Configurations

The “hard problem” of consciousness—how it is that the brain, a material object, can give rise to the immaterial or subjective phenomenon we call consciousness—is, perhaps, the most vital interdisciplinary preoccupation of our age, engaging neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and other humanists. Locating aspects of consciousness outside the brain, Jonathan Kramnick’s collection of essays, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness, argues for the importance of literature in scrutinizing mind processes. A “paper mind,” for Kramnick, is “the formal construal of a world as it shows up”—on the page—“for an agent . . . coping with built or natural environments” (p. 2). In Kramnick’s view, perception is not merely shaped by, but rather takes the form of, one’s specific bodily functions and abilities (p. 7). A particular kind of “everyday formalism” and commitment to the methodologies of close reading serve as the book’s through line, connecting its disparate essays and justifying its principal metaphor (p. 13).

Kramnick does not get to his key argument, concerning perception and representation, until chapter three. First, he includes two essays, on interdisciplinarity and on form, respectively, that defend the methodology that grounds his literary analysis. With respect to interdisciplinarity, Paper Minds addresses key concerns of scientific disciplines without attempting to answer any specific questions raised by science. For Kramnick, the kind of interdisciplinarity that is productive (that expands our collective knowledge without threatening the existence of discipline-specific expertise) refuses to settle on a common object or mode of inquiry. With respect to form, Kramnick and his coauthor on this essay, Anahid Nersessian, take account of a “millennial reboot of formalism” and its numerous stances, including the influential ideas of Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Sandra Macpherson, and Caroline Levine (p. 39). Where Kramnick and Nersessian depart from each of these theorists, as well as from Marjorie Levinson, is in their insistence that the power of form, in English studies, lies in the multiplicity of its meanings and thus in the way its uses can shift from individual project to individual project.

Chapter three argues that an anti-representational model of perception—one that identifies perception not with images in the mind, but with bodies moving within specific environments—shows up in eighteenth-century literature, notably topographical or locodescriptive poetry. This model of perception is both at odds with the period’s dominant, empiricist philosophy (and conventional realism) and anticipatory of twenty-first century ecological theories of consciousness. Kramnick’s argument is most compelling when he locates within James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726) an [End Page 112] “aesthetics of perceptual presence” that depends not only upon the landscape but also upon “the motion of who is seeing” (pp. 62, 65). “Presence” is an important word for Kramnick and is connected to his anti-representational view of perception. It may just be, Kramnick argues, that literature achieves a type of “momentary” or “ideal” presence that is not “the image of the thing,” but rather “the thing itself” (p. 69). What Kramnick leaves unexplained is how this “ideal presence”—the mind momentarily “grasp[ing] the literary world” as the actual world, not as “a picture of something else”—settles with his overall commitments in Paper Minds (p. 69). Ideal presence, at least as a matter of reader response, returns us to an entirely representational (certainly a cognitive) idea of perception that does not involve movement or skillful bodies engaging environments.

Throughout the book, Kramnick’s analysis rests on clean distinctions that, in order to work, depend on a certain reductiveness. This is visible in chapter three’s overly neat contrast between Lockean-Humean empiricism and the “direct representation” theories of Lord Kames and others. The tendency shows up later (in chapter five) when Kramnick juxtaposes empiricist accounts of mental architecture—i.e., how the mind is built—with the computational models offered by present-day cognitive scientists like Jerry Fodor. Whereas empiricists rooted thought in sensate experience (namely images in the mind), cognitive scientists, according...