Sleight of Mind: Cognitive Illusions and Shakespearian Desire

My approach differs fundamentally from that articulated in Raphael Lyne’s excellent Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), which also provides a useful survey of cognitive literary theory (28–67, 251–3).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

See for instance Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, and Sandra Blakeslee, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions (New York: Picador, 2011).Google Scholar

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Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 81. Lyne’s Rhetoric and Cognition does not cite Kahneman, but his distinction between fast and slow reading could be related to Kahneman’s between fast System 1 and slow System 2.Google Scholar

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See Rudolph Schevill, “Theobald’s Double Falsehood ?” Modern Philology 9 (1911): 269–85;Google Scholar

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Jeffrey Kahan, Shakespeare Imitations, Parodies and Forgeries, 1710–1820, 3 vols. (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004). Stern cites all these critics approvingly, without objection to their focus on Shakespeare.Google Scholar

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For Stern’s impact, see for instance Michael P. Jensen, “Talking Books with Tiffany Stern,” Shakespeare Newsletter 62.1 (Spring/Summer 2012): 9 (“It convinced me”)Google Scholar

and Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 392 (“convincing”).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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See Robert Folkenflik, “‘Shakespearesque’: The Arden Double Falsehood,” Huntington Library Quarterly 75 (2012): 131–43 (esp. 138). Folkenflik’s review essay was published before Quest.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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Kahneman and Tversky, “Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures,” Management Science 12 (1979): 313–27. My children, who have often seen this fallacy in operation, call it “the Japanese war plan” (referring to the fact that Japan’s military leaders in 1941 knew that they could defeat the United States only if everything went exactly as they hoped).Google Scholar

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