Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience
Featuring a foreword by renowned neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux, The Elusive Brain is an illuminating, comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. This fascinating book explores how literature interacts with neuroscience to provide a better understanding of the brain’s relationship to the self.

Jason Tougaw surveys the work of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Siri Hustvedt, and Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay—analyzing the way they experiment with literary forms to frame new views of the immaterial experiences that compose a self. He argues that their work offers a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Building on recent scholarship, Tougaw’s evenhanded account will be an original contribution to the growing field of neuroscience and literature.
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Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience
Featuring a foreword by renowned neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux, The Elusive Brain is an illuminating, comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. This fascinating book explores how literature interacts with neuroscience to provide a better understanding of the brain’s relationship to the self.

Jason Tougaw surveys the work of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Siri Hustvedt, and Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay—analyzing the way they experiment with literary forms to frame new views of the immaterial experiences that compose a self. He argues that their work offers a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Building on recent scholarship, Tougaw’s evenhanded account will be an original contribution to the growing field of neuroscience and literature.
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Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience

Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience

Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience

Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience

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Overview

Featuring a foreword by renowned neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux, The Elusive Brain is an illuminating, comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. This fascinating book explores how literature interacts with neuroscience to provide a better understanding of the brain’s relationship to the self.

Jason Tougaw surveys the work of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Siri Hustvedt, and Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay—analyzing the way they experiment with literary forms to frame new views of the immaterial experiences that compose a self. He argues that their work offers a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Building on recent scholarship, Tougaw’s evenhanded account will be an original contribution to the growing field of neuroscience and literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780300235609
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 04/24/2018
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 288
File size: 6 MB

About the Author

Jason Tougaw is associate professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. He is the author of The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism and Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel. He blogs at californica.net.

Table of Contents

Foreword Joseph E. LeDoux ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: You Are Your Brain, You Are Not Your Brain 1

1 Before Neuromania 39

Interlude: Neurodiversity in the Age of the Brain Atlas 65

2 Brain Memoirs 74

3 Three Autistic Autobiographers 93

Interlude: If You've Met One Autistic Reviewer … 121

4 Narrating Neurological Difference 130

5 Touching Brains in the Neuronovel 156

Interlude: Interview with Maud Casey 179

6 Neurocomics and Neuroimaging 186

Epilogue: Reading Organisms in the Age of Neuroscience 228

Notes 235

Bibliography 247

Index 263

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