Status Updates From Imagining Minds: The Neuro-...

Coda = primer on disorders people can have in producing narrative --> evidence for how important narrative is for organizing human life (of course, the existence of disorders also points to other ways of being, but this is not fully acknowledged).

Tess as half conscious, sexualized. Narcissists, Angel and Alec, only see her as extension of themselves, not *her*--she reminds the man of his inability to be whole = must be annihilated herself. Psychoanalysis.

Hardy writes character as mood and resists explaining motives, character for him is temperament, or the emotional tendencies of one's mind.

Hardy makes impulse a primary mental state for characters,

Music as vibrating, resonating mind to mind in Middlemarch. Analogy for empathy.

George Eliot's fiction tries to transcend the terror of separateness as well as her own skepticism.

If memory holds the sense of the past, imagination holds the future.

Emma is a Romantic who forces the world to bend to her imagination. Mr. Knightley is an empirical realist.

George Bluestone--the novel is about the making of the hidden life of consciousness. Wrote Nivels into Film, classic work on adaptation.

"I seek to bring to consciousness how novel-imagining creates what no neuro-imaging can map--the experience of how we mind"

interested in the cognitive resonances with reading experience: tries to communicate the feeling, embodied, relational experience of reading to readers.

book operates through a principle of resonance. No one theory of mind-brain full defines the mind-brain.

Fundamental claim: "the novel is an aesthetic map to and experience of the nature of the mind-brain."

situated within field of neuroaesthetics--study the neural basis of artistic creativity and achievement.

emergence of mind-brain disciplines adn teh "minding" of the nineteenth century novel can be read as related, but that is not the line of argument she pursues in this book.

"the novel by nature can't help but write our embodied/feeling minds and minded/feeling bodies"

"No one novel tells the mind's whole story."

"We read novels for our lives--we lend their reading our own aliveness and come away form their reading more alive. It is from this position and this understanding of the novel that I write."

author-character-context-narrator create multiple "mindedness" experience. "The novel is a minded world brought to consciousness through our reading minds"

Not just talking about "reading the author's mind" but the "felt consciousness" created by the novel as a whole.

thesis: considering how Austen, Eliot, and Hardy "reveal in tehir aesthetic practices modern, post-Cartesian conceptions of the integrated mind--as cognitive, affective, embodied, and relational." Thinking about literature as the performance of the intgration of mind that cannot be done by mind-brain disciplines themselves.