Does literature merely represent cognitive processes, or can it enhance, parallel, or reassess the scientific study of the mind? Beckett and the Cognitive Method argues that Samuel Beckett's narrative work, rather than just expressing or rendering mental states, inaugurates an exploratory use of
narrative as an introspective modeling technology. Through a detailed analysis of Beckett's entire corpus and published volumes of letters, this book argues that Beckett pioneered a new method of writing to construct (in a mode analogous to scientific inquiry) models for the exploration of core
laws, processes, and dynamics in the human mind.
Marco Bernini integrates frameworks from contemporary narrative theory, cognitive sciences, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind to make a case for Beckett's modeling practice. Bernini demonstrates how this modeling applies to a vast
array of processes including the (narrative) illusion of a sense of self, the dialogic interaction with memories and felt presences, the synesthetic nature of inner experience and mental imagery, the role of moods and emotions as cognitive drives, and the emergent quality of consciousness. Beckett
and the Cognitive Method also reflects on how Beckett's fictional cognitive models are transformed into reading, auditory, or spectatorial experiences generating through narrative devices insights on which the sciences can only discursively report. As such, Bernini argues that literature should be
considered a proper exploration of the mind, with its own tools and models for cognitive inquiry.
Preface
Chapter One: Modeling the Apparent Self
Chapter Two: A Brain Listening to Itself
Chapter Three: Synaesthetic Innerscapes
Chapter Four: Cognitive Liminalism
Chapter Five: Emergence and Complexity
Conclusion
Index
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Marco Bernini is Assistant Professor of Cognitive Literary Studies at Durham University. He specializes in narrative theory, modernism, and cognitive approaches to literature.
