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A radical intervention into critical debates over the status of sensation within modernist literature
Concentrating on the work of four major modernist authors - Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Samuel Beckett - this book examines the close links between modernist literature and the philosophy of mind. By historicising the qualia debate and situating it within its cultural and literary contexts, it stages interventions into a range of academic debates: over the status of 'sensations' and 'sense data' within modernist fiction, over the scope and possibility of 'neuroaesthetic' approaches to literary criticism, and over the relationship between literature, philosophy and technology in the modernist moment.
Jon Day is Lecturer in English at King's College, London.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia; 1. Cognitive Realism, Qualia and the Inward Turn; 2. What Virginia Didn't Know: Knowledge, Impressionism and the Eye; 3. What is it like to Be Leopold Bloom?; 4. Neuromodernism and the Explanatory Gap; 5. Samuel Beckett and Modernism's Narratives of Reduction; 6. Hollow Men and Chinese Rooms: Wyndham Lewis and the Will-to-Automatism; Conclusion: Modernism, Qualia, and the Narratives of Behaviourism; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Jon Day is Lecturer in English Literature 1900-1945, and Medical Humanities, Kings College London.
Summary
Concentrating on the work of four major modernist authors Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Samuel Beckett this book examines the close links between modernist literature and the philosophy of mind..
