The "Cognitive Turn": A Short Guide for Nervous Drivers.

In this brief primer on the emergent field of cognitive literary criticism, I aim to offer a tentative outline of its more representative lines of research after roughly twenty to twenty five years of activity. One of my main concerns will be to attend to some of the main objections that the field has been charged with in its short life, and to highlight the ways in which cognitive critics have addressed such objections. After a brief sketch of the main fields of activity, I will consider some of the possible future directions, with a focus on the different ways in which cognitive critics have embraced enactive approach-es to embodied and embedded cognition

Posthumanism and Environmental Poetics in American Literature

The global climate crisis is perhaps the most pressing issue that is bringing increasing attention (of governments, activists, and intellectuals) to the environment and the relations of the human with the organic and inorganic nonhuman world in the Anthropocene. On the other hand, the recent academic preoccupation for the ways in which subjectivity, its manifestations – agency, creativity, intentionality, etc. – and its terms of engagement with language have been called into question by what can be synthetically called philosophical posthumanism, has inaugurated a productive season of critical engagement with the question of the relation between art and literature and the environment. Beside igniting a steady process of revision of the epistemic premises on which human claims about the environment are made, this critical engagement has also expanded the academic conversation about the impact of environmental concerns on literary aesthetics and, vice versa, about the influence of art and literature on conventional perceptions and definitions of the environment. As a result, a growing body of literary, artistic, and philosophical works, often characterized by a marked interdisciplinary orientation, has brough into the horizon of academic criticism an acute awareness of the interconnections between humans and their environments. It is on the terrain of this interconnection and of the deep revision it entails of our ways of thinking the role of the literary work in relation to, on the one hand, the philosophical and theoretical, and, on the other, the ecological, that we present papers addressing American literature and art’s creative interventions on how we understand the world around us, our place in it, and the place of the literary in it

Revolving the Vortex; or, Working Through Trauma at Sea

Even as sea writing in antebellum America might have aspired to literary exploration—and possession, the ocean, as Hester Blum has noted, is a ‘landscape than cannot be tangibly possessed’. The of its waters gives the sea a formless, elusive quality, and its apparently material surface hides unfathomable and ultimately ungraspable depths. The view from the masthead, moreover, offered sailors a vast barren, monotonous panorama: rather than discovery, this vantage point showed nothing—only watery emptiness. On the other hand, sea voyages were inherently circular—they ended where they had started. Whaling voyages, in particular, were non-linear and non-teleological. Or, rather, their telos— the whale—was in perpetual motion, and the whaleship circumnavigated the slippery oceanic landscape in his chase. The concern with how these ontological features of seafaring reflect, and are reflected by, the epistemology of sea narratives will broadly frame my paper. In particular, I propose to look at the final vortex in Moby-Dick as an image that happily captures these aspects of seafaring—and of sea writing: elusiveness and circuitousness, and, at once, to point at how such aspects, and their blending, eloquently embody psychic trauma. A sea vortex—‘a circular movement of water with a vacuum at the center’, in Paul Brotdkorb’s words—echoes the spiral-like experience of working-through trauma; the ceaseless revolving around an event that cannot be known, since it was not grasped as it occurred, according to Cathy Caruth’s formulation. In turn, I will contend, this vortical image is an apt trope for Moby-Dick’s own circuitous form, visually replicating the convoluted process of working through its narrator’s trauma. Therefore, I will explore the ways in which, in his meandering, digressive tale, Ishmael—and, with him, the reader—seems to be revolving the vortex in order to gain mastery over the unclaimed experience of his lonely survival