NEOMFA lit course with Emily Mitchell -

Here's our reading list for Emily Mitchell's NEOMFA lit course (Fall 2010).

Click on a book cover for more info.

"The fourth culture"

The first culture: art

The second culture: science

The third culture: "scientists who communicate directly with the general public"

The fourth culture: "one that seeks to discover relationships between the humanities and the sciences."

"This fourth culture. . .will ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blur the lines that separate. It will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and will focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience. It will take a pragmatic view of the truth, and it will judge truth not by its origins but in terms of its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem or protein teach us about ourselves? How does it help up to understand who we are? What long-standing problem has it solved?"

-Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

"To understand ourselves as works of fiction..."

"New psychologies have come and gone, but our self-awareness continues to haunt our science, a reality too real to be measured. As Woolf understood, the self is a fiction that cannot be treated like a fact. Besides, to understand ourselves as works of fiction is to understand ourselves as fully as we can. 'The final belief,' Wallace Stevens once wrote, 'is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.'"

-Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Novels or scientific psychology?

"It's quite possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology."

- Noah Chomsky, via Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

"Just as a novelist creates a novel, a person creates a sense of being..."

"Just as a novelist creates a novel, a person creates a sense of being. The self is simply our work of art, created by the brain in order to make sense of its own disunity. In a world made of fragments, the self is our sole 'theme, recurring, half remembered, half foreseen.' If it didn't exist, then nothing would exist. We would be a brain full of characters, hopelessly searching for an author."

- Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

"Life is not a clock..."

"Life is not a clock, it is a cloud." — Karl Popper

(via Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist)

"I refuse to adopt any formula..."

"I refuse to adopt any formula which does not get itself clothed for me in some human figure and individual experience." — George Eliot
(via Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist)

"...but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet..."

‎"Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?" - William James (via Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist)