Louise Gorse

Email: c.gorse@lancaster.ac.uk

Thesis Title

Neural Postmodernism in the Works of Alasdair Gray, J.G Ballard and Ali Smith

Institution

Lancaster University

Supervisors

Professor Michael Greaney
Dr Kwasu Tembo

Research Summary

My project investigates how writers Alasdair Gray, J.G Ballard and Ali Smith engage with neuroscience and the ‘explanatory gap’: the limit of what neuroscience can empirically explain of consciousness and experience. These writers use various techniques often categorised as ‘postmodern,’ but while orthodox accounts of postmodernism frame the movement in purely literary and cultural terms (language games; media images displacing nature) my interdisciplinary approach – mixing cognitive neuroscience, literary neurocriticism, and philosophies of mind and brain – both demonstrates how literary postmodernism is reinvigorated by being read in light of neuroscience, and shows what neuroscience has to learn from literary experiments.

Research Interests

Neurocriticism, postmodernism, the explanatory gap, British fiction, consciousness.

Publications

coming soon