Tactile Consciousness: Art, Cognitive Criticism, and the (New) Degeneration Debates

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Notes

Kermode 98 cited in Arata 1.

For example, the methodological rehabilitation of a receptive and responsive human body at the heart of ethical reading practices is the fundamental objective of the many studies of the lower senses that have flourished in the last decade. The striking failure of visual economies to produce adequate knowledge of what is “right in front of us” has encouraged such critics as Trotter, Cohen, Carlisle, Gigante, Manning, and others to generate fascinating investigations of touch, smell, taste, and sound—bodily experiences that have been notably neglected under Foucauldian analysis.

To be clear, Best and Marcus are not themselves cognitive critics. They offer Crane's essay on cognitive criticism as an example of “surface reading.”

While the healthful restoration of our human experience of art seems to be the goal of most cognitive criticism, Crane's explicit invocation of the cognitively reassuring power of Renaissance space throws her work into special dialogue with late-nineteenth-century art critics (like Berenson, and of course, Pater) who privileged the Renaissance in their own writing.

According to Nordau, the Pre-Raphaelites are likewise hysterical, weak-minded mystics, who got all of their ideas from a delirious Ruskin, and “misunderstood his misunderstandings” (79).

Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), and his short stories “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) and “Killers” (1927), are all discussed in Zunshine's Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies.