Victorian Literature and Neuroscience (original) (raw)

The object of neuroscience and literary studies

An investment in the object as unquestionably self-evident and self-defining has for quite some time now been widely critiqued as a central philosophical tenet of crony capitalism in its current economic, material, social, cultural and institutional manifestations. In this article, I trace that appeal to the category of the object in order to claim its discursive presence also in recent critical tendencies in literary criticism in relation to science, specifically evolutionary psychology and its underpinning neuro- and cognitive science. I focus my explorations through the 2010–2012 debate about ‘Literary Darwinism’ in the American journal Critical Inquiry and some selected articles from a 2008 special double-issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies on ‘Beckett, Language and the Mind’, arguing that both illustrate typical, core issues and problems in the critical discourses about science and literature, specifically how both the literary criticism and the science that is drawn on to support it are nevertheless all made to be rooted in a world of an agreed liberal, political and ideological commitment to a subject assumed as an autonomous agent with a transparent consciousness and language to match.

Histories of the Brain. Towards a critical interaction of the humanities and the neurosciences

After the Decade of the Brain and at the very beginning of 21st century’s “big neuroscience” projects, if we look at the state of the art concerning the interaction between neurosciences and historical disciplines, we can trace no less than two yet consolidated (and still growing) research areas: history of neuroscience and the new "neurohistory". Despite the obvious differences, this two fields of academic expertise are both a product of the "neuro-turn" – which deserves by now to be historicized itself. This essay briefly explores the connections between the rise of plasticity both as a catalyst for the neuro-turn (especially neurohistory) and as an emergence of the "neuroscience as a technoscience" paradigm, and what its implications are for the neuroscience-informed humanities and the development of a critical history of neuroscience.

A literary neuroscience study on animality and interdisciplinary research

There are three basic mimetic representations that can be applied to the production and absorption of all forms of art. The first is biological: when we experience sensation because of external input from the bottom up (ie, light, touch, sound) or from the top down (ie, visualizations, imaginations, epiphanies), we are gathering experience and observation that becomes the inspiration for art. The production of art is a second representation, while absorption of art creates a third representation in the audience. There is a divide between the second and third representations that is the concern of the artist: what changes in the interpretation between artist and audience? Ezra Pound wrote, “by good art… I mean the art that is most precise” (Coffman 128). “Good” art is determined by the precision with which the artist intuits this divide. The artist must create their art to allow for both intentional communication of meaning and for the ambiguity that characterizes the sublime. Research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology inform this divide, giving us new understanding of how humanity experiences art and what that means for our relations to things and life. Mirror neurons famously activate “not only when a grasping action is selected and performed, but also when that action is passively viewed” (381). That is, seeing is itself mediated by feeling. Art is effective because of the brain’s ability to perform this kind of synesthetic function. When we read a novel or look at a painting, we are engaging our sensory systems in a way that is as real as when we actually see the world or perform actions. For example, Lacey et al found that the “textural metaphors (such as “a slimy man” or “a rough day”) activated the somatosensory cortex in the parietal operculum… which were previously shown to be texture selective” (417). That is, the comprehension of textural metaphor involves its representation in our tactile sense areas in the brain. How does this work in literature?