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University of Toronto Quarterly Volume 79, Number 2 /2010 

Models of Mind and Consciousness," guest edited by Marlene Goldman and Jill
Matus

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/g53502t2u178/>
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/g53502t2u178/.

 

This issue contains: 

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/3636753l40u6j675/> Introduction

Marlene Goldman, Jill Matus

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/3636753l40u6j675/?p=76127effaaa0489
dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=0

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/3636753l40u6j675/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.615

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/k83167t44p5t4m47/> Autism
Fiction: A Mirror of an Internet Decade?

Ian Hacking

Abstract: In the past decade there has been an extraordinary explosion of
literature - both fiction and non-fiction - in which autism plays a key
role. This paper surveys the very diverse genre that has resulted and
examines some of its effects on the evolution of our understanding of autism
and on our ability to talk about autistic experience. It also notes the role
of the Internet in enabling autistic people to interact with others while
avoiding the difficulties of face-to-face interaction. It proposes that the
public fascination with autistic texts mirrors the dominance of the Internet
in daily life. Both such texts and the Internet itself represent radical
changes in the horizon of communication.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/k83167t44p5t4m47/?p=76127effaaa0489
dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=1

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/k83167t44p5t4m47/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.632

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/4570464376374q65/> Navigating the
Genealogies of Trauma, Guilt, and Affect: An Interview with Ruth Leys

Ruth Leys, Marlene Goldman

Abstract: In this interview, Ruth Leys discusses her career as a historian
of science and her research on contemporary developments in the human
sciences, including Trauma: A Genealogy, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and
After, and her current work on the genealogy of experimental and theoretical
approaches to the affects from the 1960s to the present. Among the topics
she covers are her investigation of the role of imitation or mimesis in
trauma theory; why shame has replaced guilt as a dominant emotional
reference in the West; the ways in which the shift from notions of guilt to
notions of shame has involved a shift from concern about actions, or what
you do, to a concern about identity, or who you are; why the shift from
agency to identity has produced as one of its consequences the replacement
of the idea of the meaning of a person's intentions and actions by the idea
of the primacy of a person's affective experience; the significance of the
recent "turn to affect" in cultural theory; and why the new affect theorists
are committed to the view that the affect system is fundamentally
independent of intention and meaning because they view it is a material
system of the body.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/4570464376374q65/?p=76127effaaa0489
dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=2

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/4570464376374q65/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.656

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/c181422702873m23/> Narration,
Navigation, and Non-Conscious Thought: Neuroscientific and Literary
Approaches to the Thinking Body

Melba Cuddy-Keane

Abstract: Despite difficulties in finding an adequate terminology,
psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists offer empirical
evidence that the body thinks. Embodied cognition may be non-conscious
rather than conscious, but it can influence conscious activity and initiate
thought on its own. This paper works at the intersections of scientific
research and narrative studies to probe the following questions: what is the
use of cognitive functions if they are non-conscious, and how can bodily
movements be detectors for such cognition at work? What processes prompt us
to shift from one schematic organization to another, to change our patterns
of thought? Beginning with Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day and studies
of gesture's influence on learning, the paper then links neuroscientific
theory, William James's theory of 'percepts,' and novels by Henry James.
Interdisciplinary consensus suggests that the body's non-conscious
strategies for spatial navigation activate similar schema for the navigation
of mental space. Bodies may instigate shifts between way-finding strategies,
enabling cognitive change.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/c181422702873m23/?p=76127effaaa0489
dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=3

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/c181422702873m23/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.680

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/lg419555676n3226/> If 'The Body
Keeps the Score': Mapping the Dissociated Body in Trauma Narrative,
Intervention, and Theory

Allison Crawford

Abstract: Psychotherapy, a central social space for remembering, has from
its inception centred upon the healing and integrative power of putting
experience into words and narrative forms of expression. However, those who
have experienced traumatic events often lack a coherent memory for or
understanding about the trauma they have undergone; they may be haunted by
inchoate bodily sensations and 'memories' that have not been fully
integrated and cannot be put into language. Such splits in experience -
between body and mind - can provide a means to understand the way we
conceptualize memory, consciousness, and body-mind. This paper describes an
intervention that seeks to help people to make the experiences of the body
more intelligible.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/lg419555676n3226/?p=76127effaaa0489
dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=4

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/lg419555676n3226/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.702

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/v8t3tnvx7u347116/> How to Make Up
One's Mind: Reason, Passion, and Ethics in Spirit Possession

Michael Lambek

Abstract: What does it mean to know one's own mind, to make up one's mind,
or to be of two minds? The paper explores some of the assumptions Westerners
make about mind and confronts them with elements from the ethnography of
spirit possession among Malagasy speakers. It challenges the assumption that
a unified state of mind, exemplified by pure reason as opposed to passion,
is the necessary basis for sound ethical judgment and action.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/v8t3tnvx7u347116/?p=76127effaaa0489
dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=5

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/v8t3tnvx7u347116/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.720

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/d04j6un067606926/> 'Just a
singing-machine': The Making of an Automaton in George du Maurier's Trilby

