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Alan Richardson
Professor of English, Boston College
Third speaker, Workshop on Literary History and the Brain
Abstract
Of Heartache and Head Injury: Minds, Brains, and the Subject of Persuasion
How might an engagement with contemporary neuroscience change the way
we do literary history? One answer, which does not involve a radical
departure from the contextualist and materialist approaches to literary
history currently in ascendance, is that reading in neuroscience can help
elicit important contexts that have long been ignored, to pose new questions
for literary historical analysis and to reopen old ones. The current
challenge to social constructionist accounts of human subjectivity presented
by brain-based models of mind, for example, along with a renewed interest
in the inherited aspects of human character or "temperament," can inspire
us to read a novel like Jane Austen's _Persuasion_ (1818) in a fundamentally
new manner. Austen's was also a time during which a dominant constructionist
approach to understanding human character--associationism--was being challenged
by a range of brain-based, organic theories of mind, particularly those
of Cabanis
and Gall, both of whom emphasized innate and heritable traits and propensities
(and whose ideas were being given a great deal of exposure just at this
time through the lectures of William Lawrence
and the public controversy they generated). Austen almost blatantly
invites us to consider the claims of these two basic approaches by presenting
us with a heroine (Anne) whose character has apparently been shaped by
a history of erotic disappointment and an anti-heroine (Louisa) whose character
is transformed in a remarkably different manner--by a severe blow to the
head. Critics have frequently taken the latter event as a clumsy
plot contrivance or even a comic one; in
fact, head injury played a significant roles in debates on the fundamental
nature of the human mind, and were frequently cited by both materialist
and orthodox writers variously arguing for corporeal
or transcendent notions of mind. Moreover, Austen frequently
depicts transient mental states in her characters, including Anne, that
seem to proceed from an implicitly embodied conception of subjectivity,
one that manifests the sorts of pervasive mind-body interaction being described
in the brain science of her time. Finally, Austen suggests at several
points in the novel, in relation both to Anne and to a minor character
(Mrs. Smith), that character may owe as much to inherited traits as to
experience, a suggestion in keeping with the growing contemporary interest
in organic, materialist accounts of mind that Austen's novel registers
in other ways as well. As literary historians, we may have overemphasized
the Lockean, constructivist aspects of literary characterization in the
early nineteenth century. Attending to the challenge to constructivist
accounts in our own historical moment may help us to newly appreciate the
complexities and contradictions of character and subject-formation as represented
in the novel of Austen's era.
Alan Richardson
Boston College
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