew Marvell.
Keywords situated cognition, embodied cognition, literary archive, cognitive prehis-
tories, cognition as imagination
Situating Literature
human life, including such basic features as gravity, the availability and
properties of water, the way other creatures (animal and vegetable) have
adapted themselves to the same environments, and many other factors.
Within that broad envelope (it appears broad to us, but it is in fact very
narrow in cosmic terms), cognition has evolved to thrive on the particular,
on the understanding and exploitation of local environments, from particular
ecologies (rain forests, the Nile delta, the Arctic tundra) to the most histori-
cally and culturally specified microcontexts, such as the one afforded by the
journal Poetics Today in 2017. In addition, humans have evolved the specific
ability to think beyond a specific habitual environment, to improvise solu-
tions to problems that few other creatures can even begin to handle except by
long-term phylogenetic attrition, and hence exponentially and at remarkable
speed to increase the range and complexity of local habitats and thought
worlds. This is what we call culture, the human way of doing nature. Despite
that extraordinary (in the literal sense) shift, cognition is constructed by the
world. It is not an autonomous standpoint from which the world can be
observed, even if human cognition has acquired the ability to perform limited
acts of virtual autonomy (such as scientific experiment).
If that view is accepted (as it is, by and large, in this issue as a whole),
it determines the sense in which the word cognition is itself being used. I adopt
the consensus of second-generation cognitive research that cognition is not a
separate, autonomous rational function but the whole suite of functions that
enable a creature to register and respond to the environment successfully
enough for it to pass its genes on to the next generation.4 This suite of func-
tions includes the processes that are traditionally labeled memory, imagin-
ation, emotion, reason, and indeed perception.5 Such folk labels imply a
spatial separation, a location of autonomous functions in different regions
of the brain, as in earlier diagrammatic representations of the “mind in the
head.”6 The situated cognition model, by contrast, would regard these as
connected and continuously interactive functions ensuring constant feed-
4. Broadly, the first generation of cognitive research (in the late twentieth century) used a
computer-based model of human cognition, regarding the brain as a machine within an enve-
lope of organic matter. The second generation and its heirs insist that cognition is embodied,
continuous with the body and indeed with the body’s ecological habitat. For different varieties
of this claim, see Varela et al. 1991; Glenberg and Kaschak 2002; Barsalou 2003; Damasio 2005
[1994]; Gallagher 2005; Clark 2008.
5. I prefer not to address the philosophical question whether there are “cognitively impene-
trable” forms of perception. As I see it, perception is precisely the set of resources by which
humans and other creatures are able to engage with, interpret, understand the environment.
It informs cognition ab initio.
6. One of the best known of these is Robert Fludd’s map of human thought processes (c. 1620).
back between mind, body, and world. Cognition, in that perspective, is essen-
tially multifaceted and mixed.
Literary utterances are by their nature mixed in just this way. They are
a product of human cognition, and they reflect its complexity and con-
nectedness more faithfully, one might argue, than any other kind of dis-
course. The language of literature is always embodied and enactive. To
compose its imagined ecologies, whether narrative, poetic, or dramatic, it
moves as a matter of course between sensorimotor resonances, affect,
counterfactuals, imaginative perspectives, improvisation, probabilities, pos-
sibilities and impossibilities, and all manner of correspondingly different
logics. Furthermore, if every cognitive act is situated, it follows a fortiori
that literary utterances are bound to be apprehended as both cognitively
and contextually situated. Although literature is programmatically released
from the demands of immediate, real-world instrumentality, the virtual
worlds it proposes are essentially familiar to those who choose to gain
access to them, or rather — since literary utterances, like all communicative
uses of language, are intrinsically underspecified7 — it proposes prompts or
affordances which enable readers, listeners, spectators to imagine those
environments for themselves and hence to engage cognitively with them.
Literature thus lends itself extremely well to cognitively inflected analysis.
By this I mean a full-scale literary analysis that reconfigures the method-
ologies of literary criticism by framing them within a cognitive perspective
and by adapting for that purpose terms and conceptions derived from cog-
nitive research across the disciplinary spectrum. What is critical here is the
posture that those of us who are committed to literary study adopt, the way
our disciplinary stance is directed. If, in obedience to the protocols of exper-
imental science, we strip literature of the very particularity and situatedness
that constitute its primary claim on our attention, the result is virtually certain
to be perceived as reductive. For scientists, reduction to fundamental prin-
ciples is a primary aim, and no one disputes that it would be wonderful to
have a grand unifying theory of at least three if not all of the four forces if you
could get it. For literary specialists (except perhaps a few die-hard theorists),
the processes of reduction stifle and eventually kill the creature you’re trying
to understand, and in the last analysis not merely kill it: erase it entirely as a
distinctive entity. If literature is to be a resource for cognitive research, we
need to think from literature toward science at least as much as the other way
round. We need to counter the tendency to submit to the policing of literary
7. I refer here in short-hand form to the communication theory known as relevance theory. See
in particular Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]; Carston 2002. Relevance theory demonstrates
that language is only partly a code. It depends in varying degrees on the interlocutor’s capacity
to infer the speaker’s meaning from the evidence offered.
study by philosophy and science and insist on the principle of working induc-
tively from the literary archive as a cognitive resource.
