A misstep in consilience: The advent of neurofiction and the scientific bias in the neurohumanities

The study of the brain is regarded by many to be the bridge that spans all disciplines. Since all intellectual pursuits begin and end in the mind, it seems logical that the cognitive sciences are deemed relevant to all knowledge and experience. I begin my dissertation by addressing the new ethos under which the cognitive sciences prevail both culturally and especially academically. In literary studies, the cognitive sciences have pervaded both the obverse and reverse sides of literature in the forms of neurofiction and the neurohumanities. To facilitate this and future studies of neurofiction, I attempt to better delineate the subgenre and explain its role in contemporary fiction by discussing the circumstances of its advent, addressing its major criticisms, and describing how it lays the foundation of a new paradigm in literary verisimilitude. I then argue against the current direction of the neurohumanities by pointing out the ways in which the neurohumanist critical modes (i.e. neurocriticism, cognitive literary criticism, and literary Darwinism) are misapplied in the study of older works of fiction, ultimately benefiting neither the natural sciences nor the humanities, and I describe how using these new critical modes in the analysis of neurofiction will prove far more effective. I conclude my dissertation by revisiting C. P. Snow's 1959 Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures,” and reevaluating the idea of consilience through our growing understanding of why the two cultures grew apart in the first place.