Papers by Naomi Rokotnitz
Marvels & Tales 37.2 , 2023
Fully crediting the “brain-body-narrative nexus” (Wojciehowski and Gallese 2022: 62) that shapes ... more Fully crediting the “brain-body-narrative nexus” (Wojciehowski and Gallese 2022: 62) that shapes readers’ reception, perception, processing, and response patterns, this article examines (1) how Byatt’s use of sensory-motor cues agitates readers’ affective schemata, (2) how this affective stimulation can affect the reading experience, and (3) how Byatt thereby also influences readers’ attitudes toward the thematic content of the story, nudging us to pay attention to our reactions and responses. She thus encourages us to scrutinize our own interactive processes of perception and meaning-making, thereby both complementing
and extending the preoccupation of the wonder tale genre with the development of individuals in their chosen social environments, current research in 4E cognition, and (existentialist) notions of 'authentic becoming.'
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ILS 25 2 06 , 2023
This article examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to notions of the “We” and tests key Arendtian... more This article examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to notions of the “We” and tests key Arendtian concepts through relation and juxtaposition with philosophical and literary texts from different periods, thereby complicating discussions of (1) how individuals participate in, shape, and are shaped by various forms of “We”; (2) how, within collective participation, individuals come to care about being themselves; and (3) to what extent literary texts enable and encourage processes of identity construction and (re)configuration. For Arendt, the “place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (2017, 387–88) is “the result of our common labor, the outcome of the human artifice” (2017, 393)—the shared practices and institutions that Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” (2009, 15). In this article, the authors argue that by exploring and critiquing “forms of life” literature can expand the range of activities we recognize as fostering “participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 465). The three literary provocations presented here—Callimachus’s “Hymn to Apollo,” Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace—all interrogate the situated interactions of “I’s” and “We’s” that instantiate the “participatory plurality” of the shared world.
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“Transatlantic Cognitive Cultures,” eds. Shannon McBriar and Meindert E. Peters, special issue, Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations 25. 2 (2021): 183-211.
Cognitive scientists and philosophers increasingly argue that one’s culture wires one’s brain (Fe... more Cognitive scientists and philosophers increasingly argue that one’s culture wires one’s brain (Feldman Barrett 2017: 177). In this article, I explore some ways by which individuals can nonetheless intervene and impact this wiring, for instance by engaging in personification in play: that is, inhabiting or acting out various subject positions in a socially interactive dynamic. My exploration of role-play is set within a wider interest in models of intersubjective communication and in recent reformulations of notions of ‘authenticity’ as fundamentally ‘reciprocal’ (Zahavi 2001, Rokotnitz 2014) and ‘relational’ (Gallagher, Morgan and Rokotnitz 2018). For this purpose, I consult resources from psychology and the cognitive sciences, particularly regarding the growing evidential basis for conceiving of emotions as constructed by predictive processing mechanisms (Feldman Barrett 2017). I anchor this discussion in examples from three fictional works: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1996), Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), and Joe Hempson and Mae Martin’s Feel Good (2020–21). Drawing together science, philosophy, and fiction from both sides of the Atlantic, this article aims to enrich and complicate notions of subjectivity, choice, and playfulness, providing contextual constellations against which to test the evolving discussion of emotions, agency, and authenticity. (Care has been taken to avoid plot-spoilers, unless such details are germane to the argument).
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interdisciplinary literary studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2021
This article examines notions of authenticity, which have traditionally centered on the individua... more This article examines notions of authenticity, which have traditionally centered on the individual, and explores instead a view of authenticity that is “reciprocal” (Zahavi 2001; Rokotnitz 2014) and “relational” (Gallagher, Morgan, Rokotnitz 2018). Investigating how children may cultivate a sense of authenticity by engaging in two forms of imaginative projection—make-believe play and fictional stories—I explore how the co-constitution of self and other(s) advances the Existentialist project. Anchoring developmental data, philosophical argumentation, and critical analysis in a literary text written for and about children—J. M Barrie’s Peter Pan—I unpack how play and fiction may contribute to authentic self-becoming by fostering social interchange and how this dynamic is made available for interrogation in Barrie’s novel. The analysis presented here reveals Wendy to be the heroine of Barrie’s novel, reconfiguring
its implications for literary scholarship, and also explicates why categories first articulated by Søren Kierkegaard, such as “the single individual” (Fear 67), one’s “absolute relation to the absolute” (78), and “witnessing” (104), are still worth pursuing in a post-postmodern twenty-first-century context. Above all, I re-define authentic self-becoming as fundamentally and necessarily relational.
