How Do I Know Thee? : Theatrical and Narrative Cognition in Seventeenth-Century France Paperback / softback

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.