Professor Nathalia King
Vollum 305 - (503) 517-7697
nking@reed.edu
Full course for one semester. This course will explore how human consciousness is represented in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels and theory, focusing on the topics of sensation, emotion, thought, language, memory, object relations, and intersubjectivity. Working from contemporary to modernist fiction, we will examine how the syntax of relations among narrators and characters or among plots and sentences participates in the modeling of consciousness. Every literary text will be paired with texts drawn from philosophy, phenomenology, psychology, and cognitive science. Writers will include Emma Donoghue, Jennifer Egan, Samuel Beckett, Ralph Ellison, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and Henry James. Theorists will include Merleau-Ponty, William James, Freud, Lacan, Jakobson, Deleuze, and Spinoza.
“Consciousness—The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.”
–Stuart Sutherland, Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology, 1989