Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of Mind

249 Pages·2013·2.42 MB·English

by  Chris Danta

Mindful Aesthetics

Mindful Aesthetics:
Literature and the Science
of Mind
Edited by
Chris Danta and Helen Groth
NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2014
© Chris Danta, Helen Groth and Contributors, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mindful Aesthetics : Literature and the Science of Mind / edited by
Chris Danta and Helen Groth.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-0286-7 (hardback)
1. Literature and science. 2. Cognition in literature.
3. Philosophy of mind in literature. 4. Aesthetics in literature.
I. Danta, Chris, editor of compilation.
II. Groth, Helen, editor of compilation.
PN55.M54 2013
809’.93356 – dc23
2013029976
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-0286-7
ePDF: 978-1-4411-8191-6
ePub: 978-1-4411-6252-6
Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction: Between Minds
Chris Danta and Helen Groth 1
Part 1 Theoria 15
1 Psychology and Literature: Mindful Close Reading
Brian Boyd 17
2 Vitalism and Theoria
Claire Colebrook 29
3 Continental Drift: The Clash between Literary Theory and
Cognitive Literary Studies
Paul Sheehan 47
4 Thinking with the World: Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello
Anthony Uhlmann 59
Part 2 Minds in History 71
5 “The Brain Is a Book which Reads Itself”: Cultured Brains and Reductive
Materialism from Diderot to J. J. C. Smart
Charles T. Wolfe 73
6 Muted Literary Minds: James Sully, George Eliot and Psychologized
Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century
Penelope Hone 91
7 The Mind as Palimpsest: Art, Dreaming and James Sully’s
Aesthetics of Latency
Helen Groth 107
8 The Flame’s Lover: The Modernist Mind of William Carlos Williams
Mark Steven 123
vi Contents
Part 3 Contemporary Literary Minds 139
9 “The Creation of Space”: Narrative Strategies, Group Agency and
Skill in Lloyd Jones’ The Book of Fame
John Sutton and Evelyn B. Tribble 141
10 Reproductive Aesthetics: Multiple Realities in a Seamus Heaney Poem
Stephen Muecke 161
11 Distended Moments in the Neuronarrative: Character
Consciousness and the Cognitive Sciences in Ian McEwan’s Saturday
Hannah Courtney 173
12 A Loose Democracy in the Skull: Characterology and Neuroscience
Julian Murphet 189
Afterword: Turn and Turn About
Paul Giles 207
Bibliography 212
Index 232
Acknowledgments
The seeds of this volume were sown by a conference that explored cross-disciplinary
dialogues between “science and literature,” held at the University of New South Wales
in 2010. We are indebted to both the Australasian Association for Literature and
the University of New South Wales for supporting this event. We would also like to
acknowledge the Australian Research Council, which has supported the research of
a number of contributors in this volume, including our own. Thanks to our editor
at Bloomsbury, Haaris Naqvi, for his unfailing support of the volume. Thanks also
to Susan Danta, who provided us with invaluable assistance with the cover, and to
Penelope Hone, whose thoroughness and insight has made a major contribution to
the editorial process. Finally, we would like to thank our families for their patience
and support.
Notes on Contributors
Brian Boyd, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland, has
written on American, Brazilian, English, Greek, Irish, New Zealand and Russian
literature, from epics, drama, poetry, fiction, nonfiction and translation to children’s
stories and comics. He is known especially for his many books on Vladimir Nabokov
and on literature, evolution and cognition. His work has been translated into 17
languages and won awards on four continents. His next book is a co-translation and
co-edition of Nabokov’s Letters to Véra (2013). He is currently researching a biography
of philosopher Karl Popper.
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. She
has written books and articles on poetry, queer theory, feminist theory, literary theory,
visual culture and contemporary European philosophy. Her most recent book is Theory
and the Disappearing Future (2012), co-authored with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller.
Hannah Courtney is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Sydney,
studying narrative trickery in contemporary fiction. She is the author of “Narrative
Temporality and Slowed Scene: The Interaction of Event and Thought Representation
in Ian McEwan’s Fiction” in Narrative (2013). She won the Graduate Student Prize at
the 2011 International Society for the Study of Narrative conference.
Chris Danta is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of the Arts and Media at
the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is the author of Literature Suspends
Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (2011) and the
co-editor of Strong Opinions: J. M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction
(2011). He has also published essays in New Literary History, Angelaki, Textual Practice,
Modernism/modernity, SubStance and Literature & Theology.
Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney. His most recent
books are Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature
(2013), The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011) and Transnationalism in
Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion (2010).
Helen Groth is Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the School of the
Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is the author of
three books: Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (2003), Moving Images:
Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (2013) and, with Natalya Lusty,
Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History (2013). She has also recently co-edited a
special issue of Textual Practice (2012) on “The Uses of Anachronism.”
Notes on Contributors ix
Penelope Hone is a PhD candidate in the School of the Arts and Media at the University
of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research concentrates on nineteenth-century English
literature, with a particular interest in noise, new media and the form of the novel.
Stephen Muecke is Professor of Writing at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
He works with Indigenous groups in Broome (a new book is Butcher Joe (2011)) and on
the Indian Ocean. Contingency in Madagascar, with photographer Max Pam, appeared
in 2012 in the Intellect Books’ Critical Photography Series.
Julian Murphet is Professor of Modern Film and Literature and Director of the Centre for
Modernism Studies in the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales,
Sydney. He has published Multimedia Modernism (2009) and co-edited the collection
Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2011) and the forthcoming
Modernism and Masculinity (2014), among others.
Paul Sheehan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Macquarie University,
Sydney. He is the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (2002) and
Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence (2013). He has also recently co-edited a
special edition of Textual Practice on “The Uses of Anachronism” (2012) and published
essays on W. G. Sebald, Cormac McCarthy and Ralph Ellison, as well as several pieces
on Samuel Beckett.
Mark Steven is a graduate student in English at the University of New South Wales,
Sydney. His thesis is on the formal intersection between communism and modernist
poetics. He has published on Celan, Faulkner, Poe and on the history of cinema, and has
co-edited a book of essays, Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2012).
John Sutton is Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, Sydney, where
he was previously head of the Department of Philosophy. He is author of Philosophy
and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (1998) and co-editor of Descartes’
Natural Philosophy (2000) and of the international journal Memory Studies. Journals in
which his recent papers appear include Textual Practice, Discourse Processes, Philosophy
Compass, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences, Journal of Mental Imagery and Biological Theory. His current research
addresses social memory and collaborative cognition, point of view in imagery and
memory, embodied cognition and skilled movement and (with Evelyn B. Tribble)
cognitive history.
Evelyn B. Tribble is Professor and Donald Collie Chair of English at the University of
Otago, New Zealand. She is the author of Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page
in Early Modern England (1993), Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital
Age (with Anne Trubek, 2003), Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering
(with Nicholas Keene, 2011) and Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in
Shakespeare’s Theatre (2011). She has also published scholarly articles in Shakespeare