Overview

The classical period in France presents a particularly lively battleground for the transition between oral-visual culture, on the one hand, and print culture on the other. The former depended on learning from sources of knowledge directly, in their presence, in a manner analogous to theatrical experience. The latter became characterized by the distance and abstraction of reading. How Do I Know Thee? explores the ways in which literature, philosophy, and psychology approach social cognition, or how we come to know others. Richard E. Goodkin describes a central opposition between what he calls “theatrical cognition” and “narrative cognition,” drawing both on scholarship on literary genre and mode, and also on the work of a number of philosophers and psychologists, in particular Descartes’s theory of cognition, Freudian psychoanalysis, mid?twentieth?century behaviorism, and the field of cognitive science. The result is a study that will be of interest not only to students of the classical period but also to those in the corresponding disciplines.

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9780810131804

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. . . provides fresh, insightful, stimulating, and useful new views of well-known and important early modern French texts, and it also provides tools for reading literary texts of any period and of any national culture. The clear and well-exemplified explanation of the differences between theatrical and narrative cognition makes a contribution to literary studies at all levels. Advanced researchers will find that Goodkin gives them new tools and helps solve mysteries that remain in classical texts, while even students in an introductory course on literary analysis could benefit from reading several chapters of this lucid book. --Modern Language Review

. . . provides fresh, insightful, stimulating, and useful new views of well-known and important early modern French texts, and it also provides tools for reading literary texts of any period and of any national culture. The clear and well-exemplified explanation of the differences between theatrical and narrative cognition makes a contribution to literary studies at all levels. Advanced researchers will find that Goodkin gives them new tools and helps solve mysteries that remain in classical texts, while even students in an introductory course on literary analysis could benefit from reading several chapters of this lucid book. --Modern Language Review

Author Information

Richard E. Goodkin is a professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. His books include Birth Marks: The Tragedy of Primogeniture in Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine (2000) and Les magnifiques mensonges de Madeleine Béjart (2013), a historical novel about the mistress and collaborator of Molière.

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