Eco-Emotions seminar with Chen Cui

Embedded in Bed and Beyond: Distributed Cognition and the Pearl-Poet’s Bed Imagery

This talk will be a presentation of an essay examining the representations of and allusions to the bed as a semantically polyvalent object in the Middle English poems attributed to the Pearl-poet—i.e., Pearl, Cleanness (also known as Purity), Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Drawing on theories of Distributed Cognition, especially the 4E framework which understands cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended, the essay integrates cognitive literary studies and historical contextualisation to investigate the role of the bed—alongside related images of sleep and liminal states of rest—across the Pearl-poet’s entire corpus, on interlaced literary and codicological levels. It argues that the Pearl-poet’s linguistic and pictorial constructions of the bed function as a narratological device that shapes the reader’s perceptual engagement with the poetic scenes, whilst also guiding the reader’s ethical and aesthetic responses in the process of meaning-making. For one thing, the bed and its socio-historically established metaphors evoke spatial forms of embeddedness that orient interpretation. For another thing, they also enact embodied imagination and extend readerly engagement beyond the individual body, thereby enabling intersubjective resonance between human cognition and the more-than-human world. For the Pearl-poet, the bed fosters a co-agential mode of sense-making that is grounded in affective response. This is an aspect of the Pearl-poet’s poetic technique and narrative art that still requires more sustained scholarly attention.

The recommended reading for this seminar are two chapters from Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (2019), edited by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler: "Distributed Cognition and the Humanities" and "Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Studies".

Read more about Chen and his research here.