This paper examines four retellings of the Arthurian legend of Guinevere and Lancelot from a bio-evolutionary perspective. The historical and social conditions which provide contexts for the retellings are described, and those conditions are related to underlying male and female reproductive strategies. Since the authors of the selected texts, Chrétien de Troyes, Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and William Morris, are all male, the assumption is made that these versions of the legend reflect male reproductive preoccupations and encode male attitudes (...) toward femaleness in general and toward female adultery in particular. (shrink)

Poetry is the most complex and intricate of human language used across all languages and cultures. Its relation to the worlds of human experience has perplexed writers and readers for centuries, as has the question of evaluation and judgment: what makes a poem "work" and endure. The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and function: not interpretation but experience; not what poetry means but what it does. Using both historic and contemporary approaches of (...) embodied cognition from various disciplines, Margaret Freeman argues that a poem's success lies in its ability to become an icon of the felt "being" of reality. Freeman explains how the features of semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect work to make a poem an icon, with detailed examples from various poets. By analyzing the ways poetry provides insights into the workings of human cognition, Freeman claims that taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts are simply products of the aesthetic faculty, and not the aesthetic faculty itself. The aesthetic faculty, she argues, should be understood as the science of human perception, and therefore constitutive of the cognitive processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment. (shrink)

According to current cognitive linguistic theory, the abstract notion of TIME in many languages of the world is expressed through a metonymic relation involving direc-tion, irreversibility, continuity, segmentation, and measurability and one of two possible versions of the TIME AS ORIENTATION IN SPACE metaphor: either the observer moves or time does. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty argues for the possibility of understanding what he calls 'our primordial experience'of time through an exploration, analysis, comparison, and evaluation of the different metaphors (...) for time, not as they exist in themselves but as they are grounded in what other cognitive linguists have explored with respect to subjectivity, concept formation, and conceptual integration. This 'primordial experience' of time is possible because of the embodiment of ourselves in the world and gives rise to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of an ontology of the flesh; the fact that we are 'of' rather than 'in' the world gives rise to his theory of time as depth. In this paper, I show how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of time might 1) clarify the picture Lakoff and Johnson give of the existence of time and 2) provide a philosophical foundation that integrates various contemporary cognitive linguistic theories. (shrink)

This paper argues that the cognitive sciences need to incorporate aesthetic study of the arts into their methodologies in order to fully understand the nature of human cognitive processes, because the arts reflect insights into human experience that are unobtainable by the methodologies of the natural sciences. These insights differ from those acquired by scientific exploration because they arise not from the conceptual logic of reason but from the precategorial intuition of imagination. Aesthetics provides a methodology whereby we are able (...) to understand how art enables us to experience emotions caused by sense impressions. This methodology lies at the heart of Giambattista Vico’s Principi di scienza nuova (1725-44), which attempts to account for the way we live and participate in cultural, social, and civic communities. Vico’s theory challenges certain Western philosophical presuppositions that still inform much of cognitive science, such as the relation of language to our experience of the natural world, the nature of subjective and objective representations, and the role of the arts in the evolutionary development of the human mind. In basing my approach to literature on Vico’s, Susanne K. Langer’s (1953, 1967) and Merleau-Ponty’s (1962[1945], 1968) theories, I argue that the language of literature is distinguished from conventional language use by its imaginative use of aesthetic patterns that make manifest the inherent character of the external world as we experience it. By introducing the concepts of minding, metaphor, and icon as structures of the imagination, I show how the language of poetic expression in Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach,” enables us to apprehend the ways in which we intuitively participate in the reality that underlies our conscious experience. Such participation occurs because sensory impressions of the world we experience cause modifications in the human mind that result in affective responses. Current research in the cognitive sciences increasingly indicates that such modification occurs; aesthetic study of the arts provides a means whereby we can know what it is like to experience such modifications. (shrink)

Providing the most thorough coverage available in one volume, this comprehensive, broadly based collection offers a wide variety of selections in four major genres, and also includes a section on film. Each of the five sections contains a detailed critical introduction to each form, brief biographies of the authors, and a clear, concise editorial apparatus. Updated and revised throughout, the new Fourth Edition adds essays by Margaret Mead, Russell Baker, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Alice Walker; fiction by Nathaniel (...) Hawthorne, Ursula K. LeGuin, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Donald Barthelme, and James McPherson; poems by John Donne, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Philip Levine, and Louise Gluck; and plays by August Wilson, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, and Vaclav Havel. The chapter devoted to film examines the relation of film to literature and gives the complete screenplay for Citizen Kane plus close analysis of a scene from the film. With its innovative structure, comprehensive coverage, and insightful and stimulating presentation of all kinds of literature, this is an anthology readers will turn to again and again. (shrink)

Epistasis plays an important role in the genetic architecture of common human diseases and can be viewed from two perspectives, biological and statistical, each derived from and leading to different assumptions and research strategies. Biological epistasis is the result of physical interactions among biomolecules within gene regulatory networks and biochemical pathways in an individual such that the effect of a gene on a phenotype is dependent on one or more other genes. In contrast, statistical epistasis is defined as deviation from (...) additivity in a mathematical model summarizing the relationship between multilocus genotypes and phenotypic variation in a population. The goal of this essay is to review definitions and examples of biological and statistical epistasis and to explore the relationship between the two. Specifically, we present and discuss the following two questions in the context of human health and disease. First, when does statistical evidence of epistasis in human populations imply underlying biomolecular interactions in the etiology of disease? Second, when do biomolecular interactions produce patterns of statistical epistasis in human populations?Answers to these two reciprocal questions will provide an important framework for using genetic information to improve our ability to diagnose, prevent and treat common human diseases. We propose that systems biology will provide the necessary information for addressing these questions and that model systems such as bacteria, yeast and digital organisms will be a useful place to start. BioEssays 27:637–646, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)