Jason Tougaw
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780300221176
- eISBN:
- 9780300235609
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300221176.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The Elusive Brain is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. Jason Tougaw analyzes the works of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple ...
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The Elusive Brain is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. Jason Tougaw analyzes the works of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Maud Casey, Jonathan Lethem, Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, and Siri Hustvedt, Ellen Forney, and David B.—arguing that their experiments with literary form offer a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Tougaw surveys memoirs about life with autism, epilepsy manic depression, or brain injury; revisionist mystery novels; and graphic narratives that engage neuroscience. The book argues that these works offer insight about how it feels and what it means to live with a brain whose role in the making of self or consciousness is far from fully understood. Brain memoirs and neuronovels revel in the mysteries of the explanatory gap between brain physiology and mental experience. In the process, these literary works offer an antidote to polarizing and outmoded debates about the “cerebral subject,” whether we are our brains (or not our brains). Rather than engaging in abstract philosophical debate, these literary works explore questions about neurodiversity politics and the stakes of rapidly advancing brain research for people whose experience represent what critic Ralph Savarese calls “all manner of neurologies.” Less
The Elusive Brain is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. Jason Tougaw analyzes the works of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Maud Casey, Jonathan Lethem, Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, and Siri Hustvedt, Ellen Forney, and David B.—arguing that their experiments with literary form offer a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Tougaw surveys memoirs about life with autism, epilepsy manic depression, or brain injury; revisionist mystery novels; and graphic narratives that engage neuroscience. The book argues that these works offer insight about how it feels and what it means to live with a brain whose role in the making of self or consciousness is far from fully understood. Brain memoirs and neuronovels revel in the mysteries of the explanatory gap between brain physiology and mental experience. In the process, these literary works offer an antidote to polarizing and outmoded debates about the “cerebral subject,” whether we are our brains (or not our brains). Rather than engaging in abstract philosophical debate, these literary works explore questions about neurodiversity politics and the stakes of rapidly advancing brain research for people whose experience represent what critic Ralph Savarese calls “all manner of neurologies.”
Jason Tougaw
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780300221176
- eISBN:
- 9780300235609
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300221176.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In this chapter, Tougaw examines novels by Christopher Haddon, Jonathan Lethem, and Tom McCarthy, all of which narrate neurological difference in fiction, translating traits associated with autism, ...
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In this chapter, Tougaw examines novels by Christopher Haddon, Jonathan Lethem, and Tom McCarthy, all of which narrate neurological difference in fiction, translating traits associated with autism, Tourette’s, PTSD, amnesia, or Capgras into a narrative voice. As an aesthetic strategy, narrating neurological difference in fiction is fraught, likely to reinforce cognitive norms in some ways and challenge them in others. The chapter argues that the ethical questions raised by appropriating neurodivergent experience for the sake of aesthetic experiment are unresolvable, but important to consider. What we can—and should—learn from these novels is that the affordances and misfittings involved in the representation shape understandings the circulation of ideas about neurological difference. We won’t understand the potential of neurodiversity politics or the implications of neurodivergent identities unless we attend to the specific representational techniques that construct the cultural niches that make debates about the brain possible and necessary.Less
In this chapter, Tougaw examines novels by Christopher Haddon, Jonathan Lethem, and Tom McCarthy, all of which narrate neurological difference in fiction, translating traits associated with autism, Tourette’s, PTSD, amnesia, or Capgras into a narrative voice. As an aesthetic strategy, narrating neurological difference in fiction is fraught, likely to reinforce cognitive norms in some ways and challenge them in others. The chapter argues that the ethical questions raised by appropriating neurodivergent experience for the sake of aesthetic experiment are unresolvable, but important to consider. What we can—and should—learn from these novels is that the affordances and misfittings involved in the representation shape understandings the circulation of ideas about neurological difference. We won’t understand the potential of neurodiversity politics or the implications of neurodivergent identities unless we attend to the specific representational techniques that construct the cultural niches that make debates about the brain possible and necessary.
Jason Tougaw
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780300221176
- eISBN:
- 9780300235609
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300221176.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In contemporary fiction, the appearance of a physical brain leads swiftly to explicit focus on questions that proliferate from the explanatory gap. Writers don’t use the term, but they explore and ...
More
In contemporary fiction, the appearance of a physical brain leads swiftly to explicit focus on questions that proliferate from the explanatory gap. Writers don’t use the term, but they explore and contextualize its implications in considerable detail. In this chapter, Tougaw examine the portrayal of those three pounds of intricately designed flesh in five novels: Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (1999), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006), Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American (2009), John Wray’s Lowboy (2010), and Maud Casey’s The Man Who Walked Away (2014). These novels are representative of a common literary phenomenon: the dramatization of a fantasy whereby touching brains may reveal the stuff of which self is made. In each of these novels, the representation of physical brains provokes questions about the relationship between physiology and the self that become central to narrative closure.Less
In contemporary fiction, the appearance of a physical brain leads swiftly to explicit focus on questions that proliferate from the explanatory gap. Writers don’t use the term, but they explore and contextualize its implications in considerable detail. In this chapter, Tougaw examine the portrayal of those three pounds of intricately designed flesh in five novels: Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (1999), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006), Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American (2009), John Wray’s Lowboy (2010), and Maud Casey’s The Man Who Walked Away (2014). These novels are representative of a common literary phenomenon: the dramatization of a fantasy whereby touching brains may reveal the stuff of which self is made. In each of these novels, the representation of physical brains provokes questions about the relationship between physiology and the self that become central to narrative closure.
