Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy

by Kay Young

Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—three great masters of the English novel—are three remarkable imagining minds. As readers of their novels, we feel ourselves to be in contact with their authorial minds and conjure the minds they create spread across the pages of their narrative worlds. In the way that we believe in and hold in mind the idea that other human beings have minds of their own do we as readers of the novel believe we are in the presence of these other minds. But how?

 

Imagining Minds explores how the novels of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy create the felt-quality of their authoring minds and of the minds they author by bringing their writing in relation to cognitive neuroscience accounts of the mind-brain, especially of William James and Antonio Damasio. It is in that relational space between the novels and theories of mind-brain that Kay Young works through her fundamental the novel writes about the nature of mind, narrates it at work, and stimulates us to know deepened experiences of consciousness in its touching of our reading minds. 

 

While, in addition to James and Damasio, Young draws on a range of theories of mind-brain generated by current research in philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis to help her understand the novel’s imagining of mind, her claim is that those disciplines cannot themselves perform the more fully integrated because embodied and emotionally stimulating mind work of the novel —mind work that prompts us as their readers to better know our own minds.

218 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2010

Reviews

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have been more into this a couple years ago, but now the analysis seems looser than what I've come to expect. Young cherry picks a variety of psychological theories to apply to Austen, Eliot, and Hardy's "integrative" theories of psychology as enacted through their narratives. She declines to evaluate truth claims of any of these theories, but rather states that each theory tells one part of the story of the mind-brain. She's going, in general, for something I really dig--an embodied psychologically-informed theory of reading. Ultimately, however, I think I've come to expect either 1. going all out and claiming one psychological theory has better truth claims than another, or (more typically and this is usually more defensible in English) 2. Historicizing psychology and thinking about Victorians may have imagined the mind-brain and how that influenced their writing (Dames does this).

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skillful linking of literature to brain science. Most liked her on intersubjectivity