The Novel and Neuroscience from Dostoevsky to Ishiguro explores how affective neuroscience illuminates the emotional and ethical impact of eight novels written between 1864 and 2018, indicating how Freud's provisional ideas in psychology are now being placed on an organic foundation. An emerging new language describes the brain and body's primary-process powers now influencing the practices of literary theory, verifying the novel's importance for self and cultural understanding.
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: A Short Neuro-Lit Glossary.- Chapter 3: De-sexualizing the Underground and Tolstoy's Dangerous Music .- Chapter 4: Extended Consciousness and the Wisdom Paradox: Eliot's and Dostoevsky's Last Novels.- Chapter 5: Eviscerating Memory in Kafka's The Trial.- Chapter 6: Words on the page, emotions in the gut: Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being.- Chapter 7: Marking Memory in Flesh : Toni Morrison's Beloved.- Chapter 8: Artificial Feelings in Klara and the Sun.- Chapter 9: Conclusion: Transformed Consciousness and the Novel.
Nina Pelikan Straus is Professor Emeritus at Purchase College SUNY, USA, and author of Dostoevsky and the Woman Question and articles on Tolstoy, Hardy, Bronte, Flaubert, Conrad, Kafka, Kundera, Derrida, Lacan, Sebald, Murakami, and Tokarczuk.
