Cognitive Science Program

Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds: A Cognitive Historical Analysis (2018)
Steven Wagschal
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division.

Abstract

Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds employs current research in cognitive science and the philosophy of animal cognition to explore how humans have understood non-human animals in the Iberian world, from the Middle Ages through the early modern period. Using texts from European and Indigenously-informed sources, Steven Wagschal argues that people tend to conceptualize the minds of animals in ways that reflect their own uses for the animal, the manner in which they interact with the animal, and the place in which the animal lives. Often this has little if anything to do with the actual cognitive abilities of the animal. However, occasionally early authors made surprisingly accurate assumptions about the thoughts and feelings of animals. Wagschal explores a number of ways in which culture and human cognition interact, including: the utility of anthropomorphism; the symbolic use of animals in medieval Christian texts; attempts at understanding the minds of animals in Spain’s early modern farming and hunting books; the effect of novelty on animal conceptualizations in" New World" histories, and how Cervantes navigated the forms of anthropomorphism that preceded him to create the first embodied animal minds in fiction.

Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750 (2018)
Ryan D Giles and Steven Wagschal
University of Toronto Press.

Abstract

Beyond Sight, edited by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal, explores the ways in which Iberian writers crafted images of both Old and New Worlds using the non-visual senses (hearing, smell, taste, and touch). The contributors argue that the uses of these senses are central to understanding Iberian authors and thinkers from the pre-and early modern periods. Medievalists delve into the poetic interiorizations of the sensorial plane to show how sacramental and purportedly miraculous sensory experiences were central to the effort of affirming faith and understanding indigenous peoples in the Americas. Renaissance and early modernist essays shed new light on experiences of pungent, bustling ports and city centres, and the exotic musical performances of empire. This insightful collection covers a wide array of approaches including literary and cultural history, philosophical aesthetics, affective and cognitive studies, and theories of embodiment. Beyond Sight expands the field of sensory studies to focus on the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies from historical, literary, and cultural perspectives.

The Smellscape of Don Quixote: A Cognitive Approach (2012)
Steven Wagschal
Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 32 (1), 125

Abstract

For a dog, he would have said, for a dog, dear master, the fact is that the whole world is a symphony of smells. Every hour, every minute, every second of his waking life is at once a physical and spiritual experience. Paul Auster, Timbuktu

The literature of jealousy in the age of Cervantes (2006)
Steven Wagschal
University of Missouri Press.

Abstract

" Explores the theme of jealousy in early modern Spanish literature through the works of Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Gongora. Using the philosophical frameworks of Vives, Descartes, Freud, and DeSousa, Wagschal proposes that the theme of jealousy offered a means for working through political and cultural problems involving power"--Provided by publisher.

Medicine, Morality, Madness: Competing Models of Insanity in Calderón's El mayor monstruo del mundo (2008)
Steven Wagschal
Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos, 227-245

Abstract

A través de una lectura de El mayor monstruo del mundo (1637) de Calderón de la Barca propongo explicar cómo en España el acercamiento pernicioso a la locura no es resultado de una progresión hacia el pensamiento racionalista – tal como arguye Foucault – sino de un retorno a un modo de pensar arraigado en la superstición. Así, sin negar la teoría propuesta en la conocida Historia de la locura en la época clásica (1961), pretendo mostrar cómo el filósofo francés no presta suficiente atención a la naturaleza dinámica de la concepción de la locura en la modernidad temprana, y así cuestiono la validez general de su paradigma en su aplicación a la España de los siglos XVI y XVII. El texto calderoniano yuxtapone dos versiones de la locura: la de Herodes, que se basa en ideas moralizantes y religiosas, y la del gracioso Malacuca, que se desarrolla de modo médico-científico. Ambas locuras en el texto …

" Mas no cabrás allá": Gongora's Early Modern Representation of the Modern Sublime (2002)
Steven Wagschal
Hispanic review, 70 (2), 169-189

