Savage Properties and Violent Forms Beitrag open-access Christopher Brooke’s ‚Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia‘ (1622) and the Discourse on Civility and Possession in Early Modern America Peter Schneck Amerikastudien/American Studies, Volume 62 (2017), Issue 2, Page 169 - 190 The following essay attempts to discuss the convergence of legal and poetical discourse and concepts by looking closely at an early modern lyrical text, Christopher Brooke’s ‘A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia’ (1622). While the poem has achieved a certain notoriety due to its excessively racist imagery, its author has been virtually forgotten, and the text has rarely, if ever, been discussed in regard to its particular poetic strategies. A discussion of these strategies might help us understand the specific ways in which, in the context of colonial expansion, early modern English poetry about sovereignty, civility, and indigenous culture(s) helped to develop a discursive ‘field’ which blends aesthetic concerns for proper forms (i. e., the specific ‘properties’ of poetry as normative speech) with legal-political and philosophical ideas about rightful conquest, dominion, and colonial property. In Brooke’s poem the convergence between these spheres finds its most explicit expression in the deconstruction and reconstruction of ‘civil bodies’— meaning both the bodies of specific victims of the massacre and the civil body politic of the colonial commonwealth which the Virginia Company tried to establish. In conclusion, the analysis and the contextual interpretation of Brooke’s text are meant to project a comparative perspective on law and poetry as acts of normative codification.
Cognitive Style and Perceptual Skill in the Realism of Thomas Eakins Beitrag open-access Pragmatism, Cognitive Science, and Art Peter Schneck Amerikastudien/American Studies, Volume 58 (2014), Issue 2, Page 213 - 234 During the late nineteenth century, new concepts of experience, cognition, and consciousness were being developed and negotiated in both scientific and artistic discourses and practices. Taking the example of Thomas Eakins, a major but also rather controversial American realist painter, the following essay discusses how concepts of perception, cognition, and experience prevalent at the time—and explicitly those expressed by American pragmatism—became translated into images that present cognitive syntheses rather than mimetic representations of the real. On a more general level, these historical observations will be used to discuss the potential of current approaches that align cognitive science with art in order to point out some obvious and some not so obvious continuities between nineteenth-century thoughts on cognition and experience and contemporary approaches in cognitive science. The focus of the discussion will be on notions like perceptual skill and cognitive style, as well as more recent concepts such as embodied and enacted cognition.
Vol. 68.4 (2023): Rethinking Solidarity 2024-03-20 Nathalie Aghoro, Katharina Gerund, and Sylvia Mayer (Guest Editors)
