Mindful Aesthetics

Chris Danta is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (2011) and the coeditor of Strong Opinions: J. M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (2011). He has also published essays in New Literary History, Angelaki, Textual Practice, Modernism/modernity, SubStance and Literature & Theology.Helen Groth is an Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (2003), Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (2013) and with Natalya Lusty, Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History (2013).

[Danta and Groth’s] collection, Mindful Aesthetics, goes out of its way to include all manner of competing views. There is an essay by the polemical evolutionary critic Brian Boyd who dismisses both psychoanalysis and behaviorism. There is a vigorous defense of theory by Claire Colebrook (and another by Paul Sheehan). There is also a critique by Anthony Uhlmann of the centrality of metaphor to understandings of embodied cognition. … The collection is quite lively.

• Introduction: Between MindsChris Danta and Helen GrothSection One: TheoriaChapter 1. Psychology and Literature: Mindful Close ReadingBrian BoydChapter 2. Vitalism and Theoria Claire ColebrookChapter 3. Continental Drift: The Clash Between Literary Theory and Cognitive Literary Studies Paul SheehanChapter 4. Thinking with the World: Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello Anthony UhlmannSection Two: Minds in HistoryChapter 5. ‘The brain is a book which reads itself’: Cultured Brains and Reductive Materialism from Diderot to J. J. C. SmartCharles T. WolfeChapter 6. Muted Literary Minds: James Sully, George Eliot and Psychologised Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century Penelope HoneChapter 7. The Mind as Palimpsest: Art, Dreaming and James Sully’s Aesthetics of LatencyHelen GrothChapter 8. The Flame’s Lover: The Modernist Mind of William Carlos WilliamsMark StevenSection Three: Contemporary Literary MindsChapter 9. ‘The Creation of Space’: Narrative Strategies, Group Agency, and Skill in Lloyd Jones’s The Book of Fame John Sutton and Evelyn TribbleChapter 10. Reproductive Aesthetics Stephen MueckeChapter 11. Distended Moments in Neuronarrative: Character Consciousness and the Cognitive Sciences in Ian McEwan’s Saturday Hannah CourtneyChapter 12. A Loose Democracy of the Skull: Characterology and NeuroscienceJulian MurphetAfterword Paul GilesIndex