Panel I: Mind and Emotion in Joyce and Beckett (Monday, March 7, 9:30 – 10:20)

1.  Stacey Clemence, “Aesthetics in Disguise: A Portrait of of the Knowledge Argument”

    In this paper, I examine the Knowledge Argument (Nagel, Jackson, Lewis, van Gulick), in terms of literature and specifically Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I argue that Portrait provides a three-tiered model of experience that augments the Knowledge Argument, and implicitly, I argue in favor of the Knowledge Argument as opposed to physicalism. Overall, my paper will use Joyce’s representations of Stephen Dedalus’s consciousness to underscore the need for forging interdisciplinary connections between aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and literary and narrative theory.
    In Portrait, Stephen experiences life first in terms of the purely physical phenomena and their accompanying emotions; this is the first level of experience in the three-tiered model. Upon this base, the second level of experience, metaphor, is laid, which excites the emotions and represents a new kind of knowledge. Metaphor, however, provides only imaginative experience based on what is already contained within the mind; Stephen understands the Catholic conception of Hell only through the priest’s colorful metaphor. Metaphor, therefore, does not provide any new knowledge, only a new way of seeing knowledge; in this respect, the novel may seem to confirm the physicalist’s argument against the Knowledge Argument. But on the third tier of experience, Stephen is able to combine both physical and metaphorical experience. I argue that this is a more advanced level of knowledge, one that is culturally and personally grounded and thus cannot be described fully by physicalism. Only by reaching this level can Stephen develop an aesthetic that enables him to judge art and the effects of art as “true”; that is, on the third tier he can accept or reject new metaphors to describe experiences that he has already had.
    Joyce’s portrait of a fictional mind thus throws new light on debates surrounding the Knowledge Argument in theoretical contexts. Specifically, the depiction of Stephen’s consciousness serves as a model for how an aesthetic is formed and how that aesthetic might lead to the creation of new art and thus new knowledge.

References

Churchland, Paul M. “Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson.” The Nature of Consciousness. eds.
    Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. 571-8.
Freeman, Anthony. Consciousness: A Guide to the Debates. ABC-CLIO, Inc. OhioLink. Ohio
    State U. Lib. 20 Feb. 2005. <http://ebooks.ohiolink.edu>
Jackson, Frank. “What Mary Didn’t Know.” The Nature of Consciousness. eds. Ned Block,
    Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. 567-70.
Lewis, David. “What Experience Teaches.” The Nature of Consciousness. eds. Ned Block, Owen
    Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. 579-95.
Lodge, David. Consciousness and the Novel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. 1-91.
Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It like to Be a Bat?” The Nature of Consciousness. eds. Ned Block,
    Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. 519-28.
Van Gulick, Robert. “Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: Are We All Just Armadillos? Part I:
    Phenomenal Knowledge and Explanatory Gaps.” The Nature of Consciousness. eds. Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. 559-66.

2.  Danielle LaVaque-Manty, “Interrupting Make-Believe: Narrators’ Roles in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Watt”

Ed. S. Tan (2000) suggests that aesthetic emotions, or emotions produced by works of art, may be responses either to represented worlds—the content of images or narratives—or to artworks viewed as artifacts, i.e., artistic achievements marked by specific formal qualities such as style or structure. To the extent that emotional response to the represented world depends on a reader’s ability to engage in “make-believe,” or immerse herself imaginatively and perhaps even involuntarily in a narrative, an artifact that calls attention to itself qua artifact may increase a reader’s “A-emotional response” to the work’s formal qualities while decreasing the reader’s “R-emotional response” to its represented world. This may seem to imply a system of necessary trade-offs; it is possible, however, that the more extensive the interaction between A- and R-responses, the greater the reader’s overall “interest” in the art. Interest, according to Tan, is an emotion that motivates one to work at understanding the relationship between represented world and artifact and to gain satisfaction from resolving connections between them. In this paper I consider two novels by Samuel Beckett, Murphy and Watt, in light of Tan’s distinction between A- and R- emotional response, arguing that this distinction helps us make sense of some of Beckett’s moves to reduce or prevent the reader’s immersion in the novels’ represented worlds.
    My paper focuses special attention on how Beckett’s thematization of emotional response affects the dynamics of A- and R-response. Tan suggests that themes “are materials available in the physical and cultural world that have an emotion potential, that are already on people’s minds—ready, as it were, to be launched wrapped up in some representation. Themes, then, are the major causes of R-emotions” (121). But what kinds of emotional responses might be caused by works that (like Beckett’s) thematize emotions in a way that transforms them into problems rather than taking them as given? Murphy and Watt employ techniques that discourage complete immersion in their represented worlds, particularly through their use of unconventional narrators. Murphy’s omniscient narrator repeatedly interrupts his story in ways that call attention to the novel as artifact, while it is unclear who narrates much of Watt and why. In Murphy, the narrator’s role may be to help demystify conventional emotional scripts, while Watt’s narrative ambiguities lead to questions about the nature of thought, stories, and language itself. My analysis suggests that the A-emotional roles these narrators play do not merely support our understanding of R-emotional themes of the novels’ represented worlds, but should rather be seen as integral to the construction of the themes themselves.

