An Example of a "Learning Process" Journal (using the 2 colored box format)

Book: Consciousness and the Novel by David Lodge

Source: Harvard University Press 2002

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 1 Consciousness and the Novel

• Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained) "Human consciousness ... can be best understood as the operation of a ... virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain ..." [p. 1]
• Francis Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis) "... 'You', your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules ..." [p. 2]
• The above two books exemplify a challenge to the "idea of human nature enshrined in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition" and "an almost equally strong challenge to the humanist or Enlightenment idea of a man on which the presentation of character in the novel is based." [p. 2]
• Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works) the mind is "a machine, nothing but the on-board computer of a robot made of tissue" [p. 9]
• "... literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have. ... The novel is arguably man's most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time." [p. 10]
• Noam Chomsky: "It is quite possible ... that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology." [p. 10]
• "Works of literature describe ... the dense specificity of personal experience, which is always unique." [p. 10-11]
• "Events are denser than any possible scientific description." [p. 13]
• "If the self is a fiction, it may be the supreme fiction, the greatest achievement of human consciousness, the one that makes us human." [p. 16]
• "... such debates are most intense when one form of knowledge lays claim to the exclusive title to all knowledge. ... Literature constitutes a kind of knowledge about consciousness which is complementary to scientific knowledge." [p. 16]
• " ... the myth of Pygmalion ..." [p. 25]
• "... we read novels ... because they give us a convincing sense of what the consciousness of people other than ourselves is like." [p. 30]
• "... a novel like A la recherche du temps perdu (A Remembrance of Times Past by Proust), in which the effort to fix experience in words is essentially what the book is about." [p. 34]
• "First-person, present-tense narration is used in certain kinds of stream-of-consciousness fiction" [p. 35]
• Mention is made of "Ian Watt ... classic study ... The Rise of the Novel"
• "Of course other minds and hearts are not totally opaque - social life would be impossible if they were. But they are not absolutely transparent either. People may tell us what they are thinking and feeling, but we have to assess whether they are telling us the truth or the whole truth, using other evidence and 'folk psychology' to guide us." [p. 41]
• "... in a sense all novels are about the difference between appearance and reality ... and this is very much connected with the ability or indeed the propensity of human beings to hide their real thoughts and feelings, to project versions of themselves that are partial or misleading, and to deceive each other." [p. 42]
• "Jane Austen: ... The real focus of interest is on what the characters feel and think, not what they do." [p. 46]
• "The classic Victorian novel, perhaps most perfectly exemplified by George Eliot's Middlemarch, usually told its story from several points of view ..." [p. 49]
• "There is a kind of underlying confidence in this fiction that reality can be known, that the truth about human affairs can be told, and that such knowledge and truth can be shared collectively. As the century drew to its close, however, this epistemological confidence declined. ... Increasingly, as we move into the modern period, the emphasis falls on the construction of the real within the individual's consciousness ..." [p. 49]
• "Henry James is a crucial figure in the transition from classic to modern fiction, and 'consciousness' is one of the key words ..." [p. 50]
• Henry James: "Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, catching every air-borne particle in its tissue." [p. 51]
• Virginia Woolf: "The mind receives a myriad of impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms." [p. 51]
• "He [James Joyce] came as close to representing the phenomenon of consciousness as perhaps any writer has ever done in the history of literature." [p. 56]
• "the work of Freud ... The idea of subconscious or unconscious motivation, of suppressed or rrepressed drives and desires which lie behind overt behavior, and which may be traced in the jumbled and enigmatic narratives of dreams, was immensely stimulating to literary imaginations, ..." [p. 58]
• "... every time we try to describe the conscious self we misrepresent it because we are trying to fix something that is always changing ..." [p. 91]

I would think that the two books would equally well challenge the idea of human nature enshrined in the Muslim religous tradition.

Chomsky's quote, which I have not seen before, coincides closely with an idea I have had since my first study leave at Southern Cross University in 1989, when I remember suggesting that I would like to try offering a psychology course based on half a dozen novels, or a few books of short stories. I really should try this!

Reference to the "myth of Pygmalion" drives home to me the fact that although I am very familiar with the term, I actually do not recall ever reading about this story. Now to see if I can find more, using Google.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/d/a/dal188/summpag.html

I must try to find a copy of the Ian Watt book, The Rise of the Novel.

I must read Middlemarch!

The collage of quotes makes a strong case for literature as the best (indeed only) approach to describing consciousness.

Psychology Index