Simulating Social Worlds: How James Joyce's 'The Dead' Speaks Across Historical Distance

Abstract

Our brains and our bodies are mortal, and yet somehow the cognitive processes they support give literary works the ability to speak across historical distance, reaching beyond the lifespan of any human being.  How can this be?  Employing literary theories about the reading process and neuroscientific evidence about embodied cognition, this lecture examines these processes as they are set in motion by James Joyce’s well-known story “The Dead.” Literary works make it possible for us to simulate the actions and interactions that constituted past social worlds by engaging in acts of imaginative participatory sense-making through which we interact with meanings held ready by the text.  The culminating story in Joyce’s collection Dubliners (1914), “The Dead” is a rendering of a Christmas party in early twentieth-century Dublin that invites us to participate in animating the interactions through which a social gathering is constituted.  This story provides a small-scale model of a paradox that characterizes all social worlds and that is of central interest to so-called “second-person neuroscience”–namely, that the actions of individual agents engaged in coordinated, collaborative activity create a we-subject that goes beyond and is not reducible to those acts.

This lecture is free and open to all. Registration is not required to attend in person.