Narrative and Consciousness

Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain. Edited by GARYD. FIREMAN, TEDE. MCVAYJR, and OWENJ. FLANAGAN. Oxford U.P. 2003. pp. xi + 252. £61 (hbk); £21.50 (pbk). WHAT do we think of interdisciplinary conferences? I suspect that most of us would reply that they are, in principle, a Good Thing. But when we move from principle to practice, two difficulties often arise: first, people often fail to grasp the motivations and theoretical stances of those from other disciplines, and they end up talking at cross purposes; and secondly, even when one is lucky enough to gain an insight from another discipline, once one returns to one's own faculty, with its own particular approaches and teaching pressures, the whole thing soon enough gets forgotten. Similar kinds of difficulties can arise when we are grappling with collections of papers that emerge, as this collection does, from an interdisciplinary conference. The full title of the collection, one might say, tells its own story in this regard. However, as the editors make clear in their introduction, this is no reason not to persevere: like the idea that nation shall speak unto nation, it is not easy, and (in order of increasing severity) failures to understand, misunderstandings, and conflicts can easily arise. But the worst one can do is to give up. The editors use a different metaphor—the ‘insularity’ of disciplines: whilst they ‘recognize that the placement of contributions from such diverse disciplines next to one another is one volume will raise questions about the coherence of concepts and stability of language use across the chapters’, they hope that the collection ‘will contribute to the recognition of the current state of enquiry into narrative and consciousness as an archipelago—a group of related and interdependent islands—and cause us to look for the submerged (and currently unseen) structures that connect them’ (pp. 12–13). I prefer my metaphor (‘island shall speak unto island’ perhaps), because what matters is dialogue overcoming cultural and social differences, rather than natural structures revealing some submerged connection. Nevertheless, their point—in principle—is well made

Consciousness · Epistemology · Linguistics · Metaphor · Narrative · Order (exchange · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Suspect · Neuroscience, Education and Cognitive Function · Philosophy · Psychology

• In the Beginning

  Open Access•Jaime Wright•Zygon®•2018

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