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Mindful Aesthetics
Literature and the Science of Mind
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In the last few decades, literary critics have increasingly drawn insights from cognitive neuroscience to deepen and clarify our understanding of literary representations of mind. This cognitive turn has been equally generative and contentious. While cognitive literary studies has reinforced how central the concept of mind is to aesthetic practice from the classical period to the present, critics have questioned its literalism and selective borrowing of scientific authority. Mindful Aesthetics presents both these perspectives as part of a broader consideration of the ongoing and vital importance of shifting concepts of mind to both literary and critical practice.
This collection contributes to the forging of a ‘new interdisciplinarity,’ to paraphrase Alan Richardson’s recent preface to the Neural Sublime, that is more concerned with addressing how, rather than why, we should navigate the increasingly narrow gap between the humanities and the sciences.
Review
“[Danta and Groth’s] collection, Mindful Aesthetics, goes out of its way to include all manner of competing views. There is an essay by the polemical evolutionary critic Brian Boyd who dismisses both psychoanalysis and behaviorism. There is a vigorous defense of theory by Claire Colebrook (and another by Paul Sheehan). There is also a critique by Anthony Uhlmann of the centrality of metaphor to understandings of embodied cognition. … The collection is quite lively.”
— Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College, USA
“[No] fewer than three important essay collections came out during the same period [2013], beginning with … Cognitive Literary Studies. … Two more specialized, but still wide-ranging, collections appeared later in the year: Mark Bruhn and Donald Wehrs’s Cognition, Literature, and History, the first book of essays devoted to cognitive historicism, and Chris Danta and Helen Groth’s Mindful Aesthetics, featuring an extended dialogue among cognitive researchers and critical observers of the field. Taken together, the lists of contributors to these three collections (which show surprisingly little overlap) demonstrate the broad appeal of cognitive literary studies, featuring scholars stationed not only in departments of English and American literature, but also in Spanish, French, German, theater, women’s studies, comparative literature, media and film studies, and philosophy departments as well.”
— Alan Richardson, Boston College, USA (MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2015)
“More than fifty years have elapsed since CP Snow delivered his famous lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’ in 1959, which identified an increasing gulf between scientific and literary disciplines. … This collection of essays … reflects on the impact of cognitive science on literature. … The collection’s most successful historicizing essays are not framed as critiques of science from a humanities perspective, but transcend stark disciplinary divisions by drawing out mutual intersections. … This emphasis on the openness and plasticity of cerebral functioning gestures towards the ways in which corporeal matter is permeated and shaped by theoretical abstractions. Contemporary Western society might be carved into neat opposing camps but biology exists in history: nature is entangled with culture whether we like it or not.”
— Hannah Proctor, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK (English, Volume 64 Issue 245 Summer 2015)
About the Author
Chris Danta is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (2011) and the coeditor of Strong Opinions: J. M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (2011). He has also published essays inNew Literary History, Angelaki, Textual Practice, Modernism/modernity, SubStance and Literature & Theology.
Helen Groth is an Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of 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).