Transformed Consciousness and the Novel

In this chapter I argue that through metaphors and the interrelated sequences we call plot, novels offer us an intimate access to others through a verbal technology for emotional connection. From an affective point of view, what might be understood as the problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996) becomes the problem of the body—the way the body has been perceived historically to variously contour western notions of what a self is—and now, through fMRI and AI—more radically. As literary fictions increasingly assimilate scientific discourses, they suggest how new power relations and new words arise in new historical contexts to transform consciousness. Neuroscientific research and the arts of story-telling expand each other’s scope as we pass beyond an old epistemological wall.