References
 3.  Eric Parrish, “Behaviorist Narration in Beckett’s Murphy"

This paper explores some of the questions surrounding Beckett’s use of a “behaviorist” narrative style, as well as related problems that arise from Murphy’s emphatic adherence to mind-body dualism.  In doing so, I consider recent arguments against dualism developed within the philosophy of mind, as well as several theories of emotion.  Overall, my paper suggests the fruitfulness of an interdisciplinary approach to the links between narrative technique and consciousness representation in Beckett’s text.
    I begin with a consideration of Oatley and Johnson-Laird’s claim that there is “an innate basis for emotions in human beings, but each culture has its own cognitive evaluations that call forth emotions” (472).  This theory suggests that emotions are, to a certain extent, based on cultural scripts.  Thus, as Oatley states in Emotions: A Brief History, it is the social aspect of emotions that creates “outline scripts of commitment to particular modes of relating” (81).  By making each character a “black box,” such that the reader is generally denied knowledge of the emotional states that affect and motivate the character, Beckett demonstrates the largely unacknowledged influence of these socially-created emotional scripts in everyday interaction.  More generally, I investigate whether Beckett’s style is purely a satirical one, or whether it suggests, to some degree, a genuine distrust of emotion.  I also consider the broader rhetorical purposes of Beckett’s narrative style: is Beckett’s ultimate project one of mystification or demystification?  Similarly, is Murphy engaged in a mystification or a demystification of the self?  Is there a difference between these two states for Beckett, or does demystification ultimately lead back to mystification?

References
Panel II: Consciousness and Narration in Woolf (Monday, March 7, 10:25 – 11:18)

1.  Heather Kirn, “‘She Felt Herself Everywhere’: Representations of the Upward-Spiraling Collective Consciousness in Mrs Dalloway”

Many critical studies (e.g., Jackson and Whiteley) have explored how Mrs. Dalloway, among other texts by Virginia Woolf, deploys a revolutionary narrative style to convey a pluralistic epistemology.  According to these studies, Woolf’s fiction suggests that there are numerous perspectives on and ways of knowing about the world.  This paper seeks to build on this prior scholarship by using the paradigm of Spiral Dynamics, suggesting the relevance of that model for study of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and of Woolf’s fictional project in general.  The paper explores how Woolf’s work can be viewed as an expression of the evolving collective intelligences at work in humanity’s history and future, as explained in the theories of Don Beck. 
    Basing his work on Clare Graves’ eight levels of psychological and cultural existence, Beck created the theory of Spiral Dynamics, a paradigm that traces 100,000 years of human evolution and classifies it into periods of collective intelligences, or memes.  Each meme, otherwise thought of as a value system, is an evolution from the previous meme, and is humanity’s response—individually and collectively—to specific life conditions to which the previous meme could not fully adapt.  Each meme attempts to transcend, but still includes, the memes beneath it.  This memetic paradigm has been used to affect large-scale change in numerous sectors and societies.  Beck himself has met with Tony Blair’s Policy Unit, American inner-city educational institutions, the World Bank, and Nelson Mandela and other South African leaders.  In his own words, “a meme code is a bio-psycho-social-spiritual DNA-type script, a blue print that spreads throughout a culture, and plays out in all areas of cultural expression, forming survival codes, myths of origin, artistic forms, lifestyles, and senses of community” (Roemischer 110).  If Beck is correct, then, we should be able to see representations of collective consciousness evolving in our artistic forms—more specifically, our literature—as humanity moves into a second tier of memes, characterized by its awareness of this evolving collective consciousness and its inclusion and transcendence of the six memes of the first tier. 
    In this paper, I demonstrate  how the characters of Mrs. Dalloway each have “centers of gravity” in varying memes, and more importantly, how Woolf’s two protagonists, Clarissa and Septimus, struggle to express second-tier value systems in a society that does not function wholly on the second tier, but rather on middle memes of the first tier.  Both Septimus and Clarissa occasionally exemplify second-tiered modes of thinking, which seeks to explain the self as both a distinct entity and a blended part of a larger, compassionate whole in the greater universe.  Such second-tiered thinking also seeks to include, along with the material body, the mind and spirit in understanding life experience.  Furthermore, Woolf’s narrative style, which unites several streams—or, as she puts it, tunnels—of consciousnesses, can serve as an argument for the validity of second-tiered memetic thinking. 

