There seem to be various reasons why Beckett Studies, especially the Anglophone ones, started to take a cognitive turn in the late 2000s: there was a growing awareness that Beckett’s work is designed from the first place to work on the audience’s cognition, thus bound to elicit diverse associative as well as interpretative responses from the first place; there was not much success in structuralist literary criticism in clarifying Beckett’s poetical patterns as well as defining Beckett’s poetics, owing to the fact that Beckett’s writing features a radically intersemiotic character in which the sensible and the intelligible are closely intertwined with each other; and it was timely then to introduce cognitive literary studies into the field as the cognitive science started to be applied to literary studies in the 2000s, replacing as the object of study textual interpretation with the experience of text itself. What paved the way for this cognitive turn is genetic criticism’s recent archival discoveries about Beckett’s experience of and interest in neuroscience, clinical psychology and psychoanalysis. This paper sketches out the above mentioned circumstances surrounding this new trend in Beckett Studies. More importantly, it also tries to assess the first dozen years’ development of this new cognitivist trend by reviewing its first fruits contributed by the Journal of Beckett Studies issue no. 17 contributors and other early-career scholars, especially centering on the emerging concepts of “extended cognition” and “enactivism,” newly imported respectively from postcognitivism and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. This cognitive criticism proves to be the most efficient and effective critical methodology yet applied in Beckett Studies, for it deals with ‘the inside’―author’s psychology, sensibility, habits and aesthetic aspiration―and the ‘outside’―historical or biographical context or influences and intellectual or writerly material or resources―of literary poetics, together with their ‘interface’―the actual writing process and whose specific stylistics―, all at the same time.
저자
Jooyeup Lee [ Phd graduate, University of Reading, UK ]
