Experimental Form, Experimental Thought? ACLA 2022 Seminar
Today, experiments about how humans think usually take place in a lab, allowing researchers to locate thought processes in the brain with unprecedented precision. However, writers have experimented with thinking for much longer. For instance, Virginia Woolf argued in her essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" (1940) that a new form of (women's) writing can cause a shift in how British men think and bring about peace. Between the Acts (1941) demonstrates how tone, rhythm, and diction can produce different cognitive registers—Elizabethan, Enlightenment, and Victorian—thus connecting form and cognition.