Fiona Coll

Abstract: This essay argues for a re-evaluation of the eponymous heroine of
George du Maurier's 1894 bestselling novel, Trilby. Trilby's tragic end is
generally understood to come at the hands of that archetypally evil
impresario, Svengali, who purportedly mesmerizes and manipulates her into
becoming Europe's greatest singing star. However, a closer examination of
her life reveals that Trilby's fate in the novel can more properly be linked
to a lifelong dehumanization that shatters her sense of autonomous self and
reduces her to a most rudimentary version of the human. In her progression
from aspiring subject to tractable 'singing-machine,' Trilby can, in fact,
be positioned as belonging to the cultural genealogy of the automaton, a
figure that symbolizes a particular nineteenth-century concern about the
fate of human subjectivity in an increasingly rationalized, systematized
world.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/d04j6un067606926/?p=76127effaaa0489
dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=6

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/d04j6un067606926/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.742

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/w213355k56026566/> Bridging the
Past and the Future: Rethinking the Temporal Assumptions of Trauma Theory in
Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon

Julia Grandison

Abstract: As an account of the descendants of a woman who is enslaved,
tortured, and driven to assist a mass suicide in nineteenth-century
Trinidad, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon represents the
intergenerational effects of traumatic experience. In accordance with the
writings of theorists such as Cathy Caruth or Nicholas Abraham, who
emphasize the disruptive - even trans-generational - persistence of
traumatic events, this novel traces the haunting recurrence of images or
sentiments associated with traumatic experience across generations. However,
while some trauma theorists focus on the disruptiveness of traumatic memory
when it recurs in the present, Brand's novel represents moments accompanying
traumatic memories as pauses in time during which characters exercise
agency. I argue that even when Brand's characters seem to be seized by the
past, they also, often very subtly, evoke the future. Consequently, Brand's
text supports the work of Ruth Leys, E. Ann Kaplan, and Richard McNally,
which recognizes the role of psychic agency in accessing and responding to
traumatic memory.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/w213355k56026566/?p=76127effaaa0489
dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=7

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/w213355k56026566/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.764

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/e16lu20857807744/> Emotions and
Eating Behaviour: Implications for the Current Obesity Epidemic

Robert D. Levitan, Caroline Davis

Abstract: Developed countries around the world are experiencing an epidemic
of overeating and obesity with significant costs at a personal, familial,
and societal level. While most research on obesity has focused on metabolic
factors, this paper considers how emotional factors might contribute to this
problem. Two examples we address are the use of food to modify negative mood
states, also called emotional eating, and food intake as an addiction. Our
central question is what makes some individuals prone to emotional eating
and/or food addiction, while others are clearly less vulnerable in this
regard. Ultimately, we suggest how obesity research, prevention, and
treatment might address the emotional underpinnings of the current
overeating epidemic.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/e16lu20857807744/?p=76127effaaa0489
dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=8

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/e16lu20857807744/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.783

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/x32576584r03008j/> The Stomach
and Early Modern Emotion

Jan Purnis

Abstract: This essay explores the importance of the stomach in early modern
understandings and expressions of emotional experience. In it I demonstrate
how the prevalence of the word stomach and the variety of its connotations
in early modern writing - most of which have become obsolete - reflect the
much greater role assigned to the organ in feeling and thinking in the
pre-Cartesian mind-body model of the period. In addition, I argue that in
discourses and representations of complex emotion in medical texts,
treatises on the passions, and fictive literature, the stomach is a site
through which gender, ethnicity, and class hierarchies are mapped and
maintained.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/x32576584r03008j/?p=76127effaaa0489
dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=9

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/x32576584r03008j/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.800

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/fl421k7u0p280114/> Tears of Joy:
Hollywood Melodrama, Ecstasy, and Restoring Meta-Narratives of Transcendence
in Modernity

Garry Leonard

Abstract: There is critical consensus that modernity is characterized by a
lack of meta-narratives, by de-sacralization, by the sequestration of people
from the meaning contained in their life experiences, and by a crisis in
valuation. This paper argues that Hollywood melodrama compensates for these
aspects of modern life by locating the sacred within the secular. Part of
the compensatory function served by this genre is effected through the
emotional impact that melodramas have on audiences, which can be usefully
contextualized in relation to religious ecstasy. A comparative analysis of
the two films Broken Blossoms (1919) and American Beauty (1999) reveals how
the evocation of ecstasy through film can reinstate meta-narratives, present
an alternative means of valuation to capitalism, and manifest an opposite
logic to that of investment - that of sacrifice.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/fl421k7u0p280114/?p=4ed914cc3e7c437
4b688fd9383b873d6&pi=10

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/fl421k7u0p280114/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.819

 

 <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/y664216g18p8758t/> Autism,
Narrative, and Emotions: On Samuel Beckett's Murphy

Ato Quayson

Abstract: This essay explores Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy in order to
illustrate the ways in which cognitive disorders such as autism bring to the
foreground the links between illness, emotions, and narrative. Starting from
the premise that the representation of autistic spectrum disorders presents
specific problems for literary interpretation, I suggest that Murphy
represents autism both at the level of the eponymous hero's characterization
and through the discursive and rhetorical disposition of the text as a
whole. I outline the concept of a metonymic circle in order to map out the
ways in which, towards the end of the novel, the text's inherently realist
orientation is disrupted by a series of discursive transpositions between
Murphy and Mr Endon, himself a mild schizophrenic. I draw provisional
conclusions about the differences between the literary representation and
criticism of illness and the process that pertains in real-life medical
diagnosis, while also touching upon some implications for
interdisciplinarity.

 

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/y664216g18p8758t/?p=4ed914cc3e7c437
4b688fd9383b873d6&pi=11

DOI:  <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/y664216g18p8758t/>
10.3138/utq.79.2.838

 

 

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