Philosophies of unselfing, found in thinkers from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Iris Murdoch to Simone Weil and Elaine Scarry, and established in traditions such as Daoism and Buddhism, have long sought to understand the aesthetic and ethical value of diminishing the relentless claims of the self. Cognitive and affective science has focused recent attentions to related notions of shared attention, the physiology of the self, and the workings of the default mode network. This panel investigates the philosophy, cognition, affect, and art of unselfing through papers on poetic selfhood, narrative experiments, and the act of reading itself. The presentations foreground the ethics of unselfing in various contexts by examining concepts such as shared attention, self-sufficiency, empathy, and shame in literature.
Donald R. Wehrs’s presentation, “Shared Attention, Anticipatory Cognition, Literary Singularity, and the Ethics of Unselfing,” uses recent research in cognitive and affect studies to show how the ethical “unselfing” that responsiveness to literary singularity elicits both reflects and refines entwinements of shared attention and anticipatory cognition. The paper demonstrates how self-formation involves constant “dialogical” interaction with others, both within and outside intentional consciousness, but also makes self-formation, paradoxically, a process of constant “unselfing.” Wehrs’s presentation shows how inquiry into shared attention and anticipatory cognition informs and largely dovetails with currents in recent literary theory. These recent literary theorists (Felski, Attridge, Serpell, Macé, Citron) link appreciative attentiveness (to the nuances of literary art) to an ethical “unselfing” that gives hospitable welcome to literary singularity and its reconfiguring agency. Wehrs argues that this discussion of “unselfing” illuminates both what literary art does and why it matters to the study of the humanities today.
In “The Crisis of Individualism: The Jameses and Their Unselfing Experiments, ” Wenwen Guo examines the philosophical and literary experiments of unselfing by Henry James, Sr., William James, and Henry James. Guo argues that the tendency to “introspection,” as identified by Henry in his 1879 essay on Hawthorne, is such a potent cultural practice that, fueled by the Transcendentalist injunction to find “in oneself...the law of all nature,” gives rise to mental and physical crises in the second half of the nineteenth century. Guo’s presentation relies on mid-20th-century psychological and cognitive theories developed by Silvan Tomkins and Anthony Wilden, as well as contemporary criticisms, to account for the Jameses’s unselfing projects. She contextualizes their inclination to forfeit selfhood (Henry James, Sr.) or to reimagine the self (William and Henry) in the neurasthenia “epidemic” of the 1840s. Guo proposes that shame is closely tied to all their thought experiments (James senior’s “self-extinction,” William’s will and twice-born soul, and Henry’s analogically communicative characters.) The presentation shows how the Romanticist trust in the sovereignty and self-sufficiency of the self and the biopsychological crisis illustrated in the Jameses are two sides of the same coin.
Lorenzo Bartolucci’s presentation, “The Physiology of the Self” focuses on the poetry of Jorie Graham (b. 1950) as a lens to reassess the cultural and epistemological evolution of the idea of poetic selfhood. Bartolucci argues that there is a particular humanist notion that postwar American poetry is regarded as having conclusively debunked: the idea of the self as a “coherent, unified, and centered” index of identity (Hutcheon). His presentation asks, “But what if the self, instead of disappearing, had morphed into a new way of approaching the representation of experience?” The presentation traces the course of such a transformation through a reading of Graham’s commitment to the “reality of the self,” which is sometimes framed as a transcendental afflatus out of step with the sensibility of the times. Graham took an early interest in the new field of neuroscience, and particularly in the neurological “physiology of the self” (Sacks) unfolding in its bosom. Bartolucci argues that the imaginative amplification of this idea offers a new perspective on the embodied experience of identity and discloses a missing chapter in the poetic history of the self.
Each paper will last 12-15 minutes. Michaela Hulstyn will serve as a respondent, giving a brief (8-minute) response to the papers (entitled “After Unselfing”) with reference to her monograph, After Unselfing: Altered States and Global French Narrative. The response will be followed by a minimum of 15 minutes of discussion and questions from the audience.