References
 2.  Elizabeth Marsch, “A Mind of One’s Own: Narration and Influence in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway”

In “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf talks at length about women writers’ need to wrestle with and kill off societal influence, warning her audience that, “you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own.”  Mrs. Dalloway, however, presents a very different directive. In that novel, Woolf explores ambiguities of narrated thought representations to develop a complex web of interaction and influence among characters, the narrator, and the reader. By using a “speech-category approach” (Palmer) to examine the different kinds of thought representations employed in the novel, this paper argues that Woolf exploits ambiguously narrated thought representations at key junctures in the text. It argues further that that narrational ambiguity complements the text’s thematic focus, contributing to the articulation of a world view based on multiplicity, similarity, influence, and ultimately, intermentality.
    The paper argues that Mrs. Dalloway is not just experimental fiction, but that it also functions as (in effect) a treatise on ethical selfhood. By reading closely the multiple, simultaneous, and subtle layers of intermentality the novel requires the reader to address, as well as pointing to Woolf’s privileging of Clarissa, I argue for a more complicated understanding of Woolf’s mandate for independence.  The paper seeks to expand narratological criticism on Mrs. Dalloway that acknowledges the fluidity and dual-voicedness expressed through free indirect discourse, linking that narrative strategy with the novel’s main theme of influence as an important aspect of human consciousness.
    Accordingly, novels such as Mrs Dalloway “talk back” to the theories Woolf advances in her criticism. Woolf’s understanding of the ethical issues of influence, articulated in her essays and speeches that eschew enslavement to societal pressures, receives a more nuanced treatment in Mrs. Dalloway. By using a complex mode of free indirect discourse, Woolf explores the life of a woman who does not shun the influence of those around her, who keeps a careful balance between overbearance and solitude in her relationships, making of herself a fluid personality affected by those in proximity to her and resisting once-and-for-all self-definition. In this way, Woolf also explores the possibilities for a world in which such interconnectedness is a basic and positive human trait, a world in which it is impossible and undesirable to have a mind entirely one’s own.

References
3.  Allison Fisher, “Narrative Presence, Ascription, and Representations of Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s ‘Miss Ella’”

Recent scholarship has focused on the divergences of narrative form and aesthetics in highbrow and middlebrow fiction written during the heyday of modernism. This paper draws on ideas from narrative theory, as well as theories of consciousness and emotion, to examine how narrative voice intersects with the ascription of states of consciousness to characters in both a highbrow and a middlebrow work: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s “Miss Ella (1931)”—highbrow and middlebrow, respectively. I examine the ways in which Woolf’s use of multiple reflectors and figural narration along with a disembodied third-person narrator contribute to her project of elaborating a type of (dis)embodied social consciousness.  I then compare Woolf’s narrative strategies with Fitzgerald’s.  Fitzgerald’s alternating use of third-person and first-person narration also creates a form of intermental, social consciousness, but, whereas Woolf constructs a disembodied presence emanating from a physical body, Fitzgerald’s version of social consciousness constructs an embodied presence emanating from everywhere and nowhere within the story. 
    Mrs. Dalloway makes use of figural narration and a variety of reflectors, as well as a third-person narrator who seems completely disembodied yet somehow both inside and outside of the story world.  In contrast, “Miss Ella” centers on a southern spinster, thoroughly Victorian in her bearing, whose tale of disappointed love is ostensibly told by an unnamed first-person narrator within the story world.  Fitzgerald’s narrative presence is more complex than this, however, since at times the narrator is privy to thoughts and emotions as well as to scenes that a homodiegetic narrator would not have had access to.  The narrative presence constructs an account to explain the title character’s behavior, and in doing so constructs Miss Ella as society wishes her to be.  The narration also alternates between a narrator who ascribes emotions to characters in the story and one who seems to consciously avoid doing so. 
    Comparing and contrasting Woolf’s and Fitzgerald’s narratorial presences and their modes of consciousness ascription, I argue that both authors use their narrators to critique the society for which they seek to construct a unified social consciousness.  Further, whereas many critics have discussed Virginia Woolf’s use of narrative form to affect social critiques, critics have been largely dismissive of Zelda Fitzgerald’s narrative technique.  Hence, whereas fluctuations in narrative presence have been interpreted as deliberate and strategic in Woolf, in Fitzgerald’s work they have been viewed as a flaw and the sign of an underdeveloped writer.  By contrast, my analysis puts Fitzgerald’s narrative experiments into conversation with Woolf’s, and in so doing, begins to identify similarities in experimentation and innovation being undertaken in both middlebrow and highbrow works from the early decades of the twentieth century. 

