The Hand that Cannot Taste: Conundrums of Mimetic Desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream

• In Event: Cognitive/Affective Cultures I: Cognition and Culture in Early Modern England

Abstract

What happens when literary critics borrow concepts from neuroscience for their own research—and vice versa? In this talk I will track the migration of Rene Girard’s concept of mimetic desire into the discourse of cognitive neuroscience in the early 2000s, where that concept took on a life of its own in the experiments and writings of Vittorio Gallese, Joel Lebreton and other scientists. I will then reimport these scientific theorizations of mimetic desire back into Shakespeare Studies and specifically Girard’s influential 1979 essay, "Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream." Using these new, cognitively supercharged theories of mimetic desire, which are in fact quite different from Rene Girard’s original concept, we find ourselves in possession of a very different toolkit with which to explore the play.

Author

• Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, University of Texas at Austin