1st Edition

Unorthodox Minds in Contemporary Fiction

Edited By Grzegorz Maziarczyk, Joanna Klara Teske Copyright 2025
260 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

260 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

260 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

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.