Paper Minds. Litterature and the Ecology of Consciouness 

Jonathan Kramnick

University of Chicago Press

224 p.

$25.00

ISBN: 9780226573151

PRESENTATION

How do poems and novels create a sense of mind? What does literary criticism say in conversation with other disciplines that addresses problems of consciousness? In Paper Minds, Jonathan Kramnick takes up these vital questions, exploring the relations between mind and environment, the literary forms that uncover such associations, and the various fields of study that work to illuminate them.

Opening with a discussion of how literary scholarship’s particular methods can both complement and remain in tension with corresponding methods particular to the sciences, Paper Minds then turns to a series of sharply defined case studies. Ranging from eighteenth-century poetry and haptic theories of vision, to fiction and contemporary problems of consciousness, to landscapes in which all matter is sentient, to cognitive science and the rise of the novel, Kramnick’s essays are united by a central thematic authority. This unified approach of these essays shows us what distinctive knowledge that literary texts and literary criticism can contribute to discussions of perceptual consciousness, created and natural environments, and skilled engagements with the world.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Paper Minds, an Introduction

Part One: On Method and the Disciplines
1.         Are We Being Interdisciplinary Yet?
2.         Form and Explanation

with Anahid Nersessian

Part Two: Poetry and the Perception of the Environment
3.         Presence of Mind
4.         On Beauty and Being at Home

Part Three: Fictions of Mind
5.         Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel
6.         Around 2005; or, Two Novels and the Problem of Consciousness
7.         Two Kinds of Panpsychism: Margaret Cavendish and Marilynne Robinson

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

REVIEWS

"In this series of elegantly connected essays, Jonathan Kramnick excavates a kinetic, haptic, and immersive alternative to contemplative aesthetics in the eighteenth century and follows its ramifications into contemporary debates about theory of mind. How does free indirect discourse offer its own way of working through the 'hard problem' of consciousness? What can apostrophe teach us about the supposed divide between perceiving the world and acting in it? Moving deftly from locodescriptive poetry and common sense philosophy to novels about cognitive science, these astute and sometimes polemical writings broaden our understanding of what an aesthetics and ethics of everyday dwelling might be and of how literary forms provide unique insight on theories of perception."

Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago

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