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Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 20.4, 2018
Abstract: The explosion of interest in “4E cognition” in recent years marks a change, not merely ... more Abstract: The explosion of interest in “4E cognition” in recent years marks a change, not merely in scientific approaches to material brains and bodies, but in attitudes to the processes by which humans think, feel, communicate, and create. This article traces how the evolution of the new field of “the cognitive humanities”—which fosters cross-fertilization between theorists and practitioners from the “humanities” and empirical experimenters in the “sciences”—has been expressed in the work of performers and performance scholars over the last thirty years, leading up to the most recent projects currently underway (in the summer of 2017). I analyze how these forms of artistic and scholarly production contribute to our increasingly nuanced understanding of the breadth and complexity of the human affective, emotional, cognitive, and cultural spectrum.
Keywords: performance, cognitive humanities, neurophenomenology, affect, 4E cognition, embodied knowledge, extended mind.
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Journal of Literature and Science , 2018
This article adds to the rich array of scholarly work on the moral dimensions of fairy tales by i... more This article adds to the rich array of scholarly work on the moral dimensions of fairy tales by inverting key aspects of what has so far been theorized, and suggesting a basis for the evaluation of moral agency that arises from reciprocal interchange. Drawing upon current theories of "folk-psychology," complementary developmental studies of "intersubjective competency," research on "motor resonance" (Gallese 2001, Zwaan and Taylor 2006), and close textual analysis, this article illuminates how fairy tales guide (or manipulate) the reception of their moral content by conveying abstract notions and sociocultural knowhow through accessing preconscious sensory-motor mechanisms and "affective consciousness" (Vandekerckhove and Panksepp 2011). In so doing, I add credence to the theory of cultural evolution proposed by Richard Dawkins (1976, 1982) and Daniel Dennett (1984. 1991, 2017), which posits genes and memes to be the main currency of cultural transmission. This view overlaps in interesting ways with the Extended Mind hypothesis and the "4E" modal of human cognition, according to which the mind is embodied, embedded, enactive and extended (Clark 1997, 2013; Wheeler 2005; Gallagher 2005; Menary 2010; Colombetti 2014; Rowlands 2015). What we learn from the continuously successful history of the fairy tale tradition, I argue, is that moral standards may vary, but certain principles for communicating moral content remain steadfastly effective.
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NeuroExistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. ed. Gregg Caruso an... more NeuroExistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. ed. Gregg Caruso and Owen Flanagan. Oxford UP, 2018 pp.126-146
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Anglia: Journal of English Philology , 2017
This article expands and develops current reformulations of the term 'authenticity' by juxtaposin... more This article expands and develops current reformulations of the term 'authenticity' by juxtaposing Peter Nichols's dramatic presentation of (in)authen-tic behavior in Passion Play, Søren Kierkegaard's writings on authenticity, and recent studies in psychology and affective neuroscience. Rethinking Kierke-gaard's views on identity and autonomy in relation to Nichols's presentation of the experiences of betrayal, despair, and self-governance, the article explores how innovative theatrical performance may cause spectators to physically simulate various modes of existential choice, and elucidates the constitutive role played by bodily responses in the shaping of self-understanding and interpersonal communication. While sharing aspects of Kierkegaard's category of the 'individual', as a person who is fully conscious of him/her self and takes responsibility for that self's conduct, the model of authentic self-becoming that emerges from this discussion is anchored in a balance between attunement to bodily cues, self-directed reflection, and decisive action.
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This article tests Martha Nussbaum's assertion that a novel can be "a paradigm of moral activity"... more This article tests Martha Nussbaum's assertion that a novel can be "a paradigm of moral activity" (1990: 148) and expands that claim beyond the boundaries Nussbaum is likely to have originally conceived, through a study of Lionel Shriver's controversial novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003). The article combines analysis of Shriver's narrative techniques and unorthodox moral argument with current clinical research, discussions of accountability in post-postmodern society, and Nussbaum's hopes for the place of fiction in such debates, particularly with regard to her distinction between the general and the particular in moral judgment.
