Description
- Abstract:
- In this dissertation, I argue that the novel was the laboratory in which emerging theories of embodied cognition developed sensible forms for nineteenth-century American audiences. While the relationship between the novel and the sciences tends to be considered through the language of transmission (from science into the novel), I contend that scientific and literary discourse function in a circuit—irreducible to each other, yet inextricable. Drawing on recent scholarship in literary phenomenology and the history of science, I position the novel as a key experimental site for transmitting and transforming the various epistemic discourses about the brain into socially legible experiences. Accordingly, Fictional Brains reads the history of the brain through the phenomenological possibilities of the novel and recontextualizes scientific concepts like force, causality, and reflexivity through the operations of narrative forms. In doing so, this project examines the literary origins of the neural subject: the now intuitive identification of one’s brain with one’s personhood, identity, and consciousness. This turn to the neural subject reveals how dimensions of the modern embodied self originates in the interstices of 19th-century neuroscientific and literary imaginations. Each chapter takes up a different “as-if” experience of the embrained self and traces its emergence to the figurative power of expressions like “cerebrations” that circulated through and transfigured scientific and novelistic discourse. Fictional Brains travels from “brain fever” as a shared conceit of 18th-century neurophysiology and sentimentalism to the morbid practices of “braining” in early African American autobiographies and the cadaver trade. It historicizes the scientific theory of “conscious reflexes” and the popular fear that consciousness had become superfluous for both the sciences of mind and the novel. Ultimately, this project situates trans-Atlantic neuroscience alongside authors like Brown, Douglass, Melville, and James. It argues that the novel trained readers to experiment with “as-if” feelings that could make sense of otherwise experientially impossible claims about the body—in effect, giving form to the contemporary neural subject and its various sexual, racial, and philosophical imaginaries.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023
Citation
Smith, Dorin,
"Fictional Brains: Reflecting on the Neural Subject in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel"
(2023).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:qzp44uc9/
