Abstract
Groes discusses the recent ‘neurological turn’, in which phenomena, events, and characteristics are explained by insights provided by neuroscience, in relation to Crace’s work. The belief that human experiences and consciousness can be wholly explained through the working of the human brain has been challenged by literature, either through a wholesale rejection of neuroscience or through a sceptical interest. Crace’s early work refuses to conflate experience solely with the brain. Quarantine and Being Dead suggest that the material nature of the human body and external influences are equally important as the brain in shaping human behaviour and perception. Crace foregrounds culture and contexts as productive of human consciousness: thinking is demonstrated as an embodied and extended phenomenon in Crace’s novels.
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Notes
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The idea of the ‘neuronfiction’ arose around the mid-noughties, when novelists such as Richard Powers and Ian McEwan explicitly addressed neurological processes in human behaviour, conceptions of the self, and in pathologies in their work. The concept matured in the second decade of the twenty-first century when critics and scholars mapped out concepts, characteristics, and methodologies of neurofiction. In 2008, Charles B. Harris spoke of ‘neurological realism’ in his analysis of Richard Powers The Echo Maker, and in 2012 Jason Tougaw spotted the ‘brain memoir’ trend. See Harris (2009) and Tougaw (2012).
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Begley (2003).
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Groes, S. (2018). 9 Thinking Crace: Consciousness and Cognition in Jim Crace’s Quarantine and Being Dead. In: Shaw, K., Aughterson, K. (eds) Jim Crace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94093-9_10
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