CFP: New Maps of the Mind: Neuroscience, Microscopy and the Literary
Imagination
We are looking for one or two delegates to join us on a panel on
neuroscience and literary modernism at the MSA 9th Annual Conference
Geographies of Visual and Literary Culture in Long Beach, CA (1 - 4 November
2007).
Turn-of-the-century scientific inventions and discoveries created radically
new topographies of the human mind. Especially neuroscience, relying on
improved technology in the area of microscopy, suggested profoundly new ways
of looking at the nervous system, making its internal organisation and
geography visible to the human eye. Whilst the workings of the human mind
thus became more comprehensible to neuroscientists, scientific studies
simultaneously emphasized the complexity and vulnerability of the nervous
organisation, an intricate system of neuronal interdependencies where
neuronal transmission and communication among different neuron groups could
easily be interrupted and permanently damaged.
This panel aims to look at how writers of the modern period represented,
reflected on, and commented on emerging theories in turn-of-the-century
neuroscience. Its emphasis will be less on neurology, the study of damage to
the nervous system through trauma and shell shock, as on the manner in which
new images of the microscopically exposed nervous system influenced
modernist writers in re-considering writing techniques in the fist half of
the twentieth century.
Please send paper proposal (250 words) to Dr Ulrika Maude, University of
Durham (ulrika.maude_at_durham.ac.uk) and Dr Vike Martina Plock, University
College Dublin (vike.plock_at_ucd.ie) by 31 March 2007.
 
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Received on Sat Mar 03 2007 - 17:54:44 EST