Abstract

STEVEN WAGSCHAL Indiana University g. f 53}. 2t HE last century has left us with three main views, 3" t8,"* 1 of Gongora's Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea. In^ gm: i the first which characterizes both Damaso t> 1 t Ju Alonso's (186-207) and A A. Parker's (111-6) posing dualisms (monstrosity/beauty, darkness/light, love/jealousy) united and balanced in an organic whole. l According to the second view, the positive values in this dualism are celebrated; for RO Jones, these are beauty and life (36-7), while for Robert Jammes, they are love and other pastoral ideals (533-54). The third holds that the negative values of the dualism triumph; for instance, Melinda Eve Lehrer interprets much of Gongora's poetry, including the Polifamo, as" beautiful pastorale [s]... built up and then shattered"(57). Along similar lines, R. John McCaw's recent article treats the poem's subversion of pastoral:" The contradiction between Polyphemus …

Contemporary Cinematic Tragedy and the ‘Silver-Lining’Genre (2014)
Sandra Shapshay and Steven Wagschal
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 54 (2), 161-174

Abstract

Although much recent work in Anglo-American aesthetics on tragedy has focused exclusively on the ‘problems’ of tragic pleasure, in the long tradition of reflection on tragedy philosophers have focused more on tragedy as a genre of particular moral and political-philosophical significance. In this paper, we investigate the tragedy of our day in light of these latter concerns in order to determine what works of this genre reveal about the sense of the terrible necessities or near-necessities with which our contemporary Western culture must grapple. We do this by focusing on cinematic tragedies since film is a medium that has become more popular than theatre. Surprisingly, contemporary aestheticians do not have a good definition of tragedy as it has developed to the present. Thus, we start with some definitional work taking Aristotle as a base. After adumbrating some plausible necessary conditions for tragedy, we …

Digging up the past: the archeology of emotion in Cervantes'" Romance de los celos" (2007)
Steven Wagschal
Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 27 (2), 213-228

Abstract

NEARLY A DECADE AGO, Pedro Ruiz Pérez pointed out that poetry was the most" unexplored territory" in Cervantes' writing (63), something which remains true today. For the most part, scholarship on Cervantes' poetry has tended to regard it in stark contrast with his novelistic production, that is, as retrograde, much in line with the author's own pseudo-appraisals of his poetry in various works as well with as those of his contemporaries (Ruiz Pérez 63-65).(1) Proof of the poetry's relative worth is found, for instance, in the fact that Cervantes' verse was not selected by Pedro de Espinosa for the Flores de poetas ilustres de España (1605), a project bent on acclaiming the stylistic innovations of those who wrote" nueva poesía" in Italianate verse; rather, Cervantes' autochthonous poems were published in the more" backward-looking" Romancero general of 1600 (Ruiz Pérez 65). Building on Ruiz Pérez's observations …

Writing on the Fractured T: Gongora's Iconographic Evocations of Vulcan, Venus and Mars (2004)
Steven Wagschal
Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age, 130-50

Abstract

Polyphemos hurls a boulder at Acis and smashes him to bits. Zeus strikes Phaethon down with lightning bolts for coming too close to the Earth. Juno sends the hundred-eyed Argos to keep watch over her husband’s beloved Io. In the early modern period in Old and New Spain, the invocation of Greco-Roman myths in literature was far from being a mere adornment. Yet myth is so common in the prose, theater, and poetry of the period that its semantic importance can be easily overlooked, a situation that De Armas’s collection of essays on mythology and the comedia (1998b) serves to address and redress.Golden Age lyric poets, from Garcilaso to Sor Juana, frequently employed myths for a variety of reasons and desired effects, oftentimes to draw a comparison to a psychological state. Such is, for example, how Lope de Vega evokes pathos for the lyric voice in Sonnet 56,“Que eternamente las cuarenta y nueve”[That eternally the forty-nine], by comparing his affective torment to the physical torture of Tantalus, Sisyphus, and other mythological characters, in order to make the bold claim that his own emotional suffering is worse.

Don Quixote, the Skeptical Reader and the Nature of Reality (2013)
Steven Wagschal
Iberoamericana-Vervuert. 139-54