The article reveals how critical focus on violence in Shriver's novel has so far obscured Shriver's fierce and surprisingly optimistic ethical message. In addition to its astute anatomization of trauma, the novel offers readers a framework for envisioning rehabilitation from trauma that is both recuperative and generative. The process of mutual-reconstitution achieved by Shriver's characters challenges readers to reconfigure their expectations, assumptions, and biases; to engage with characters that court antipathy; and yet, to emerge from the experience profoundly humbled. Shriver thereby sets forth an existential model of significant importance to contemporary reformulations of notions of authentic self-becoming and of love's knowledge.
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Poetics Today , 2017
This article contributes to studies of the heuristic, metacognitive, and social values of literar... more This article contributes to studies of the heuristic, metacognitive, and social values of literary works by interrogating ways literary description can induce experi-ential involvement in the reading process through mobilizing what the neuropsychol-ogists Maria Vandekerckhove and Jaak Panksepp call our " affective consciousness, " a form of prereflective reception that arises from bodily experience. Focusing upon Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, the article proposes a theoretical framework for interrogating the forms of priming, bias, and insight gained via these physical dimensions of reading. In particular, it examines a narrative technique termed " embodied anchors, " by which Roy conveys her characters' experiences and their interpretations of those experiences through image clusters that function both as metaphors and as physical cues, simultaneously affecting both " basic " and " moral " emotions (as differentiated by the clinical psychologists Bunmi O. Olatunji and Jorge Moll). The article analyzes how these embodied prompts activate readers' preconscious modes of perception, modify cognitive skills, and intensify the effects of reading by anchoring ideational content in readers' bodies, rendering abstract concepts physically tangible, thus providing alternative and parallel means of communicating and manipulating knowledge. This knowledge, it is argued, can be integrated into readers' range of experiences in ways that parallel " real-life " encounters, potentially facilitating profound learning.
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Partial Answers, 2014
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Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. ed. Nicola Shaughnessy, London & New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. 2013. pp.117-134., 2013
Margaret Edson’s Wit (1993) and Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations (2008) both dramatize the last few... more Margaret Edson’s Wit (1993) and Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations (2008) both dramatize the last few weeks in the life of a highly successful academic who is dying of an incurable disease. The advent of her illness propels each stridently independent woman into a state of dependency upon others. Thus, in addition to contending with ever-increasing pain, physical disintegration, invasive clinical examinations and fear of death, each woman also reflects upon her professional and her personal life-choices.
By considering recent research into cognition, empathetic “motor equivalence,” and “tactile touch” physiotherapy, I examine how bodily contact may bypass conscious resistance, re-shaping both somatic identity and philosophical attitudes, and how dramatic performance can demonstrate the value of bodily forms of apprehension and communication. I contend that Edson’s play is compelling and thought provoking, and an important milestone for the medical humanities. Kaufman’s play not only dramatizes a creative example of the existential attitude Heidegger terms “being-toward-death,” but adumbrates paths through which we may effectively reach out to one another, physically and emotionally.
Biology, psychology, technology, and art are intertwined in both the subject matter and dramatic presentation of each play, creating a productive economy of reciprocity. Deconstruction of the body by illness, we discover, may facilitate a reconstruction of the self; giving birth to a new subject position that can produce knowledge of a kind that could not, perhaps, be tapped by the healthy agent.
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Marking 30 years since the original production of Our Country’s Good. The evidence presented in t... more Marking 30 years since the original production of Our Country’s Good. The evidence presented in this chapter, including the testimonies of life-term prisoners who staged the play in Blundstone Prison in 1989, suggests forcefully that participation in dramatic production can instigate profound physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual transformation, affecting both individuals and their community at large.
Abstract: The book Trusting Performance (2011) argues that dramatic productions facilitate experiments that cannot be conducted in laboratories, thereby challenging cognitive scientists to consider the arts as essential companion-fields in the investigation of human embodied cognition.
Chapter 3 discusses Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country’s Good, which dramatizes the events that led to a performance of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer by a group of transported convicts in Australia in 1789. Wertenbaker displays the heated discussions, confrontations, and violent interruptions that precede this public performance, as well as the remarkable effects of cooperation, empathy, and self-articulation that emerge during rehearsals. Crucially, I argue, the play within the play re-creates trust through correcting embodied experience: the participants’ bodies are in effect re-programmed, transforming a heterogeneous, hostile group of individuals into a civil community in which respect, trust, and affection are possible.
