"Dubreuil insists that without poetry the human risks degenerating into the merely computed. He does not, thankfully, do this by dismissing the power of cognitive science. Instead, he teases out of this science the principle that even on its own terms, poetry puts in play an array of cognitive challenges that the mind succumbs to morbidity without. The astonishing range and acuity of Dubreuil's poetic readings show how seriously the author takes his contention that poetry, if read attentively, jostles the cerebral cortex."-John Mowitt, University of Leeds
"Poetry and Mind is an excellent book that performs its own thesis as a 'thinking experiment' that is part classical argument and part poetic suggestion. Many scholars and artists have attempted the Tractatarian form before, but seldom with Dubreuil's success."-John Ó Maoilearca, Kingston University
The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience cannot be ignored if, as humanists, we are interested in the way we think. At the same time, poetry grants us the ability to move beyond the limits of thought and to explore the beyond of cognition-it teaches us to think differently. A joint commitment to literary, philosophical, and scientific insights animates this remarkable account of poetry's centrality for what we call cognition.
Drawing from Wittgenstein, the book is developed through brief, eloquent logical elaborations but also punctuated by some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, and from cuneiform tablet to rap music. Uniquely broad and comparative, the book encompasses dozens of traditions, oral and written, from all continents.
Poetry and Mind shows that poetry-a widespread, perhaps universal phenomenon among humans-arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations, but, in going through them, also exceeds them. For theorists of literature and for logicians and cognitive scientists alike, the book offers a novel and sophisticated account of the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience.
Laurent Dubreuil is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, and Cognitive Science at Cornell University and a Senior International Professor at the Tsinghua University Institute for World Literatures and Cultures.