“Down to the Wire”: Probing the Cybernetic Unconscious of American Neurofiction
My research interests lie primarily in the history of the psychological sciences, and my dissertation project is focused on the interaction between neuroscience and American literature at the end of the 20th century. My project considers neurofiction—an emergent sub-genre of literary work within the post-postmodern movement—as an important moment in the history of self-consciousness in fiction, where the self-referentiality of the text extends beyond ideas about language and narrative and incorporates scientific understandings of cognition. My analysis features readings of novels by Kathy Acker, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and David Foster Wallace, whose works interrogate the growing “medicalization” and “cerebrification” of American consciousness during the Decade of the Brain, the resultant changes in the status of the author and the possible roles for fiction in a neuroculture. Drawing upon theoretical works in cybernetics, poststructural theory, and archival texts in psychological research, my project attempts to understand how American neurofiction reads the human/automata distinction made by the cognitive sciences’ experimental and clinical practices. My project recasts the poststructural “death of the subject” in neuroscientific terms, suggesting that “brainhood”— the predominant ontological concept of “personhood” at the end of the millennium—is the effect of political, legal, and financial forces which frame the activities of the psychological sciences. These works of fiction highlight the need for a neuro-ethics of conscious attention to resist cultural and biological automatisms of everyday life. My project takes a brief look at the appearance of the brain throughout the American canon in order to understand the works written at the cusp of the millennium. The hidden ethical impetus of the sub-genre—to directly address the reader and encourage a break from self-reflexive cycles—amounts to a post-postmodern extension of Barthes’s and Lyotard’s convictions about the importance of the avant-garde, bringing them through the neuro-turn and into the twenty-first century.
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