One could indeed claim that there is a sense in which literature has
always been imagining for us the problems addressed by latter-day cognitive
science and philosophy without necessarily straining for a resolution. What
that amounts to is the proposition that the literary archive is also a cognitive
archive and therefore that a history of cognition, and of reflection on cogni-
tion, might be traced through imaginative literature rather than through
a history of science, a history of philosophy, or even, more broadly, a history
of ideas.
Various questions arise here. How would the evidence be discovered,
inferred, displayed? What would be the status of the history in question?
What would it be a history of ? Those questions and some others will be at
the center of this essay, but even more central to it is the use of examples or
particular cases from the literary archive broadly conceived. So I shall frame
the remainder of my discussion of these issues with two case studies from
different genres.
The first example is taken from Les Essais (The Essays) of Michel de Montaigne
(1965, 2:377 – 78, 379), written between 1572 and 1592:
We have news of only two or three Ancients who have trodden this path; and even
then we cannot say whether it was in quite the same way as I have done it here,
since all we know of them is their names. No one since has set off in their tracks. It is
a thorny enterprise, more so than it might seem, to follow a movement as wan-
dering as that of our mind; to penetrate into the opaque depths of its inner recesses;
to tease out and pin down so many of its subtle shades and stirrings. . . . What I
depict principally is my cogitations, a formless subject, which cannot become
apparent as concrete action. At best, with the greatest difficulty, I can frame it
in the airy body of words (My translation).
Nous n’avons nouvelles que de deux ou trois anciens qui ayent battu ce chemin; et
si ne pouvons nous dire si c’est du tout en pareille maniere à cette-cy, n’en con-
naissant que les noms. Nul depuis ne s’est jetté sur leur trace. C’est une espineuse
entreprinse, et plus qu’il ne semble, de suyvre une alleure si vagabonde que celle de
nostre esprit; de penetrer les profondeurs opaques de ses replis internes; de choisir
et arrester tant de menus airs de ses agitations. . . . Je peins principalement mes
cogitations, subject informe, qui ne peut tomber en production ouvragere. A toute
peine le puis je coucher en ce corps aërée de la voix.8
This passage is part of a lengthy extension that Montaigne added to his essay
“De l’exercitation” (“On Practicing”) more than fifteen years after he had
written the original version. He’s trying retrospectively to find words to
describe what he’s been aiming to do in his Essays as a whole. The essay itself
in its original form tells the story of a near-death experience that Montaigne
had had perhaps four years earlier (around 1569), before he had retired from
public service and begun to write. While out riding not far from his chateau,
he was accidentally knocked off his horse and thrown to the ground. He
remained semiconscious, but for some considerable time he experienced a
kind of suspended cognitive state which he describes in some detail. In par-
ticular he talks about the temporary loss of his short-term memory of the
accident and then the sudden recovery of the memory. I shall come back to
that passage in a moment.
The title of the essay (“On Practicing”) refers to the unique opportunity
Montaigne was presented with of practicing death, trying it out, feeling what
it’s like to die. Usually that’s the one thing you can’t practice, and he insists
on the rarity of the experience. He follows early modern habits of mind by
introducing the topic in the opening pages of the essay as a variant of tra-
ditional philosophical modes of reflection on death and pain. But within that
initial frame, what he is doing is in fact highly unusual for his time and his
culture. Similarly, if one compares this intrinsically situated scene of a near-
death experience with the institutionally policed, didactic scenes of death that
are conjured up by devotional treatises and other books of piety, the distinc-
tive character of “On Practicing” becomes immediately clear. We could
describe it as a layperson’s experimental reflection on his own temporary
cognitive deficit.
More broadly, in this essay and many others Montaigne is feeling his way
toward a cognitive phenomenology — not a formal philosophical phenome-
nology but an intuitive, unsystematic way of exploring mental processes from
a first-person point of view. It’s a glimpse, in other words, of a kind of inquiry
that will, as we know, exist in the future but which was scarcely imaginable in
Montaigne’s day.
