| Summary: | Recent developments in cognitive science and neuroscience reveal cognition and subjectivity to be distributed in the brain and body and extended out into the world: 'the extended mind hypothesis' (EM). This thesis aims to demonstrate the potential usefulness of the humanities' extending their knowledge about current research in cognitive science and neuroscience. Trends in literary criticism have recently focused on various kinds of social constructivism in which bodies are presented as cultural constructs (notably in new historicism, cultural materialism, and feminist, queer and globalisation studies). However, EM suggests another perspective that takes account of sociocultural and technological environments as natural components of cognitive processing, which are enabled by functional and neurological plasticity. EM enables a reassessment of ideas about the subject as either autonomous or as only socially constructed, which may have constrained understandings of historical, as well as modern, subjectivity.
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