Serendipities

In the latest issue of the TLS, Raymond Tallis, an emeritus professor of geriatric medicine, takes to task the use of neuroscience as a new perspective in literary studies. In “The Neuroscience Delusion” Tallis warns against the tendency to use works of popular science as a basis for interdisciplinarity: in his view, critics use a vague understanding of another discipline as the basis for a new interpretation of literature. Tallis challenges neuroaesthetics as based on an overstated case for neuroscience, and argues that it reduces humanity (as well as reading and writing) to a brain function. 

His main objection to popular neuroscience is that it suggests that the whole of human experienced can be explained from processes in the brain. Instead, human experience is more than a brain - Tallis offers a transcendent alternative that reminded me a little of Jung’s collective unconscious: 

For the extraordinary thing about human beings – and what captures what is human – is that they transcend their bodies; that human experience is not solitary sentience but has a public face; it belongs to a community of minds. This is a process that has developed over many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years since hominids parted company from the monkeys.

What exactly this “community of minds” is and how it relates to literary studies, the article does not make clear. 

Read the rest of this entry »

This comment on Serendipities in the user notes at del.icio.us just made my day: 

Geek is chic, after all.

After my paper on masculinity and anger in early modern revenge tragedies at the ESSHC conference in Lissabon, I was invited to what promises to be an exciting workshop on the cultural history of the emotions in the early modern period in Umeå, Sweden this October. The call for papers is open until 15 May:

Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity Read the rest of this entry »

My system of keeping track of interesting sites is quite muddled. I use old-fashioned bookmarks in my browser; sticky notes with urls can be found lingering in the corners of my Apple Dashboard; I mail interesting links to whoever I think is interested; I stick links into WordPress posts I think I might at some point write about a subject; I use the nifty research tool Zotero to keep track of research links; and I haphazardly use del.icio.us - but that hasn’t kept me from growing a collection of tags that already looks too unwieldy to me.

If you are like me, then Wess Daniels’ Tips for using Delicious in (doctoral) research may be the thing for you. The post is full of useful tips on organizing your tabs, using the notes feature, and combining your use of del.icio.us with tumblr and DevonThink.

See also how de.icio.us is changing academic research and the del.icio.us blog itself for ideas on the use of social bookmarking in education.

h/t: Academhack