Virginia Woolf – The Emergent Self (Jonah Lehrer – Proust was a neuroscientist)

Volgens Jonah Lehrer stelt Virginia Woolf zich in haar boeken de volgende vraag over het menselijke bewustzijn en zijn identiteit:

“But if the mind is so evanescent, then how does the self arise? Why do we feel like more thatn just a collection of disconnected thoughts? Woolf’s revelation was that we emerge form our own fleeting interpretations of the world.” (169)

“The self is simply this subject: it is the story we tell ourselves about our experiences.” (169)

Proust was a Neuroscientist – Jonah Lehrer

In dit boek, gaat Jonah Lehrer na “how art and science might be reintegrated into an expansive critical sphere.” (197). Want

“[b]oth art and science can be useful, and both can be true. In our time, art is a necessary counterbalance to the glories and excesses of scientific reductionism, especially as they are applied to human experience. This is the artist’s purpose: to keep our reality, with all its frailties and question marks, on the agenda” (197).

Via acht case-studies (Whitman, Eliot, Escoffier, Proust, Cézanne, Stravinsky, Stein en Woolf) gaat hij na hoe fictie niet “the opposite of scientific fact” (ix) is, maar “[b]y exploring their own experiences, they expressed what no experiment could see” (xi): “what reality feels like” (x)

William Faulkner – Paris Review Interview (Issue 12, 1956)

I’ve read these books so often that I don’t always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you’d meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes. (51)

Uit: The Paris Review Interviews. Vol. II. New York, Picador. 2007

Titlepage.tv – Episode 1: All over the map

Een nieuw internet-boekenprogramma over globalisatie-literatuur.

Titlepage’s first episode: All Over The Map.
On this episode we “travel” across the world with some of the country’s best novelists. This episode features fiction that takes us to the Lower East Side of New York, a midwestern college campus, the bustling stock exchange of Shanghai, and the neon streets of Las Vegas. Our guests are: Richard Price, Colin Harrison, Susan Choi and Charles Bock.

“One of the best ways to see and understand the world is through first-class fiction” (Daniel Menaker)

Te bekijken op: http://www.viddler.com/explore/titlepage/videos/7/ 

Saul Bellow – Paris Review Interview (Issue 36, 1966)

INTERVIEWER

Your context is essentially that of the modern city, isn’t it? Is there a reason for this beyond the fact that you come out of an urban experience?

SAUL BELLOW

Well, I don’t know how I could possible separate my knowledge of life, such as it is, from the city. I could no more tell you how deeply it’s gotten into my bones than the lady who paints radium dails in the clock factory could tell you. (p. 102)

Yi-Fu Tuan – Space and Place. The perspective of Experience

“Space and place are basic components of the lived world; we take them for granted. When we think about them, however, they may assume unexpected meanings and raise questions we have not thought to ask.” (Tuan 1977: 3)

Yi-Fu Tuan’s baanbrekende boek over ruimtelijke ervaring (Space and Place 1977) onderzoekt in wezen de menselijke capaciteit tot symboliseren. Net als het dier neemt de mens de wereld waar, maar de mens “is capped by an exceptionally refined capacity for symbolization” (5). Zijn centrale vraag is de volgende: “Given the human endowment, in what ways do people attach meaning to and organize space and place?” (5) Hij merkt op dat in literatuur, filosofie, antropologie, … deze ervaringen op een complexe manier worden neergeschreven.

Rik Pinxten over teksten, onderwijs, kunst & identiteit

Rik Pinxten’s bezwaar tegen de textualisering van het onderwijs (“Het onderwijsbeleid in de rijke landen verheldert hoe we op een afstandelijke weg van kennis-is-informatie zitten. We leren over de wereld enkel uit boeken en media” (Pinxten 2003: 15)) leek me allereerst om te slaan in een verheerlijking van de “directe ervaring”. We leren volgens hem de wereld kennen via “taal en teksten, niet langer door ervaringen” (14).