The essay isn’t an imaginative representation of cognition and of reflection
on cognition solely by virtue of its explicit (propositional) content. It also
depends heavily on the cognitive resources of language. Look, for example,
at the extraordinarily delicate, finely calculated kinesic effects: “to tease out
and pin down so many of its subtle shades and stirrings” (“choisir et arrester
tant de menus airs de ses agitations”), “the airy body of words” (“ce corps
aërée de la voix”). What Montaigne is doing here is nothing less than finding
a language for the way mind manifests itself as a body — a tenuous, elusive
body, hard to capture and pin down but a body nonetheless. Look too at
What, then, can one do historically with a text such as this? If we agree
that a cognitive project as we would conceive it today is indeed scarcely
imaginable in the sixteenth century, it is clearly inappropriate to insert
Montaigne’s remarks into a sequential history of science or philosophy or
even, more broadly, a history of ideas. Questions of perception, rationality,
memory, the imagination, illusion and delusion, and other features of
what we would call the cognitive domain are certainly recurrent topics of
Western philosophy and science from Aristotle onward, but the emergence
of a specific “cognitive” field of study is a twentieth-century phenomenon.
Similarly, the phenomenological tradition as we know it was far beyond the
horizon of Montaigne’s thought world.
This is a classic example of what I would call a pre-history. A pre-history is
made up of the fragments or traces that seem to us retrospectively to antici-
pate a later conceptual or historical development when that development
has not yet reached a threshold where it has become fully established and
potentially visible to contemporary observers in the period in question. For
example, accounts of the self or of personal identity reach a threshold in the
seventeenth century with René Descartes, John Locke, and lexical phenom-
ena such as the emergence of the noun le moi in French. Montaigne, William
Shakespeare, and Miguel de Cervantes belong to a period just prior to the
threshold, so it becomes a delicate matter to decide how to describe their
exact places in that history.11
Similarly, one would need to be cautious about saying, for example, that
the thinking of Aristotle, or Montaigne, or Descartes, or Denis Diderot,
or Adam Smith, or even William James anticipates the modern cognitive
project. They belong rather to its pre-history. The field that we loosely
refer to as cognitive studies has reorganized a vast swath of knowledge in a
distinctive way. Simply focusing on cognition rather than knowledge, or
psychology, or any other roughly equivalent term changes the whole frame
of reference irrevocably.
In short, then, my example from Montaigne would clearly belong to a
highly fragmentary pre-history of cognitive thought, not to a progressivist
11. See Cave 1999 for an account of this development within the perspective of a pre-history
in the sense indicated.
ing to modern cognitive science, but they don’t for that reason lose their value
as testimony. They are always instances of the way our enactive presence
in the world may be perceived and imagined. So the local and contextual
aspects of the archive must be taken into account not just as contingent factors
but as part of the exercise of calibrating the cultural reach of cognition: what
it is capable of, and its constraints, in different local ecologies.
I need here to return to and develop a point made earlier concerning the
question of reductionism. Despite all this talk of histories and pre-histories,
are not cognitive approaches intrinsically ahistorical and hence dismissive
of culture (history being in the last resort only the temporal gradient of
cultural differentiation)? Will they not always give priority to universals,
for which contingent historical or cultural forms are merely the local medi-
um of expression? The answer that neuroscientists, psychologists, philos-
ophers, and linguists would give to this question in relation to their own
subject would, I suppose, be an unambiguous “yes.” For them, culture and
its history may be interesting, but it’s only a sideshow.
Correspondingly, some of the leading contributions to cognitive literary
studies have emphasized the universal rather than the particular. This is true
of evolutionary approaches, such as those of Joseph Carroll (2004) and Brian
Boyd (2009), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980) notion of “meta-
phors we live by” as reflected in the work of Patrick Colm Hogan (2003) and
others, or the closely related notion of “conceptual blending” developed by
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002). In recent years, however, there
has been a marked return both to close reading and to historical contexts.
Boyd’s (2012) account of Shakespeare’s sonnets fuses the evolutionary ap-
proach with close attention to the detail of the text, Guillemette Bolens (2012
[2008]) demonstrates that kinesis can take us deep into the historically situ-
ated imaginations of writers from the Middle Ages to the present day,
and Mark J. Bruhn and Donald R. Wehrs (2014) set out specifically to address
the question of cognition in history.
This seems to be an opportune moment, then, to review the question in the
broadest terms. The outline arguments that follow would all need eventually
to be unpacked at length, but the objective here is to establish an opening
stance that is weakened by neither apology nor compromise.
