- Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), English Romanticism, Franz Kafka, Rabbinics, and 6 moreRhetorical Theory and Criticism, Middle English literature and culture, The Frankfurt School, Modern Literature, Modern Jewish Philosophy, and Biblical interpretation (English)edit
- Hillel Broder holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY. His areas of research and writing include cognit... moreHillel Broder holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY. His areas of research and writing include cognitive studies, modernist studies, Kafka studies, pedagogy, prayer, and the poetics of Jewish mysticism. He currently serves as the Principal for General Studies at DRS Yeshiva High School for Boys of the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach. He has previously taught literature, composition, and Judaic studies at Fordham University, SAR High School, and Yeshiva University High School for Boys.edit
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WANDERING IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE: A NARRATIVE THEORY OF COGNITION
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Normative “Theory of Mind” is the lens through which cognitive psychologists understand the empathic response of readers to fiction and fictive characters. This paper attempts to demonstrate how the modernist aesthetics put forth by Franz... more
Normative “Theory of Mind” is the lens through which cognitive psychologists understand the empathic response of readers to fiction and fictive characters. This paper attempts to demonstrate how the modernist aesthetics put forth by Franz Kafka and his literary descendent, Kazuo Ishiguro, model experimental cognition that is profoundly amnesic and deeply decontextualized. Focusing on the expressionist “gesture” in their narratives at the expense of normatively contextualized Theory of Mind, both authors cultivate a distinctive attentiveness in their characters and for their readers’ empathic experiences. This study is a useful paradigm for the effect literary experiment might have on the limits set by cognitive psychology’s normative understanding of cognition, empathy, and Theory of Mind.
Research Interests:
Normative “Theory of Mind” is the lens through which cognitive psychologists understand the empathic response of readers to fiction and fictive characters. This paper attempts to demonstrate how the modernist aesthetics put forth by Franz... more
Normative “Theory of Mind” is the lens through which cognitive psychologists understand the empathic response of readers to fiction and fictive characters. This paper attempts to demonstrate how the modernist aesthetics put forth by Franz Kafka and his literary descendent, Kazuo Ishiguro, model experimental cognition that is profoundly amnesic and deeply decontextualized. Focusing on the expressionist “gesture” in their narratives at the expense of normatively contextualized Theory of Mind, both authors cultivate a distinctive attentiveness in their characters and for their readers’ empathic experiences. This study is a useful paradigm for the effect literary experiment might have on the limits set by cognitive psychology’s normative understanding of cognition, empathy, and Theory of Mind.
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This chapter reconsiders the melancholic affect commonly attributed to Sebald's work by arguing that Sebald's iteration of textual and photographic melancholy occupies a uniquely ethical position in that it maintains the fixed alterity of... more
This chapter reconsiders the melancholic affect commonly attributed to Sebald's work by arguing that Sebald's iteration of textual and photographic melancholy occupies a uniquely ethical position in that it maintains the fixed alterity of the mourned object through an unwaveringly documentary gaze, while admitting, through its various aesthetic and phenomenological ambivalences, to the mourned object's necessarily creative reconstitution.
Research Interests:
Normative “Theory of Mind” is the lens through which cognitive psychologists understand the empathic response of readers to fiction and fictive characters. This paper attempts to demonstrate how the modernist aesthetics put forth by Franz... more
Normative “Theory of Mind” is the lens through which cognitive psychologists understand the empathic response of readers to fiction and fictive characters. This paper attempts to demonstrate how the modernist aesthetics put forth by Franz Kafka and his literary descendent, Kazuo Ishiguro, model experimental cognition that is profoundly amnesic and deeply decontextualized. Focusing on the expressionist
“gesture” in their narratives at the expense of normatively contextualized Theory of Mind, both authors cultivate a distinctive attentiveness in their characters and for their readers’ empathic experiences. This study is a useful paradigm for the effect literary experiment might have
on the limits set by cognitive psychology’s normative understanding of cognition, empathy, and Theory of Mind.
“gesture” in their narratives at the expense of normatively contextualized Theory of Mind, both authors cultivate a distinctive attentiveness in their characters and for their readers’ empathic experiences. This study is a useful paradigm for the effect literary experiment might have
on the limits set by cognitive psychology’s normative understanding of cognition, empathy, and Theory of Mind.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This study offers a theory of wandering cognition as an animating feature of western literature, in general, and of contemporary literature, in particular. Unlike existing theories of peripatetic bodies and minds in fiction that focus... more
This study offers a theory of wandering cognition as an animating feature of western literature, in general, and of contemporary literature, in particular. Unlike existing theories of peripatetic bodies and minds in fiction that focus primarily on political critiques, cultural practices, or pleasures of digression, this theory of wandering offers an aesthetic philosophy and ethical critique of representing cognition, memory, and narrative identity that finds affinities in the political, phenomenological, and ethical thought of Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben.
Unlike existing cognitive theories of literature that apply cognitive theory to literary study (or vice versa), this study develops an aesthetic and phenomenological theory of consciousness that emerges from within the representation of perception, attentiveness, and memory in literatures of wandering minds. Wandering generates narrative identity apart from conventional and normative narrativity, a narrative consciousness that accounts for the cognitive motion (and blindspots) in remembering selves and that illuminates cognitive mimeses of amnesic, episodic, and disabled consciousness.
Finally, while this study focuses primarily on the contemporary literary experiments of wandering in the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, W.G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, and Maud Casey, it has a wider reach in its retrospective and prospective rethinking of the function of peripatetic fiction. Wandering is built into the narrative motion and aesthetic technique of narrated and remembering identities in the early Romantic autobiography of Rousseau, Wordsworth, and De Quincey; and wandering underlies the conscious identities narrated absent memory in the emerging genre of the amnesic memoir.
Unlike existing cognitive theories of literature that apply cognitive theory to literary study (or vice versa), this study develops an aesthetic and phenomenological theory of consciousness that emerges from within the representation of perception, attentiveness, and memory in literatures of wandering minds. Wandering generates narrative identity apart from conventional and normative narrativity, a narrative consciousness that accounts for the cognitive motion (and blindspots) in remembering selves and that illuminates cognitive mimeses of amnesic, episodic, and disabled consciousness.
Finally, while this study focuses primarily on the contemporary literary experiments of wandering in the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, W.G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, and Maud Casey, it has a wider reach in its retrospective and prospective rethinking of the function of peripatetic fiction. Wandering is built into the narrative motion and aesthetic technique of narrated and remembering identities in the early Romantic autobiography of Rousseau, Wordsworth, and De Quincey; and wandering underlies the conscious identities narrated absent memory in the emerging genre of the amnesic memoir.