Beth Bradburn
Recently, important theorists such as Zizek, Butler, Shepherdson and others have debated the relationship of "the body" to the decentered subject of Lacanian thinking. These discussions are important and compelling but vitiated in a way because they fail to take into account neurologically-based explanations of human consciousness. Cognitive neuroscience offers a compelling possibility for grounding or at least locating the decentered subject in the body itself. In fact the neuroscientific affirmation of the relationship of body and consciousness can strengthen certain psychoanalytic insights that have a bearing on literary interpretation. The possibilities begin to appear implicitly in early writings by Daniel Dennett, and are made more explicit in work by neurologists such as Simon Baron-Cohen that expands on Dennett's models. And we now have neurological explanations of biophysical affect in language and of metaphor as cognition (as in David Miall, Reuven Tsur, Mark Turner, Raymond Gibbs, etc). This paper sketches out (in language understandable to a general MLA audience) ways in which psychoanalytic and neuroscientific understandings of "the body" can come together in a cognitive poetics.