In continuation to the earlier talk which looked at the genealogy of mind in literature and at the crisis of literary theory, this talk will delve deeper into the core chapters and conclude the thesis on poetics after theory. The study falls under the rubric of what the critic Brian McHale has termed ‘descriptive poetics’. After introducing the core texts – Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005), Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 (1995), Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001) and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) – for analysis, I will briefly situate them in contemporary Anglo-American fiction and locate the zeitgeist that marks their occurrence around the turn of the century. The talk then goes on to explore various aspects of poetics (viz. formalist poetics, ecopoetics, biopoetics and theopoetics), drawing on a synthesis of the aesthetic form and the political form. It shows how the artifice is acutely conscious of its ideological underpinnings – and yet crafts an aesthetic that continues to raise the ethical and existential questions central to human life but which fall beyond the purview of empirical methods of inquiry. It argues, in conclusion, that in an age of dwindling faith and fading enchantment, serious literature has the potential to be transformed into secular scripture, into an ambit of meaning. It examines how contemporary prose fiction formally and metaphysically adapts in response to the mounting empirical insights into the ecology of the human mind in the age of the brain - how, in other words, it recasts poetics to suit its needs.



Keywords: poetics, literary mind, theory, metonymy