Introducing a special issue on neuroscience and modern fiction, this essay surveys current work on literature and brain research, outlining the issue’s structure and guiding philosophy. To map out what is at stake in such readings, the introduction offers a sustained reading of Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star , placing it into a larger social and historical context that reveals its extensive engagement with (often popular) neuroscientific source material. This reading provides an entry point into a consideration of the asymmetrical historical distribution of cognitive literary studies, especially their comparative neglect of post-1900 fiction, and sets the scene for the essays that follow.

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Neuroscience and Modern Fiction

Anchored in a reading of Jane Austen's Persuasion , this essay proposes three main claims. The first treats Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments as narrative theory and argues for its important and under-recognized influence on the development of nineteenth-century realism. The second posits a relationship between Smith's model of sympathy and nineteenth-century literary realism, offering a new term--sympathetic realism--to account for that realism's formal structure. The third argues that Persuasion demonstrates Austen's determination to wed Smithian theory to the novel form, primarily through exemplification and the strategy of making cases, labor performed by both the novel's heroine and its form.

The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness

This essay uses Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1955) to chart an intersection between biopolitics, food studies, and questions of novelistic form. First, the essay develops the argument that with the emergence of population as a key cultural concern, the Victorian novel became a biopolitical form structured by an interplay between the marriage plot and what I call the “food plot.” Following Thomas Malthus's uneasy connections between reproduction and the food supply, the nineteenth-century British novel was animated by a biopolitical tension between sexuality and appetite that took the shape of an uneven relationship between the dominant marriage plot and the subordinate food plot. However, the essay goes on to argue that Gaskell's industrial fiction reworks this dynamic to expose its limits and elisions. Through its commitment to representing working-class hunger, Gaskell's industrial fiction reshapes the relationship between the food plot and the marriage plot, giving appetite a central place in Victorian narrative but also drawing attention to the problematic ways in which marriage plots push appetite to the margins. My main test case is Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, which deploys in order to scrutinize and finally destabilize the novelistic framework that subordinates appetite to sexuality.

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Gaskell's Food Plots and the Biopolitics of the Industrial Novel

Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing

Since Aristotle, “character” has tended to be thought in dialectical conjunction with its antipode, “plot.” But these two moments – the one allegorizing the theological horizon of predestination and Totality, the other standing in for subjective particularity and the gesture of free will – are ceaselessly reabsorbed into one another in the phenomenology of reading, as what had at first appeared to be the imposition of a grand design is subsequently revealed to have been the random convergence of dissociated wills; before this latter is again unveiled as the cunning of authorial reason after all. This dialectic, out of time and itself a kind of allegory for historical experience, occludes certain determinations that have, in modernity, differentiated the concept of “character” both from itself and from its narrative situations: determinations of historicity, of form, and of media. These cannot be approached separately, but must be faced squarely in their knotted convolution. What their involvement with the given problematic suggests is that, alongside this dominant dialectic of plot and character, a minor dialectic, of critical reflexivity and the relentless auto-correction of partial syntheses internal to the concept of “character,” must also be registered. It is this latter dialectic that will be the focus of what follows, whose first part sketches a provisional theory of modern “character” as something in determinate excess of the sheerly narratological schemata with which it has tended to be thought. For the motor engine of literary and theatrical reflexivity is one that builds new characterological systems out of the remnants of the immediate past, before these again are metamorphosed into their own caricatures during the next stage of revision and generic differentiation. “Character” is situated at the very crux of this dialectic: in a perennial process of reification, as the new modes of narrativization and literary discursivity stabilize into reliable forms; but also the privileged site for reflexive modification and renewal – in something like a perfect analogue for the development of modern subjectivity, which is itself drawn into a ceaseless dialectic of substantiation, self-estrangement and sublation throughout modernity. Part two then looks to a particular text, Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1955 film Ordet, as a practical demonstration and manifesto for a new theory of character, at an obtuse angle to the

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

Neuroscience and Modern Fiction

The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness

Gaskell's Food Plots and the Biopolitics of the Industrial Novel

Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing

Character and event

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