Attending to Wertenbaker's ambitious claims for theatrical production, her explicit affinity with key premises of eighteenth century contractual political theories and Sentimentalist moral theories and, in addition, recent neuropsychological studies, this chapter intervenes in postmodern, post-structuralist lamentations of the isolation of the individual, suggesting instead that by sacrificing certain personal desires for the good of the “general will," through learning to cooperate in joint-effort projects, we may outweigh skepticism and brutality, and establish civic cooperation, trust and even love.
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Chapter One of Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama (Palgrave Macmil... more Chapter One of Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama (Palgrave Macmillan 2011), an earlier version of which was first published in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies After the Cognitive Turn. eds. F. Elizabeth Hart and Bruce McConachie. New York: Routledge. 2006. pp.122-146.
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Books by Naomi Rokotnitz
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Chapters by Naomi Rokotnitz
In O. Flanagan and G. Caruso (eds.),. Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. (126-145). Oxford: Oxford University Press., 2018
In Chapter 8, the authors explore the notion of relational authenticity, arguing that to understa... more In Chapter 8, the authors explore the notion of relational authenticity, arguing that to understand existential authenticity we must not return to the individuality celebrated by classical existentialism nor look for a reductionist explanation in terms of neuronal patterns or mental representations that would simply opt for a more severe methodological individualism and a conception of authenticity confined to proper brain processes. Rather, they propose, we should look for a fuller picture of authenticity in what they call the “4Es”—the embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended conception of mind. They argue that one requires the 4Es to maintain the 4Ms—mind, meaning, morals, and modality—in the face of reductionistic tendencies in neurophilosophy. The 4E approach, they contend, gives due consideration to the importance of the brain, taken as part of the brain-body-environment system, incorporating neuroscience and integrating phenomenological-existentialist conceptions.
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Papers by Naomi Rokotnitz
and extending the preoccupation of the wonder tale genre with the development of individuals in their chosen social environments, current research in 4E cognition, and (existentialist) notions of 'authentic becoming.'
its implications for literary scholarship, and also explicates why categories first articulated by Søren Kierkegaard, such as “the single individual” (Fear 67), one’s “absolute relation to the absolute” (78), and “witnessing” (104), are still worth pursuing in a post-postmodern twenty-first-century context. Above all, I re-define authentic self-becoming as fundamentally and necessarily relational.
Keywords: performance, cognitive humanities, neurophenomenology, affect, 4E cognition, embodied knowledge, extended mind.
The article reveals how critical focus on violence in Shriver's novel has so far obscured Shriver's fierce and surprisingly optimistic ethical message. In addition to its astute anatomization of trauma, the novel offers readers a framework for envisioning rehabilitation from trauma that is both recuperative and generative. The process of mutual-reconstitution achieved by Shriver's characters challenges readers to reconfigure their expectations, assumptions, and biases; to engage with characters that court antipathy; and yet, to emerge from the experience profoundly humbled. Shriver thereby sets forth an existential model of significant importance to contemporary reformulations of notions of authentic self-becoming and of love's knowledge.
By considering recent research into cognition, empathetic “motor equivalence,” and “tactile touch” physiotherapy, I examine how bodily contact may bypass conscious resistance, re-shaping both somatic identity and philosophical attitudes, and how dramatic performance can demonstrate the value of bodily forms of apprehension and communication. I contend that Edson’s play is compelling and thought provoking, and an important milestone for the medical humanities. Kaufman’s play not only dramatizes a creative example of the existential attitude Heidegger terms “being-toward-death,” but adumbrates paths through which we may effectively reach out to one another, physically and emotionally.
Biology, psychology, technology, and art are intertwined in both the subject matter and dramatic presentation of each play, creating a productive economy of reciprocity. Deconstruction of the body by illness, we discover, may facilitate a reconstruction of the self; giving birth to a new subject position that can produce knowledge of a kind that could not, perhaps, be tapped by the healthy agent.
Abstract: The book Trusting Performance (2011) argues that dramatic productions facilitate experiments that cannot be conducted in laboratories, thereby challenging cognitive scientists to consider the arts as essential companion-fields in the investigation of human embodied cognition.
