The brain is the most complex object in the known universe, and consciousness is one of its last remaining mysteries. Even as new noninvasive imaging techniques for analyzing brain function have seeded unprecedented new insights into the underlying brain mechanisms associated with specific mental phenomena (such as vision, emotion, memory, or pain), no one has as yet accounted for the “hard” problem of consciousness: how and why does subjective experience arise from objective brains in the first place? In the context of the “hard” problem of neuroscientific study, consciousness refers to our inner life of subjective experience and phenomenal perception: “What is it like” (Thomas Nagel) to taste the “sweetness” of chocolate, or to feel the “warmth” of an embrace? Science only accepts third-person data gathered by observation. Yet consciousness is only accessible “from within” (we cannot read each others’ minds).

Where science stumbles, literature has thrived. Writers from modernism to the present have combined narrative’s access to first-person introspection with interdisciplinary forays into the cognitive science of their times. What William James and Freud were for the modernist novel of consciousness, neuroscientific insights into various brain disorders (popularized by Oliver Sacks) and phenomena like memory and vision are for the contemporary neuronovel, which updates the modernist novel of consciousness through the insights of contemporary neuroscience.

Debates on neurofiction cover a wide range of topics: how do individual neuronovels reinvent specific modernist writers and works (Proust, Woolf, etc.)? In blending inner consciousness and external observation, can the narrative technique of free indirect style be viewed as fiction’s breakthrough as regards the “explanatory gap” between first-person experience and third-person scientific observation? Do neuronovels challenge the materialist reduction of consciousness to brain mechanisms—or don’t they? This session takes stock of new developments in this ongoing discussion.

Daniel Schwartz begins by contrasting the limitations of science to the possibilities of fiction as regards consciousness. The former view is represented by Nagel’s classic claim that the phenomenal quality of “what it is like to be” a bat remains out of reach for someone with complete knowledge of the neurophysiology of the animal. E.M. Forster expresses the latter view: in “daily life, we never understand each other, but people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader; . . . their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.” Schwartz challenges this Forsterian intuition, arguing 1) that fictional minds are no more straightforwardly transparent than actual minds because 2) actual minds are not straightforwardly opaque (accessible only from ‘within’). He approaches these issues by way of Wittgenstein’s later work, which challenges our sense that consciousness is where “things are hidden,” inaccessible from the outside. If Wittgenstein is right, and the mind is not an inaccessible space of hidden ‘things,’ then the most radically innovative novels of consciousness, which largely leave the shared, unhidden world behind in favor of inner illumination, would seem to belie a deep philosophical disorientation.

Dorin Smith also takes his departure from fiction’s privileged access to first-person consciousness as opposed to the difficulties confronting third-person scientific observation, but proceeds in a different direction, questioning its use as a strategy for justifying literature in contemporary neurofiction through banal lyrical realist visions of inner thought. On Smith’s account, this is a startling regression from a century ago, when E.M. Forster speculated that psychological research would allow novelists to refine techniques for representing human and non-human consciousnesses. Smith explores the neuronovel’s movement into lyricism with specific attention to Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom (2020). Drawing on phenomenology (Noë) and second-generation cognitive narrative theory (Armstrong & Kukkonen), he frames the genre’s use of scientific references as a figural strategy for defining what consciousness isn’t. On Smith’s assessment, the neuronovel becomes an emblem of professional anxiety, reflecting the need to justify the novel’s right to talk about mind at all.

Sandy Brack focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying reading, examining readers who self-identify as having aphantasia (the inability, or reduced ability, to generate visual mental images). Building on qualitative empirical studies, Brack examines how readers with aphantasia describe their engagement with N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015). In this novel, shifting perspectives and second-person narration foreground the problem of representing consciousness from within. By examining how readers without visual imagery encounter a text that constructs richly sensory environments and complex interior perspectives, the paper explores not only the relationship between these two narrative techniques, but also the diversity of cognitive pathways through which reader experience emerges.