1. The phenomenon of cultural evolution, which is the evolutionary niche
humans have above all exploited, means that it is incorrect to see the
relation between nature and culture as antithetical. (As I see it, there is
The only way we can find answers to those questions, I believe, is to embark
on a praxis, to practice and fine-tune a mode of criticism that satisfies as many
as possible of the relevant criteria. So we might, for example, propose the
following long-term project.
We start by compiling a pre-history of imaginative representations of cog-
nition, by which I mean instances like the Montaigne passage where what we
would call a cognitive theme is explicit and/or salient. In other words, we lay
down the basis for a pre-history of reflection on cognition in the literary and
paraliterary archive.
We take it as a fundamental principle that these instances should not only
be analyzed thematically or in terms of propositional content. The instru-
ment we use for interrogating the archive should be a cognitively informed
and inflected criticism which privileges the dynamics of agency and com-
munication and the pragmatics of embodied and situated language. That
condition probably means that we will begin by looking at strong instances:
instances that lend themselves well to that kind of analysis while making
salient the cognitive theme as such. Examples might include medieval alle-
gorical narratives like the Roman de la Rose and Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy;
Montaigne’s Essais; the dialogues and novels of Diderot; certain of the works
of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Hein-
rich Wilhelm von Kleist; the novels of George Eliot, Franz Kafka, Virginia
Woolf, and William Faulkner; the writings of Paul Valéry and Wallace
Stevens (the corpus could and should of course be widened to include
works in other languages and from non-European cultures).
In parallel with this project, we envisage a more inclusive class of readings
that takes seriously the hypothesis that literature (in all its forms) is a distinc-
tive and comprehensive mode or instrument of thought. In that perspective,
all literary works potentially become equally valid as objects of cognitive
study. The presupposition here is that the whole literary archive testifies in
richly varied ways to cognitive process. Literature is now understood as a
manifestation of cognition: as an archive of insights which may sometimes
be erroneous but are always features of the way our enactive presence in
the world can be perceived and imagined. Errors, misunderstandings, false
assumptions, and the like will become evident diacritically, as a function of
the variety and richness of the archive as an affordance.
I believe that such a project would be on a par with cognitive research in
other disciplines and ought to be of interest to specialists in those disciplines. If
you’re still asking why pre-histories should be relevant to modern science, you
might begin by thinking about the archive of human remains compiled by
evolutionary anthropologists: a slender and fragmented archive from which
evolutionary stories are inferred. You might then consider that analyzing the
literary archive in a cognitive perspective and according to cognitive critical
instruments means recovering an enormous number of insights and case
histories of the kind I mentioned earlier — a vast archaeological laboratory
of materials capable of enriching the resources available to experimental
science in ways as yet unforeseen.13
Finally, the historical archive of imaginative representations is relevant,
indispensable, because cognition can’t be accessed by logical or scientific
modes of thinking alone. Those modes of cognition (as a whole series of
thinkers have argued since Giambattista Vico) are a modern invention.
Most of the time, the mind doesn’t in fact think like a computer, or like a
mathematician, or even like a philosopher (as Montaigne, for one, was well
aware). I adopt here a broad-brush picture similar to the one argued for by
Iain McGilchrist (2009). Leaving aside his insistence on the functions of the
two hemispheres of the brain, which many people are unhappy with, his
13. The psychologist David C. Rubin envisaged such a laboratory in his study Memory in Oral
Traditions (1995). He called it a natural laboratory studied inductively as opposed to the pro-
cedures adopted in the experimental laboratory.
Accordingly, I turn to lyric poetry for my second case study. The lyric (togeth-
er with its sibling, song) is after all a genre in which imagination is given
special license. The sixth stanza of Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” (2013:
157 – 58; written c. 1668) stages a celebrated thought act:
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
represents the world, both as it is and as the imagination might render it. The
same is true of the broader framework of belief the poem is said to refer to,
namely, a metaphysical concept of mind as capable of a Platonic transcen-
dence. It is of course of historical interest to restore this context, and it will
help modern readers situate the poem in relation to other works of the period.
But at the primary reading level, I would suggest that the cognitive principle
of limited counterintuitive violation proposed by Pascal Boyer (2001) oper-
ates here. The slightly quaint notion of lines 3 and 4 and the more main-
stream metaphysics may be counterintuitive if taken at face value, but these
violations pose no obstacle to the reading of the poem. On the contrary, they
open a window affording an untrammeled view of the poem. They work in
much the same way, one might say, as the first paragraph of Kafka’s famous
story The Metamorphosis (1996: 96). The limited counterintuitive violation
offered by the fictional belief that Gregor Samsa has been transformed
into something like a cockroach is made possible because everything else in
the story remains in place, proceeding as if this event had actually occurred.
