Literary Brain Workshop, Second speaker: Francis Steen
Literature and the Cognitive Revolution
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Alan Richardson
Professor of English, Boston College
 
Third speaker, Workshop on Literary History and the Brain
 
 
Abstract

Of Heartache and Head Injury: Minds, Brains, and the Subject of Persuasion

How might an engagement with contemporary neuroscience change the way we do literary history?  One answer, which does not involve a radical departure from the contextualist and materialist approaches to literary history currently in ascendance, is that reading in neuroscience can help elicit important contexts that have long been ignored, to pose new questions for literary historical analysis and to reopen old ones.  The current challenge to social constructionist accounts of human subjectivity presented by brain-based models of mind, for example, along with a renewed interest in the inherited aspects of human character or "temperament," can inspire us to read a novel like Jane Austen's _Persuasion_ (1818) in a fundamentally new manner.  Austen's was also a time during which a dominant constructionist approach to understanding human character--associationism--was being challenged by a range of brain-based, organic theories of mind, particularly those of Cabanis
and Gall, both of whom emphasized innate and heritable traits and propensities (and whose ideas were being given a great deal of exposure just at this time through the lectures of William Lawrence
and the public controversy they generated).  Austen almost blatantly invites us to consider the claims of these two basic approaches by presenting us with a heroine (Anne) whose character has apparently been shaped by a history of erotic disappointment and an anti-heroine (Louisa) whose character is transformed in a remarkably different manner--by a severe blow to the head.  Critics have frequently taken the latter event as a clumsy plot contrivance or even a comic one; in
fact, head injury played a significant roles in debates on the fundamental nature of the human mind, and were frequently cited by both materialist and orthodox writers variously arguing for corporeal
or transcendent notions of mind.  Moreover, Austen frequently depicts transient mental states in her characters, including Anne, that seem to proceed from an implicitly embodied conception of subjectivity, one that manifests the sorts of pervasive mind-body interaction being described in the brain science of her time.  Finally, Austen suggests at several points in the novel, in relation both to Anne and to a minor character (Mrs. Smith), that character may owe as much to inherited traits as to experience, a suggestion in keeping with the growing contemporary interest in organic, materialist accounts of mind that Austen's novel registers in other ways as well.  As literary historians, we may have overemphasized the Lockean, constructivist aspects of literary characterization in the early nineteenth century. Attending to the challenge to constructivist accounts in our own historical moment may help us to newly appreciate the complexities and contradictions of character and subject-formation as represented in the novel of Austen's era.

Alan Richardson
Boston College

 
Curriculum Vitae
 
 
 

 

Literary Brain Workshop, Second speaker: Francis Steen
Literature and the Cognitive Revolution
End of Program - Next menu