Reviewed by:

• Paper Minds: Literature and Ecology of Consciousness by Jonathan Kramnick
• Wendy Anne Lee (bio)

By the time you are reading these words, Paper Minds will already have been reviewed in several publications and you may know the basics: this is a collection of essays that (1) doubles down on literary studies and its method of close reading (see part 1: “On Method and the Disciplines,” which includes an essay co-authored by Anahid Nersessian), (2) applies philosophies of enactive perception to an “ecological” reading of Georgic poetry (see part 2: “Poetry and the Perception of the Environment”), and (3) features what David Chalmers has called the “hard problem” of consciousness, that is to say, the mystery of why phenomenal or subjective experience—the question of What it is like?—even happens. For the readers of this journal, then, I will focus on the import of the book’s third and final part, “Fictions of Mind,” to consider its potential relevance to our field.

For starters, apart from localized passages of Robinson Crusoe and a handful of pages on Sentimental Journey, little eighteenth-century fiction [End Page 275] appears in Paper Minds. And while the meta-conversations about formalism, disciplinarity, and aesthetics will attract other reviewers, my remit is to find the pay-off for the study of early fiction. It arrives at the very end of Kramnick’s book, surprisingly in a reading of Marilynne Robinson’s remarkable and much acclaimed 1980 novel, Housekeeping. Preceded by an analysis of a panpsychism advanced by Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), Kramnick’s reading of Housekeeping intensifies and refines earlier, looser claims linking consciousness, materialism, and writing. Like other theorists of narrative—in particular, those (including Ann Banfield, D.A. Miller, Blakey Vermeule, and Frances Ferguson) who elaborate the special powers of free indirect style—Kramnick roots much of his textual analysis in point of view, fiction’s means of “putting you in the position to be the subject of [another] creature’s perception” (144) and thereby to experience, paraphrasing Robinson, “the feeling of reality on another nervous system” (151). Notably, then, his analysis moves past grammatical position (“Ruth’s first person at once expands in a watery thinness and mutes as it is no longer just hers”) to take in the virtuosic ways that focalized narrative can slip into a cosmic impersonality, shifting from “a view from one perspective” to “a view from no perspective” such that “phenomenal experience seems at once to lace over every object and belong almost to no one” (155). I can see how Kramnick’s account of Robinson’s ability to “tamp down singular features of personality while at the same time ... open up a vantage onto the strange, aqueous world in which the novel is set” might spur other insights about, say, Bunyan, Inchbald, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft (152).

Embedded in Kramnick’s valedictory nod to fictional language is the claim that Housekeeping features “a simultaneous attention to experience and disregard for the singularity of any character in whom such experience might reside” (152). The articulation here of a narrative project to attend closely to consciousness and, at the same time, to deindividualize its phe nomenology conveys a charge of ethical excitement that surpasses milder claims for the discernment of a quantum universe or an “injunction to attend to the forms experience takes” or the particularities of haptic experience (145). Indeed, the book’s most vivid passage of literary interpretation expresses an ontological commitment that diverges (for this reader, happily) from its earlier account of literature’s “ready-to-hand” “affordances.” In an account of Housekeeping’s “conspiracy of the senses with the world,” Kramnick attaches in the end to “a dissolving or dissolution, as if the indifference between one’s own sentience and the sentience of everything else meant a kind of final and permanent un knitting of the person” (155).

All this is to point out that it is through his engagement with Robinson’s fiction and ideas about fiction that Kramnick arrives at his most sharpened formulations...

审核人：

• 纸的思想：意识的文学和生态学乔纳森·克拉姆尼克（Jonathan Kramnick）
• 温迪·安妮·李（生物）

到您阅读这些单词时，Paper Mind已经在数个出版物上进行了复习，并且您可能已经知道一些基础知识：这是一本论文集，其内容（1）加倍了文学研究及其近距离阅读的方法（请参阅第1部分）。 1：“论方法与学科”，其中包括由Anahid Nersessian合着的一篇论文，（2）将积极知觉的哲学应用于对格鲁吉亚诗歌的“生态学”解读（见第2部分：“诗歌与人类的知觉”） （环境）），（3）以大卫·查默斯（David Chalmers）所谓的意识的“难题”为特征，这就是为什么现象或主观经验的奥秘-关于它是什么样的问题？-甚至发生。因此，对于本期刊的读者而言，我将重点介绍本书第三部分和最后一部分“心灵小说”的含义，以考虑其与我们领域的潜在相关性。

对于初学者来说，除了局部通道鲁滨逊和网页上的一把剑雪浮生，小十八世纪的小说[尾页275]出现在论文的头脑。尽管关于形式主义，学科性和美学的元对话将吸引其他评论家，但我的职责是为早期小说的研究找到回报。它到达了克拉姆尼克的书的最后，令人惊讶地是读了玛丽莲·鲁滨逊（Marilynne Robinson）那本引人注目的，广受好评的1980年小说《看家》（Housekeeping）。在对玛格丽特·卡文迪许（Margaret Cavendish）的《炽热的世界》（The Blazing World，1666）提出的一种泛精神主义进行分析之前，克拉姆尼克读过《管家》加强和完善了较早的，松散的主张，将意识，唯物主义和写作联系在一起。像其他叙事理论家一样，尤其是那些阐述自由间接风格特殊力量的人（包括安·班菲尔德，达·米勒，布莱克·维米尔和弗朗西斯·弗格森），克拉姆尼克将他的大部分文本分析植根于观点，小说的手段“使您处于[另一种]生物的感知对象中”（144），从而用鲁宾逊的话来体验“另一种神经系统的现实感”（151）。值得注意的是，随后，他的分析超越了语法立场（“露丝的第一个人立刻变得像水一样稀薄，变得沉默寡言，因为不再只是她的人”）采取了聚焦于叙事的虚假方法，从而陷入了宇宙的非人格化，从“从一个角度的观点”转变为“从一个角度的观点”，以至于“现象经验似乎立刻笼罩着每个物体，几乎不属于任何人”（155）。我可以看到克拉姆尼克对鲁滨逊的能力的描述“在夯实人格的独特特征的同时...打开了小说集所处的陌生的，充满水波的世界的有利条件”，这可能会激发人们对诸如此类的其他见解。 Bunyan，Inchbald，Rousseau和Wollstonecraft（152）。

克拉姆尼克（Kramnick）在虚构语言中的点头表示，内务管理的主张的特点是“同时注意经验，而忽略这种经验可能会居住在其中的任何角色的奇异性”（152）。这里叙述的一个叙述项目要与意识紧密相关，同时要去个体化其现象学，这表达了一种道德兴奋的冲动，其超越了对量子宇宙的辨别或“要求遵守形式的禁令”的温和主张。体验”或触觉体验的特殊性（145）。确实，这本书最生动的文学阐释表达了一种本体论上的承诺，这与读者对文学“现成的”“能力”的早期描述（对这个读者很高兴）有所不同。在管家帐户中最后，克拉姆尼克将“感官与世界的合谋”归结为“一种消散或消解，仿佛一个人的情感与其他一切事物的情感之间的冷漠，意味着一种最终的，永久性的人的编织”（155）。

所有这些都指出，克拉姆尼克通过他对鲁滨逊小说和小说观念的参与，得出了他最敏锐的表述。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。