One might indeed argue that to insist too much on the historically situated
“strangeness” of Marvell’s belief world would distort the cognitive effects of
the poem in ways it would not have been distorted for contemporary readers
and would thus paradoxically result in a false situatedness.
This line of argument applies a fortiori to the preceding stanza:
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarene, and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Insnared with flow’rs, I fall on grass.
(Marvell 2013: 157)
this questionable, but one can infer from the confidence of the poem’s
language that most of them didn’t. The Eden-like garden is a thoroughly
this-worldly experience where no theology of sin intrudes.16
Let us see how that reading is carried by the stanza as a whole. Rather than
a description of a garden, it stages an almost erotically intimate interaction of
speaker and environment. That staging relies heavily on the use of kinesic
verbs (dropping, crushing, stumbling),17 and one of the ways Marvell induces
these kinesic responses is by the inversion of subject and object. The garden
and its fruits become the subject of kinesic verbs: the fruit, not the hands, are
doing the dropping, crushing, and reaching. In the early modern period,
the word curious (line 5) had a range of meanings, which in this case clearly
include “delicate,” “exquisite,” but it already had the sense “inquisitive,”
which makes the peach an anthropomorphic agent, inquisitively reaching
out to the human presence in the garden. In consequence, the speaker is
represented as not only engaged with but actually absorbed into the veg-
etable world of the garden, as if he were simply part of the natural ecology.
In cognitive terms, then, this is an enactive representation.
We can return via that loop to the final two lines of the following stanza.
Whatever the seventeenth-century metaphysics of the phrase “Annihilating
all that’s made,” it offers itself as a hyperbolic way of evoking the human
capacity for conceptualization, our key cognitive tool (along with language
itself). The human species has thrived on the skill of replacing the bewildering
plurality of particular things in the world with categories and concepts. Thus
a green thought is a quintessentialization of the garden — its greenness, which
absorbs, as it were, all its other aspects. But note that this “green thought” is
still a sensual or somatic imagination, and it takes place within a real garden.
It is produced by the garden. In this situated cognitive reading, the poem is
not a eulogy of abstraction. It proposes a reciprocal interchange between
body and mind, thought and the world. It would be hard in fact to find a more
imaginatively persuasive articulation of embodied cognition in poetic form.
Conclusions
References
Barsalou, Lawrence W.
2003 “Situated Simulation in the Human Conceptual System,” Language and Cognitive Processes
18, nos. 5 – 6: 513 – 62.
Bolens, Guillemette
2012 [2008] The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press).
Boyd, Brian
2009 The Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press).
2012 Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press).
Boyer, Pascal
2001 Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits, and Ancestors (London:
Vintage).
Bruhn, Mark J., and Donald R. Wehrs, eds.
2014 Cognition, Literature, and History (New York: Routledge).
Carroll, Joseph
2004 Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge).
Carston, Robyn
2002 Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication (Oxford: Blackwell).
Cave, Terence
1999 Pré-histoires: Textes troublés au seuil de la modernité (Geneva: Droz).
2015 ‘Far Other Worlds and Other Seas’: Thinking with Literature in the Twenty-First Century (Milan:
Olschki).
2016 Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Clark, Andy
2008 Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University
Press).
Currie, Gregory
2011 “Literature and the Psychology Lab,” Times Literary Supplement, August 31.
Damasio, Antonio
2005 [1994] Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (London: Penguin).
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner
2002 The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic
Books).
Gallagher, Shaun
2005 How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon).
Gibson, James J.
1986 [1979] The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum).
Glenberg, Arthur M., and Michael P. Kaschak
2002 “Grounding Language in Action,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9, no. 3: 558 – 65.
Hogan, Patrick Colm
2003 The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Kafka, Franz
1996 Die Erzählungen. Originalfassung. Edited by Roger Hermes (Frakfurt am Main: Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag).
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson
1980 Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Marvell, Andrew
2013 The Poems of Andrew Marvell. Edited by Nigel Smith (London: Routledge).
McGilchrist, Iain
2009 The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Montaigne, Michel de
1965 Les Essais. Edited by Pierre Villey and V.L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France).
Rubin, David C.
1995 Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes
(New York: Oxford University Press).
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson
1995 [1986] Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell).
Spolsky, Ellen
2011 “An Embodied View of Misunderstanding in Macbeth,” Poetics Today 32, no. 4: 489 – 520.
Squire, Larry, and Eric R. Kandel
2009 Memory: From Mind to Molecules, 2nd ed. (Greenwood Village, CO: Roberts).
Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch
1991 The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).