References
Panel III: Fictional Minds: Extensions, Extrapolations, Reworkings (Monday, March 7, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m., DE 447)

1.  Maureen Traverse, “Object of Affection: Disembodied Consciousness as a Means of Understanding Human Identity”

Often, fiction aims to create as vivid a sense of “qualia,” or subjective states of conscious awareness, as possible; it thereby seeks to afford a better understanding of collective human consciousness through the examination of a single consciousness.  Thus, complementing theorists’ efforts to map out human thought processes and emotion discourse, some authors have constructed fictional narratives that engage with the philosophical problem of defining consciousness.  My own short story, “Object of Affection,” examines the limits of a disembodied consciousness while engaging with the physicalist notion of consciousness as a sum of human parts, a mere byproduct of having a physical body.  The short story thus tackles the mind/body problem by putting various philosophical notions of consciousness into conversation with one another.  In particular, it explores the implications of an objectified consciousness in relation to human interaction, using the disembodied consciousness to reflect on the objectification of human beings.
    Testing out some of the consequences of a physicalist conception of consciousness, the story entertains the possibility of “strong” functionalism, the theory that minds “‘are not defined by their material composition but rather by their activities or tendencies,’” making the actual material of the brain irrelevant and allowing the possibility that consciousness could reside within an object (qtd. in Palmer 88).  However, the story plays out this functionalist conception not to suggest that an inanimate object could possess a mind, but to explore the limitations such a mind would experience.  At the same time, the story suggests that the concept of will (and the ability to enact it) and the notion of purpose are essential features of human consciousness.   
    Further, the story traces a consciousness attached to an object as it observes the dissolution of a human relationship.  Along the way, the disembodied mind contrasts its own sense of existence for a singular purpose with the ways in which human beings justify their multifaceted and multipurposed existence.  This story builds on the tradition of object narrators as described by Christopher Flint in “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth Century Prose Fiction.”  Flint argues that the proliferation of such narratives at that time reflected growing authorial uneasiness surrounding the concept of a published story as a commodity.  While contemporary writers have different kinds of anxieties about the complications of a mass market, my story deploys an object narrator (and object-based consciousness) to explore the effects of commodification on human consciousness itself.

References
 2.  Jolie Lewis, “Butterfly Theory”

