Erica’s Reviews > Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy > Status Update

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.