In this talk, I examine how contemporary fictional narratives formally and metaphysically adapt 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. My thesis, in brief, is that a materialist theory of the mind now pervades the literary understanding of human consciousness, mind and subjectivity - especially as consciousness remains the final unsolved (and perhaps, unsolvable) frontier. Ploughing the depths of human interiority, after all, has traditionally been at the heart of literary forms. While the study is effectively a theoretical work, it falls under the rubric of what Brian McHale has termed 'descriptive poetics'.

The project began from an abiding frustration with the textual and linguistic excesses of once-dominant Theory (a catch-all term for various strands of post-structuralist, postmodernist and constructivist theories of literature and culture) which no longer commands the interpretative reverence it did in the heydays of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. In the wake of high theory's decline since the mind-1990s, compounded with the Sokal Affair, the Paul de Man fiasco, and the political quietism of relativistic jouissance, the primary intellectual framework has splintered into myriad afterlives of "post-Theory". In this study, I chart the fusion of New Formalism, Ecopoetics, New Materialism and Literary Bioethics as the dominant scaffolding for scholarly discourses in the era of the Anthropocene. I argue, therefore, that there is a 'turn' in the poetics of the literary mind after Theory. The larger thrust is the persistence of literary metaphysics in an era that threatens to reduce the 'human' into a sum of its parts, whether through neurological advancement, digital simulation of consciousness, nonconscious influences of memory, construction of phenomenological selfhood or through reshaping the theological and bioethical implications of the embodied 'soul'. Having been duly chastened by the suspicion of metanarratives and the rising politics of identity, literary poetics now recasts contentious literary universals of 'humanness' as a process in lieu of an essence. It, further, complicates the moral and political implications of the materialist theory of mind which argues for an embodied subjectivity.

After looking at some of the crucial scholarly journals (Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Poetics Today, Journal of Literary Theory, Boundary 2, PMLA, Narrative) that frame this debate, I turn to the core texts selected for closer analysis in this study, viz. 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). The study casts its attention to different aspects of poetics (viz. formalist poetics, ecopoetics, biopoetics and theopoetics) over the course of the four main chapters, drawing on a synthesis of aesthetics, science and literature. 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 and metaphysics that continues to raise the ethical and existential questions central to human life but which fall beyond the purview of empirical methods of inquiry. To repeat the opening statement, this study examines how contemporary fictional narratives formally and metaphysically adapt 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.

The talk will be divided into two seminars, the first dealing with the introductory remarks and the first half of the dissertation, while the second seminar will conclude the thesis.

Chapterisation:

Introduction - Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit: Literary Mind and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Chapter 1 - Lyric in the Age of the Brain: Poetics and Politics of Form in Ian McEwan's Saturday
Chapter 2 - The Final Frontier: Embodied Mind and the Ecopoetics of Consciousness in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2
Chapter 3 - New Materialism: Memory and the Biopoetics of Nonconscious Mind in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections
Chapter 4 - Death is the Mother of Beauty: The Theopoetic 'Soul' and Literary Bioethics in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
Conclusion - Apres la Finitude: Poetics After Theory