Thomas Nagel addresses the mind-body problem in his groundbreaking 1974 essay “What is it like to be a Bat?”, suggesting that it is impossible for a human to know what it is like to be a bat.   There is a subjective quality of consciousness, Nagel says, that can be understood from only one point of view – the experiencing point of view – which limits our knowledge not only of other species, but also of other humans.  Since then, other theorists have suggested that it may be equally hard to know “what it is like” to be ourselves, because the act of stopping to contemplate our experience interferes with the temporal reeling out of consciousness, and because we are given terms to understand our own experiences only through the vocabulary we acquire through others’ descriptions of their consciousness.
    Fiction has long been a vehicle through which writers can test or argue philosophical tenets, and the questions surrounding consciousness, emotions and other aspects of interiority are no exception.  Since James Joyce pioneered his stream-of-consciousness writing in the early 20th century, there have been modern novelists who have inserted their voices, via narrative, into the debates surrounding consciousness.  But beyond the potential of the novel or short story to provide a venue for deploying or testing theoretical arguments, the question remains: What does fiction have to offer to the larger academic conversation about consciousness?
    This paper draws on the theories of introspection and conscious awareness to suggest that, if we can’t truly be known by others or by ourselves, perhaps our best chance at identifying our own experience is by “recognizing” representations of consciousness that seem like our own.  The paper does not, however, seek to provide the exhaustive theoretical framework and evidence that supporting such a claim would require; instead, it aims to articulate questions about how such “recognition” might work.  Specifically, if fiction can be reasonably assumed to provide an accurate depiction of a consciousness, then how could such a “case study” be used to explore the nature of subjective experience?  To examine this question, I base my discussion on a central test case, analyzing the taxonomy of consciousness presented by John Searle in The Rediscovery of the Mind through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a portrayal of a fictional consciousness that seems particularly “right” to me.  Studying the novel allows me to consider the accuracy and relative importance of aspects of consciousness that Searle has identified, including unity, intentionality, familiarity, overflow, and mood, among others.
    This paper is not written in a classically academic style, but instead explores these issues creatively, telling the story of my pursuit of ideas while simultaneously trying to capture my own conscious experience.  Ultimately, returning to the question of ascription, or how we ascribe conscious states to ourselves and others, I consider whether Woolf better describes nuances of my subjective experience than I myself can.

References
 3.  Doug Watson, “What Is It Like? An Academic Farce”

In this cutting-edge work of literature, the old order shall be overthrown and nothing set up in its place. Beasts hitherto unimagined shall be loosed, they shall devour the mind of the reader (having already ingested that of the writer), they shall have their way with whomsoever they find. A demon wind shall arise—out of the north, perhaps—and sweep before it all that once was considered unsweepable. Malign giggling shall be heard from the mouths of creepy infants. The Lone Ranger shall not ride again, pterodactyls shall not spread their wings over cities that shall not crumble, the red rooster shall not crow at a dawn that never comes. The crowd will throw back its collective head and cry, in a unison so profound that it can only have arisen out of a moment of pure intermentality, “More!”
    Just kidding. Let’s see... What is the real plot of this farce? Well, insofar as the author knows the plot, it runs like this: A bunch of people who think too much walk into a bar. Some of these people are fiction writers, some are writers of critical theory, some are members of Prof. David Herman’s English 863 class. All of them have at one time or another entertained, each in his or her own way, questions such as: What is it like to be me? What would it be like to be someone else? Why didn’t I marry someone else? Is it possible to know another’s mind? Is it possible even to know my own mind? What is this thing we call consciousness? Do I believe in telepathy? If not, what are all these voices in my head? When I say I feel sad, what do I mean? Would I mean the same thing if I said the equivalent in Spanish? in German? in Cantonese? Genghis Khan and his brother Don—why couldn’t they keep on keepin’ on? Was it a feeling that led them to give up, or was it some more purely cognitive process, or were they simply not getting enough protein?
    Somewhere along the way, there will be, in this farce, a conversation between (perhaps) Briony Tallis and Messrs. Harré and Gillett, a conversation that will pit Briony’s intuitive and quite useful (though not yet adult) understanding of emotion against the theorists’ dreadfully convoluted and not-so-bloody useful understanding of emotion. There will also be a murder. At issue will be not merely the amazingly thin line that separates life from death but also such thorny matters as the relation between cognition and emotion and the incredible ability of this Wittgenstein fellow to exasperate all those whose misfortune it is to encounter his ideas.
    The moral of this farce may well turn out to be this: While it is true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it is even more true that the overexamined life is not even being lived. Life is so fucking* short. Why waste it developing unprovable theories about the nature of consciousness?
    Then again, what else is there to do?
    Many people have had thoughts about thinking. Many, too, have had thoughts about feelings. No small number have had feelings about thought(s), feelings about feelings, and/or thoughts and/or feelings about not thinking and/or not feeling. Many others have tried to represent some or all of the items listed above in works of fiction. Still others have had thoughts about such representations. Of all the people obliquely referred to in this paragraph, only a very small percentage have had their thoughts, feelings, and/or representations published. Of these, only a very, very small percentage would find their names on the English 863 syllabus. The number whose works were read by me is even smaller, but it is greater than the number whose works shall influence the content of the farce-to-be. This number, in turn, is infinitely greater than the projected dollar value of the hypothetical finished product.

