Mindful Aesthetics Literature and the Science of Mind [Paperback]

In the last few decades, literary critics have increasingly drawn insights from cognitive neuroscience to deepen and clarify our understanding of literary representations of mind. This cognitive turn has been equally generative and contentious. While cognitive literary studies has reinforced how central the concept of mind is to aesthetic practice from the classical period to the present, critics have questioned its literalism and selective borrowing of scientific authority.Mindful Aestheticspresents both these perspectives as part of a broader consideration of the ongoing and vital importance of shifting concepts of mind to both literary and critical practice.

This collection contributes to the forging of a 'new interdisciplinarity,' to paraphrase Alan Richardson's recent preface to theNeural Sublime, that is more concerned with addressing how, rather than why, we should navigate the increasingly narrow gap between the humanities and the sciences.

Introduction: Between Minds
Chris Danta and Helen Groth

Section One: Theoria

Chapter 1. Psychology and Literature: Mindful Close Reading
Brian Boyd
Chapter 2. Vitalism and Theoria
Claire Colebrook
Chapter 3. Continental Drift: The Clash Between Literary Theory and Cognitive Literary Studies
Paul Sheehan
Chapter 4. Thinking with the World: Coetzee'sElizabeth Costello
Anthony Uhlmann

Section Two: Minds in History

Chapter 5. 'The brain is a book which reads itself': Cultured Brains and Reductive
Materialism from Diderot to J. J. C. Smart
Charles T. Wolfe
Chapter 6. Muted Literary Minds: James Sully, George Eliot and Psychologised
Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century
Penelope Hone
Chapter 7. The Mind as Palimpsest: Art, Dreaming and James Sully's Aesthetics of
Latency
Helen Groth
Chapter 8. The Flame's Lover: The Modernist Mind of William ClC%