Really smart review of Refiguring Minds from Jamie Redgate out of U. Glasgow in the Digital Humanities Quarterly (11.2). He picks up on what I agree is perhaps the incongruous 3rd chapter on the game Journey, which deliriously delves into a kind of qualified evolutionary criticism after Brian Boyd.
Here’s a sample:
“The book as a whole serves as a strong example of how literary studies might productively draw on the contemporary sciences of mind. Ciccoricco is extremely diligent throughout, and his assimilation and explication of a wide range of cognitive reading alone will make his study hugely beneficial to others working in the burgeoning field. His cognitive research is matched by an equally impressive engagement with both long-established and very new narratological and literary theory. One of the central theoretical problems with which Ciccoricco opens his study concerns the relationship between representation and simulation. As Ciccoricco explains, ‘digital media push the project of cognitive literary and narrative theory into new (kinetic, cybernetic, ludic) territory’ [Ciccoricco 2015, 15]. Once we begin to read minds in other media, we have to ask new questions about how those minds are both represented to, and enacted within, the reader/player. This complex theoretical area is the thread with which Ciccoricco subtly ties the whole study together.”
david ciccoricco 