There’s a fine line between reflecting thoughtfully on your practice, and talking about yourself. The former can really get in the way of the latter. I have been doing a bit of both recently.

I was invited to write a post for the ‘Comment’ section of Palgrave Communications, an online journal focused on interdisciplinary work. I think it’s available to all, here. This is the first time I’ve ever been sent a link to the article’s metrics, as well as to the article itself, should I ever want to find out how often it’s been read or cited. I dare say the chance to measure one’s impact on the world makes some of my colleagues’ eyes shine. In my eyes? Fear.
      My idea was to get across that interdisciplinary research (in my case, the kind of thing that got me writing this blog about literature and cognitive science) is not only done by confident, energetic, purposeful types who know they are tuned in to the future of academia. It’s also done by fretful, pensive people who are trying to stave off a sense of inadequacy while also addressing difficult intellectual challenges that they really care about and feel inspired by. And it’s not only a meeting of robust and reputable intellectual approaches that exchange ideas equally and harmoniously. It also involves tensions and problems within and between fields.
      I hope I managed to get across that it doesn’t diminish the value of interdisciplinary work if the difficulties involved are part of the project. I also hope I managed to put a good work in for some fantastic work being done in the field (I don’t mean the slightly needy list of my own offerings). It was nice to be asked to contribute to a forum of that sort, something new to me.

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Next week I’ll also be a little bit inward-turning when I talk to a conference called ‘Embodied Cognition and the Goethezeit’, organised by my colleague Charlotte Lee and others. This is an effort to explore what some aspects of cognitive science might offer to those studying German Romantic literature and thought (and vice versa, I’ll be muttering, and vice versa). I’m there, along with another colleague, Tim Chesters, to say a bit about what cognitive approaches have been doing in our field, renaissance literature.
      I am going to ask whether there are particular reasons why the approach has flourished in my period. It isn’t that difficult to think of reasons why renaissance literature and thought might be amenable to consideration alongside recent advances in cognitive science: a changing intellectual climate might in various ways have opened up crucial questions, and certain key writers and genres might have fostered new ways of reaching the mind through language. I think in the end I’ll step back from the brink and say that it’s not as if other periods have not been addressed by cognitive critics, and many of the cultural and intellectual themes I could bring up will have their equivalents elsewhere. Things are often changing.
      Still, it’s been useful facing something I’ve faced lightly in my blog, which is why Shakespeare in particular always comes to my mind. It’s only partly because I don’t know about anything else. It’s also because special conditions of language, literary landscape, and intellectual culture combine in his work to enable countless vivid encounters with something now thought of as embodied cognition.