Chapter 3 discusses Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country’s Good, which dramatizes the events that led to a performance of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer by a group of transported convicts in Australia in 1789. Wertenbaker displays the heated discussions, confrontations, and violent interruptions that precede this public performance, as well as the remarkable effects of cooperation, empathy, and self-articulation that emerge during rehearsals. Crucially, I argue, the play within the play re-creates trust through correcting embodied experience: the participants’ bodies are in effect re-programmed, transforming a heterogeneous, hostile group of individuals into a civil community in which respect, trust, and affection are possible.
Attending to Wertenbaker's ambitious claims for theatrical production, her explicit affinity with key premises of eighteenth century contractual political theories and Sentimentalist moral theories and, in addition, recent neuropsychological studies, this chapter intervenes in postmodern, post-structuralist lamentations of the isolation of the individual, suggesting instead that by sacrificing certain personal desires for the good of the “general will," through learning to cooperate in joint-effort projects, we may outweigh skepticism and brutality, and establish civic cooperation, trust and even love.
Books by Naomi Rokotnitz
Chapters by Naomi Rokotnitz
and extending the preoccupation of the wonder tale genre with the development of individuals in their chosen social environments, current research in 4E cognition, and (existentialist) notions of 'authentic becoming.'
its implications for literary scholarship, and also explicates why categories first articulated by Søren Kierkegaard, such as “the single individual” (Fear 67), one’s “absolute relation to the absolute” (78), and “witnessing” (104), are still worth pursuing in a post-postmodern twenty-first-century context. Above all, I re-define authentic self-becoming as fundamentally and necessarily relational.
Keywords: performance, cognitive humanities, neurophenomenology, affect, 4E cognition, embodied knowledge, extended mind.
The article reveals how critical focus on violence in Shriver's novel has so far obscured Shriver's fierce and surprisingly optimistic ethical message. In addition to its astute anatomization of trauma, the novel offers readers a framework for envisioning rehabilitation from trauma that is both recuperative and generative. The process of mutual-reconstitution achieved by Shriver's characters challenges readers to reconfigure their expectations, assumptions, and biases; to engage with characters that court antipathy; and yet, to emerge from the experience profoundly humbled. Shriver thereby sets forth an existential model of significant importance to contemporary reformulations of notions of authentic self-becoming and of love's knowledge.
By considering recent research into cognition, empathetic “motor equivalence,” and “tactile touch” physiotherapy, I examine how bodily contact may bypass conscious resistance, re-shaping both somatic identity and philosophical attitudes, and how dramatic performance can demonstrate the value of bodily forms of apprehension and communication. I contend that Edson’s play is compelling and thought provoking, and an important milestone for the medical humanities. Kaufman’s play not only dramatizes a creative example of the existential attitude Heidegger terms “being-toward-death,” but adumbrates paths through which we may effectively reach out to one another, physically and emotionally.
Biology, psychology, technology, and art are intertwined in both the subject matter and dramatic presentation of each play, creating a productive economy of reciprocity. Deconstruction of the body by illness, we discover, may facilitate a reconstruction of the self; giving birth to a new subject position that can produce knowledge of a kind that could not, perhaps, be tapped by the healthy agent.
Abstract: The book Trusting Performance (2011) argues that dramatic productions facilitate experiments that cannot be conducted in laboratories, thereby challenging cognitive scientists to consider the arts as essential companion-fields in the investigation of human embodied cognition.
Chapter 3 discusses Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country’s Good, which dramatizes the events that led to a performance of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer by a group of transported convicts in Australia in 1789. Wertenbaker displays the heated discussions, confrontations, and violent interruptions that precede this public performance, as well as the remarkable effects of cooperation, empathy, and self-articulation that emerge during rehearsals. Crucially, I argue, the play within the play re-creates trust through correcting embodied experience: the participants’ bodies are in effect re-programmed, transforming a heterogeneous, hostile group of individuals into a civil community in which respect, trust, and affection are possible.
Attending to Wertenbaker's ambitious claims for theatrical production, her explicit affinity with key premises of eighteenth century contractual political theories and Sentimentalist moral theories and, in addition, recent neuropsychological studies, this chapter intervenes in postmodern, post-structuralist lamentations of the isolation of the individual, suggesting instead that by sacrificing certain personal desires for the good of the “general will," through learning to cooperate in joint-effort projects, we may outweigh skepticism and brutality, and establish civic cooperation, trust and even love.