Biography, Autobiography and Pseudobiography in the Long Eighteenth Century

I was reading something today that made me think of the end of yesterday’s class. This is from an article by Christian T. Wolfe called “De-Ontologizing the Brain” (full version available here). The first quote that Wolfe uses is from cognitive scientist Andy Clark, the second is from mega-awesome literary critic N. Katherine Hayles:

“[The plasticity of the human brain] implies in turn a surprising degree of opportunitic openness towards the non-organic, the artificial, the technological: the biological functioning of our brain themelves ‘has always involved [using] nonbiological props and scaffolds,’ with direct consequences for brain architecture itself: ‘a youngster growing up in a medieval village in twelfth-century France would literally have different neural connections than a twenty-first century American adolescent who has spent serious time with computer games.’ In Deleuze’s terms, ‘Creating new circuits in art means creating them in the brain.’”

We got into a small discussion about “relating” to Crusoe and Bunyan, and about whether or not Wordsworth was correct in asserting that anybody could relate to Robinson Crusoe (I don’t have Wordsworth’s text, so I’m not sure exactly how he phrased it). What the passage from Wolfe highlights, for me, is the imbrication of the relating (that is, reading) subject in a technologically and historically determined mode of reading. We have radically different ways of thinking of the third person, the past tense, etc. because we have access to new representational forms (film, video games, etc.) which inform our readings and, I would guess, our sense of what it means to “relate” to a fictional construct.

Not to get all cognitive sciencey, but, for me, anyway, it’s worth thinking about the dissonance between the anti-Cartesian reading subject (i.e. me, maybe you?) and the Cartesian object being-read (Robinson Crusoe) within the frame of a brain that understands the notion of “relating” in a completely different way than its 18th C. predecessors, that in face relates to the concept of “relating” in a totally different way.

This week’s Friday Forum looks interesting:

Please join the Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group for

“Foreign Encounters with Domestic Economies”
Kim Hall, Fordham University

Keynote address for
Strange Currencies: Dynamic Economies in the Early Modern World
The Third Annual Conference of the Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group

Friday February 16th, 4 pm
Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016

Co-sponsored by the English Department of the City University of New York, Graduate Center

It will interesting to compare the role of time in Crusoe to the telescoping of time in Grace Abounding.

Both narratives have an extremely interior feel to me, despite Crusoe’s busy manipulation of the island…I find that time is hard to keep track of in Defoe just as it is in Bunyan’s book.

Hello all–welcome to Biography, Autobiography and Pseudobiography in the Long Eighteenth Century

I look forward to reading your posts.

Reading Robinson Crusoe, I was reminded of the “Enlightenment” exhibit at the British Library a few years back:

http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/enlightenment/

The exhibit brought together the idea of the classification of the world through enlightenment science with the colonial dimensions of the 18th century. As I walked through it, I found myself amazed by the taxonomic urge of early 18th century museum founders–but I mainly got the sense that the worldwide global exploration of the “age of enlightenment” was simply glorified grave robbing and curiosity collection.