Minds on Stage : Greek Tragedy and Cognition

Minds on Stage expands our understanding of Greek tragedy, and uses Greek tragedy as a way to explore cognitive thinking. We see both 'minds on stage', understanding and dealing with complex situations and with each other, and 'minds in the audience', following the action, forming a picture of the characters' inner worlds.

Greek tragedy parades, tests, stimulates, and upends human cognition. Characters plot deception, try to fathom elusive gods, and fail to recognise loved ones. Spectators observe the characters'' cognitive limitations and contemplate their own, grapple with moral quandaries and emotional breakdown, overlay mythical past and topical present, and all the while imagine that a man with a mask is Helen of Troy. With broad coverage of both plays and cognitive capabilities, Minds on Stage pursues a dual aim: to expand our understanding of Greek tragedy and to use Greek tragedy as a focal point for exploring cognitive thinking about literature.After an introduction that considers questions of methodology, the volume is divided into three parts. Part One examines the dynamics of mind-reading by characters and audience, with articles on Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The chapters in Part Two study aspects of the characters'' cognitive sense-making, from individual styles of attributing causes and different manners of remembering, to the use of objects as tools for thinking. Finally, Part Three turns to the cognitive dimension of spectating. The articles treat the spectators'' generic expectations and different modes of engagement with the fictional worlds of the plays, the joint nature of their attention to the drama, the nexus between aesthetic illusion and the ethics of deception, as well as the situated nature of cognition that helps both audiences and characters make sense of morally complex situations.