1st Edition
Unorthodox Minds in Contemporary Fiction
Unorthodox Minds in Contemporary Fiction seeks to provide an overview of the ways in which broadly understood contemporary fiction envisions, explores and engenders minds going beyond the classical models. The opening essay discusses the complex relationships between such innovative concepts of the mind and experimental techniques for presenting mentality. The chapters which follow focus on (dis)embodied and/or extended mind, virtuality of avatar minds, intermental thought of reader communities, the capability of artificial intelligence (and humans) for genuine selfless love, the interplay between technology and affect in posthuman consciousness. The books under discussion include Murmur by Will Eaves, The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker and Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan. A piece of conceptual fiction by Steve Tomasula, one of the most innovative American novelists of our times, exploring the human mind’s alleged power to transcend its biological limits, complements these scholarly inquiries.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Formal Experiments and Innovative Models of the Mind in Contemporary Fiction: An Introduction
Grzegorz Maziarczyk and Joanna Klara Teske
1.Towards an Account of Interactive Narrative Time
Isabelle Wentworth
2.Back and Forth: The Dynamics of Memory in Gabriel Josipovici’s After and The Cemetery in Barnes
Magdalena Sawa
3.Memory Works: The Enactivist Approach to the Fragmented Mind in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates
Daria Baryshnikova
4.“I am a being but not a body”: The Representations of (Dis)embodiment in Murmur by Will Eaves
Patrycja Podgajna
5.The Avatar Dynamic: Cognitive Conditions in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
Nathan D. Frank
6.Casting a Digital Shadow: Juan José Millás and Current Human Experience
Michal Tal
7. Happy New World: Consciousness, Technology and Affect in Nicola Barker's H(A)PPY
Grzegorz Maziarczyk
8. Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro: Artificial Intelligence and Genuine Love
Joanna Klara Teske
9.Networks of Minds in David Foster Wallace’s Online Communities
Gabriela Tucan
10.Clay (A Sci-Fi Parable (with at Least 2 Endings))
Steve Tomasula
Index
Biography
Grzegorz Maziarczyk is Director of the Institute of Literary Studies at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. His main research interests include textual materiality, multimodal storytelling, digital narrativity, fictional minds and dystopia. He is the author of The Narratee in Contemporary British Fiction (2005) and The Novel as Book: Textual Materiality in Contemporary Fiction in English (2013).
Joanna Klara Teske is Associate Professor in the Institute of Literary Studies at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. She is the author of Philosophy in Fiction (2008), Contradictions in Art: The Case of Postmodern Fiction (2016) and articles on contemporary English-language fiction and cognitive theory of art. She is currently working on projects concerning metamodernist fiction and narrative representations of mentality.
