Memory In Literature: From Rousseau To Neuroscience

Description:
This book is the first to discover and probe in depth memory phenomena captured in literary works. Using literature as a laboratory for the workings of the mind, this comparative study of writers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Octavio Paz uncovers valuable material for the classification of the memory process. Such classification includes memory in its relation to emotions, the senses, environmental associations, the unconscious mind, and language. Suzanne Nalbantian brings scientific objectivity to literary criticism and, at the same time, offers scientists fresh data from literature about the workings of human memory. She discerns new connections between the intuitive expression of memory by literary subjects and neuroscientific theories about the encoding, storage, and retrieval of memory. This daring interdisciplinary work involving literature, science, and art forges a new model for dialogue between the disciplines.

Review:
'In this book, Suzanne Nalbantian boldly ushers in a new way of writing about literature. She bridges the gap between literary criticism and the neurosciences by focusing on the phenomenon of memory as a site of interdisciplinary interaction. Fully informed about the recent developments of neurosciences, this book reopens a debate initiated at the turn of the last century with James and Bergson...' - Professor Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania 'Suzanne Nalbantian's Memory in Literature is a remarkable contribution to the voluminous literature on this most popular of subjects. Her range of reference, which includes not only a dozen major novelists and poets but painters as well along with all the major players from psychology and neuroscience, is most impressive. As she moves easily between languages she achieves an overview of the subject that is linguistically unconfined' - Professor James Olney, Louisiana State University 'There is much of interest here and much to learn from this sophisticated book.' - Brain: A Journal of Neurology 'well-informed and readable book' - Michael Eskin, Arcadia

Table of Contents:
List of Plates Acknowledgements Note on the Text Introduction Memory in the Era of Dynamic Psychology: Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds Rousseau and the Romantics: Autobiographical Memory and Emotion Baudelaire, Rimbauld, and Le Cerveau: Sensory Pathways to Memory Proust and the Engram: The Trigger of the Senses Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner: Associative Memory Apollinaire, Breton, and the Surrealists: Automatism and Aleatory Memory Nin, Borges and Paz: Labyrinthine Passageways of Mind and Language The Almond and the Seahorse: Neuroscientific Queries Afterword: Images of the Artists: Dali, Dominguez and Magritte Bibliography Index

Author Biography:
SUZANNE NALBANTIAN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Long Island University. She received her PhD from Columbia University and is a permanent member of its Society of Fellows in the Humanities. A specialist in nineteenth and twentieth-century European literatures, she is the author of The Symbol of the Soul from Hoderlin to Yeats, Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, and Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin. She has also edited Anais Nin: Literary Perspectives.