Abstract

Abstract:

“Shapes of Cognition in Typographical Fictions” shows that the equation of cognition with computation in the early cognitive sciences affects the aesthetic treatment of thought in contemporary typographical fictions. When these fictions present thought as though it were a computational process, they affirm computationalism’s mind-body dualism. At the same time, “typographical fictions”—as the label implies—manipulate fonts, weight, and layout of letters to advance the narrative, visibly embracing the multimodal designing capacities of computers as writing interfaces. Given that visual features of the written language assume significance, these texts also explicitly engage the reader’s verbal-pictorial sensory perceptions, enriching the semantic field. Thus, in this article, I analyze the British author Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), a typographical novel frequently studied for its representation of autism, in order to delineate both the formal possibilities and the problematic implications that follow from contemporary typographical fictions’ reliance on computers as medium and analogue for thought representation.

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