Works to be cited? No.

Works to be consulted? Absolutely.


Panel IV: Postmodern Minds: Aspects of Interiority in Rhys, Amis, and McEwan (Wednesday, March 9, 9:30 – 11:18)

1.  Miranda S. Miller, “‘There is always the other side, always’: Searching for the Emotional Other in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea”

In Emotions: A Brief History (2004), Keith Oatley seeks to classify the emotions of contempt and hatred, noting that: “Our promptings toward such acts are not social emotions.  They are anti-social emotions” (92).  While Oatley does list contempt as one of six social emotions, he later undermines his own schematization, positing that because “the emotions of contempt and hatred seek to eliminate the other” (91), they are therefore antithetical to the legitimately social emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and love.  In this paper, by contrast, I explore the legitimately social and relational functions of hatred in Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, drawing extensively on Hegel’s interpersonal theories to modify Oatley’s narrow conception of the nature of anti-social emotions. 
    In essence, my project demonstrates that texts like Wide Sargasso Sea are not only rich for analysis in the context of emotion theory – they can also shape our overall understanding of the nature and function of emotions such as hatred.  My study thus complements feminist and postcolonial treatments of Wide Sargasso Sea, suggesting how emotion theory can yield fresh insights into the novel that would not be available if we characterized Antoinette and Rochester as dueling “others,” a la Simone de Beauvoir and Edward Said.  Drawing on Hegel’s dialectic as it is articulated in Phenomenology of Spirit, I argue that foundational facets of their emotional development prevent Antoinette and Rochester from being neatly separated into the categories of oppressor and oppressed.  Hegel states that: “Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same” (631).  Here Hegel effectively challenges the strict separation between individuals and those they attempt to cast as their others.  For Rochester and Antoinette, the rigid categories of thesis and antithesis, master and slave, being and other, simply do not have the potency to overcome their similarities – similarities that derive, in part, from the social bond they share because of their hatred and contempt for one another.  In focusing on the role of hatred in the social settings of the Caribbean and the English manor, my analysis suggests that hatred and contempt, far from having no place in the creation and maintenance of relationships, are in effect Antoinette’s and Rochester’s form of Hegelian synthesis.

References
 2.  Ann Godfrey, “Consciousness and Identity: The Social Mind and Intersubjectivity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea”

Since the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, many of Jean Rhys’s critics have been interested in the issues surrounding identity in the novel. Many feminist and postcolonial scholars have characterized the identity of the characters in the novel, particularly Antoinette, in terms of self versus other, or more specifically, victimizer versus the victimized.  As Missy Dehn Kubitschek and Carmen Wickramagamage show, however, whereas Antoinette Cosway’s identity is shaped to some extent by an oppressive socio-political ideology, she nonetheless displays some agency in enacting her own self-identification. Building on Kubitschek’s and Wickramagamage’s work, my paper resists a simple binarization of self/other and victimizer/victimized to explore aspects of Antoinette’s identity.   Specifically, I draw on theories of the social embeddedness of consciousness, as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis, to work toward a richer characterization of the forces that enable as well as constrain agency in Rhys’s novel.
      I first use Alan Palmer’s account of “the situated or embedded nature of cognition” and its relationship to identity to frame my discussion of Antoinette’s identity. Supplementing Palmer’s ideas with Lacan’s study of the mirror stage and its (mis)representation of the social self, as well as George Butte’s theory of deep intersubjectivity, I then discuss how the social mind and deep intersubjectivity play themselves out in the novel, focusing on Antoinette’s use of other characters as “mirrors” and the role of shared experiences and intermental thinking in the novel.  I use Lacanian theory to argue that to gain a broader understanding of Antoinette’s identity, we need to examine failed intersubjectivity and moments of misrepresentation or lack as crucial elements in Antoinette’s vision of self.  In this way I work toward a synthesis of cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches to the problem of identity, developing a model that may be relevant for identity studies in general as well as Rhys’s novel in particular.   

