A growing consensus hold that much of the brain’s activity is dedicated to predictive processing and optimization of the body’s responses to the environment. The flip side of this idea, however, is that the brain’s most vital work happens precisely when its predictions are not met, and it has to react to the unknown and unexpected. This perspective is one shared by many psychoanalysts, including key Object-Relations theorists D.W. Winnicott and W.R. Bion, who reached similar conclusions based on clinical work. They hypothesized that the newborn’s early negotiations with reality lay the foundations for the mature psyche’s capacity to think. Thinking, in this light, is rooted in the body, shaped by emotion, and predicated on the encounter with the new.

The novel, as its name implies, also thrives on upsetting formal expectations, and some degree of experimentalism has been part of the genre from its very inception. The question this seminar asks is whether, beyond the mere pursuit of novelty for its own sake, certain writers can be said to have used experimental form in order to expand the domain of the thinkable, or perhaps more accurately, to have opened a space for new thinking through the encounter with literary form. To ground our discussion, we will read five modern and contemporary texts at the very fringes of the novel form (The Waves by Virginia Woolf, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald, Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee, and Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman) alongside contemporary research in neuroscience (with a focus on memory, the Default Mode Network and the so-called “Bayesian” brain), as well as clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis, in order to describe the interplay of expectation and experimentalism at the literary, cognitive and biological levels.

*This course will satisfy the UD seminar requirement*

*This course will satisfy one of the courses needed for the Literature and the Mind Specialization*