Cognitive Studies as Transdisciplinary Esperanto

This summer in Edinburgh, at the conference of the Society for Italian Studies, the first entirely cognitive-oriented panel was presented. The transdisciplinary perspective allowed by the cognitive lens enabled the panellists to bring together issues such as experience of space and plot comprehension; private testimonies and fictional representations of memory; bodily, rhetorical and cultural implications of affects in Holocaust literature; the interaction of visual and verbal features in experimental poetry; the recurrence of metaphors of (un)rootedness in accounts of migratory experience; psychological mechanisms and dynamics of characterisation in crime fiction; reflections on the age of post-truth.

In other words, the cognitive framework appeared to facilitate in enticing ways the bidirectional dialogue between real-life experience and its multifarious artistic counterparts. Along similar lines, the discussion initiated on this occasion sparked some reflections that could be methodologically relevant to discourses on interart and intermediality. In particular, my suggestion is that to look at cognitive studies may serve to highlight some key questions underlying interartistic and intermedial practices and may help to enfranchise critical endeavours from too propositionally-centred views.

Cognitive studies are very well-positioned to start a dialogue across different media and arts because of their primary focus on the subject’s mental experience; while the latter can be produced through a variety of practices and means, cognitive research tends to emphasise the analogies and continuities between these practices and means, rather than on their incompatibilities. For instance, to speak of storyworlds [1] as mental models constructed through the text enables to establish robust connections between Cinderella the ballet, the film or the written story, acknowledging their common features and the possibility of their coalescing in the recipient’s mind. To some extent, the cognitive perspective encourages precisely to work through the specificities of certain media, which is the reason why it has been enthusiastically adopted in narrative studies.

Among other cross-cutting issues explored in cognitive studies, worth mentioning are the mechanisms of ‘immersion’, that is, the sense of engagement following the relocation of the subject’s consciousness (and, possibly, even of the subject’s bodily projection)[2] into another context, as well as the complex relationships, reciprocal influences, and porous boundaries between imagination and reality. Both these questions are vitally involved with arts and media, and it might be argued that only by embracing a transdisciplinary perspective one may hope to achieve any adequate – if provisionary – answers.

Cognitive approaches also offer a viable way to go beyond that primacy of literature within cultural studies which, as Brook and Pieri (2017) noted, needs to be overcome. By positing a view of cognition as a complex phenomenon that depends on the verbal as much as on the perceptual (including visual, heptic, olfactory and auditory) and affective dimensions of thought, the cognitive perspective reassesses the relevance of verbal language in the analysis of thought processes. One of the consequences of seeing cognition as deeply rooted in embodied experience is indeed the creation of a new balance among the types of input that participate in our cognition. In a sense, we could say that concepts and ideas from cognitive studies offer a sort of theoretical Esperanto, which allows not only to comparatively discuss outputs across different media, but also to effectively approach truly hybrid cultural products – from graphic novel to installations exploiting augmented reality experiences.

** My warmest thanks go to Marilina Ciaco, Guido Furci, Giovanni Miglianti, Marco Paoli, Cecilia Piantanida and Emiliano Zappalà, who presented in Edinburgh.

[1] Herman David (2002) Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, p. 6.

[2] Caracciolo Marco (2014) The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter, p. 160