References
 3.  Nicholas Vanover, “(Dis)connected Dots: ‘Metaspection’ and Consciousness in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow”

The postmodern condition of the late twentieth century produced a plethora of experimental narrative forms in the novel. This paper examines how narrative techniques in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, a fictionalized treatment of the Holocaust and its legacies that is told in reverse, create a world where the narrator must use unique methods to ascertain his own state of mind and, by extension, make sense of his own identity. Starting from David Rosenthal’s account of introspection, which Rosenthal characterizes as high-level awareness of our own mental states, I argue that because the narrator is himself a state of mind, he must alternatively use what I call “extrospection” and “metaspection” to evaluate the situations and events that have made him who (or what) he is. In this way, Amis’s text highlights the complexity of introspective awareness, and suggests that while consciousness may, in fact, be inextricably bound to the body, it nevertheless can be analytically separated from the physical world.
    A phenomenological analysis of Amis’s narrating-I yields insight into the dynamics of the episode-by-episode (de)construction of the narrator’s identity. Thus I call the narrator “dot”: both a reversal of the phonemes in the “first” name given to the character’s identity and a metaphor for the indivisible instantaneous present, as characterized by Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative. As critic Greg Harris notes, the novel “is narrated from the perspective of a co-consciousness (and sometimes ghost conscience)” (489). If we adopt Harris’s reading of the narrator’s role in relation to the protagonist’s and analyze the scenes as “metaspective” moments, then we find the narrator has much more information than he would have us believe. Regardless of the lengths to which he goes to forget or repress all knowledge of his own atrocities, they are nevertheless always already inextricably bound to his being. By synthesizing Rosenthal’s account of introspection with a phenomenological perspective on Amis’s technique, we can investigate the means by which the narrator’s consciousness is always under construction.
    By isolating the scenes as unique temporal “metaspections,” we avail ourselves of the opportunity to explore the role of time and becoming in consciousness formation. Further, by exploring the dynamic of introspection and “metaspection” in Amis’s novel, we can illuminate the underlying structure of the text’s character-narrator. Indeed, through the portrayal of time, memories, and expectations in consciousness formation, Amis suggests that time rather than amino acids constitutes the fundamental building block of Tod T. Friendly and of identity more generally.

References
 4.  Julie O’Leary, “Theory of Minds: Focalization, Folk Psychology, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement”

“How to begin to understand this child’s mind? 
Only one theory held up.”
-- Ian McEwan, Atonement, pg 215

“This theory, or conviction, rested on the memory of a single encounter – the meeting at dusk on the bridge.”
-- Ian McEwan, Atonement, pg 219

    Alison Gopnik defines theory of mind as “the branch of cognitive science that concerns our understanding of the minds of ourselves and others” (838).  It involves, she tells us, “psychological theorizing about our ordinary, intuitive, ‘folk’ understanding of the mind” (838).  Given its concern with questions about the authority and reliability of reports of consciousness, work on theory of mind seems well-suited to analysis of the minds of both narrators and characters in fiction.  Indeed, recent work by scholars like Lisa Zunshine has started to explore the possibilities of productive synergy between narratology and theory of mind.  My paper extends this work by investigating several different ways that the concept of theory of mind can be applied, fruitfully, to narrative texts.  In this paper, I investigate three levels of concern, in Atonement, with theory of mind – the characters’ theories of one another’s minds, the reader’s theories of characters’ minds, and, finally, the implied author’s theory of his characters’ minds – and argue that Ian McEwan’s Atonement is both a celebration of and an inquiry into the ways in which we form theories of mind.
    The debate emerging in early critical work about Atonement is divided on the issue of the dissonance between the first three parts of the novel and its fourth, concluding section.  Some reviewers have “criticize[d] what they understand to be an essentially realist novel that at the end inappropriately resorts to a modish self-referentiality” (Finney 69); however, Brian Finney argues that the novel is not a realist novel, but rather “a work of fiction that is from beginning to end concerned with the making of fiction” (69).  Extending this claim, I argue that Briony’s effort – and ours – to develop a viable theory of others’ minds is the force that propels the novel forward, and that part four is an important continuation of this progression.  What the novel’s final section does – by revealing Briony as the author of the first three sections and asking, on the penultimate page, “what really happened?” – is heighten our awareness of McEwan’s use of theories of mind throughout the novel, whether via characters, readers, or the implied author.  The ultimate effect of McEwan’s metafictional project, then, is to underscore the extent to which we are all always constructing the minds of real others.
 
Preliminary Bibliography