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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/.
This issue contains:
Marlene Goldman, Jill Matus
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/3636753l40u6j675/?p=76127effaaa0489dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=0
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.615
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=76127effaaa0489dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=1
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.632
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=76127effaaa0489dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=2
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.656
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=76127effaaa0489dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=3
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.680
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=76127effaaa0489dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=4
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.702
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=76127effaaa0489dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=5
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.720
‘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=76127effaaa0489dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=6
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.742
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=76127effaaa0489dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=7
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.764
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=76127effaaa0489dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=8
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.783
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=76127effaaa0489dac92538ae5f13f3b&pi=9
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.800
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=4ed914cc3e7c4374b688fd9383b873d6&pi=10
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.819
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=4ed914cc3e7c4374b688fd9383b873d6&pi=11
DOI: 10.3138/utq.79.2.838
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University of Toronto Quarterly
Acclaimed as one of the finest journals focused on the humanities, University of Toronto Quarterly is filled with serious, probing, and vigorously researched articles spanning a wide range of subjects in the humanities. Often the best insights in one field of knowledge come through cross-fertilization, where authors can apply another discipline’s ideas, concepts, and paradigms to their own disciplines. UTQ is not a journal where one philosopher speaks to another, but a place where a philosopher can speak to specialists and general readers in many other fields. This interdisciplinary approach provides a depth and quality to the journal that attracts both general readers and specialists from across the humanities.
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posted by T Hawkins, University of Toronto Press - Journals