Emergence, Meaning and Presence an Interdisciplinary Approach to a Disciplinary Question

This chapter explores the various ways cognitive science challenges how we make sense of theatre and performance. A cognitive approach must foreground the embodied and embedded nature of communication, attending to the importance of time, presence, emotion and learning, areas traditionally overlooked by more semiotic 'readings' of meaning onstage. Cognitive linguists are now almost unanimous in understanding that thinking and speaking are creative and metaphoric. Cognitive linguistics, with its insistence on an embodied experience of and articulation of life, has produced many influential works on Shakespeare and classic texts. Many cognitive linguists view language as being compositional and creative from the start. The growing consensus within the cognitive sciences is that thinking is not computing in the brain but action with the body in the world. This is not a small change to the general received wisdom about literature, theatre and art.