Abstract
In this thesis I will investigate the relationship between individual and society in three novels by Miguel de Unamuno, Italo Calvino, and Albert Camus. I will do so using a cognitive approach to literature. My point of departure will be Georg Lukács and Franco Moretti’s accounts of the novel’s history. For these two, the relationship between the fictional characters and the society that surrounds them is fundamentally antagonistic. I will claim that there is a parallel to this conception in what is usually referred to as the first-generation of cognitive science. This approach to the human mind conceptualised the brain as the software of a computer, where the brain would function as the operational system which is operating autonomously from its physical parts (the body) and its surroundings. An alternative approach to the human mind, known as 4E cognition, has strongly criticized this approach. For them, the human mind is inseparable from its body and its social and physical surroundings. In my thesis, I investigate how 4E cognition, and more specifically, the enactivist approach, can contribute to an investigation of how San Manuel Bueno, mártir, Il Barone rampante and La Peste can be said to rethink the problematic relationship between individual and society as proposed by Lukács and Moretti. I will claim that all these books, in different ways, can be read as attempts to dissolve the strict dividing line between brain, body and surroundings. Through this, I argue that the three books suggest a new way that individuals can relate to their surroundings.