It has become a critical commonplace to say that works of literature “think”. And yet this metaphor, our panellists agree, risks obscuring the formal and historical specificities of how particular genres, texts, and authors invent and reinvent mental activity – what they have to tell us, in short, about what a “mind” is and does. We build upon a wide range of scholarship that has interrogated the relationship between literary form and the minds of both readers and characters in local and particular ways: among many others, Andrea Gadberry’s Cartesian Poetics (2020), Kevin Ohi’s Henry James and the Queerness of Style (2011), Catherine Gallagher’s Telling It Like It Wasn’t (2018), Nikki Skillman’s The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (2016), Elizabeth Helsinger’s Poetry and the Thought of Song (2015), Timothy Bewes’ Free Indirect (2022), and – reflecting on the mental work of criticism itself – Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth (2023).

What is it about literary form, then, that brings questions about mind into play? What is distinctive about the states and acts of mind that literary texts have recorded or produced? And under what conditions do these effects expand, change, or collapse? By offering four very different accounts of how various literary forms bring these questions into play, we hope to generate new conversations between subdisciplines, exploring the powerful affordances both of forms and of minds.

Michael Rizq’s paper, “On Getting It (via Mallarmé),” will give an account of “understanding” by reading Stéphane Mallarmé’s highly idiosyncratic poetry and prose. Considering Mallarmé closely, he argues, invites us to consider concepts such as “leaps,” “virtualities,” and “speculations” as aspects of knowledge-formation. For literary critics and students alike, the paper argues, ‘getting it’ requires a return to what’s most slippery, elusive, and partial about understanding - something one feels one ‘has’ one minute, but then seems to have disappeared the next.

In “Narrative’s Knowledge and the Novel of Impressionability” Lizzie Mundell-Perkins will examine how the novel’s presentation of its own capacity to represent the mind evolved in the wake of 19th century realism. The paper theorizes a distinctive genre, “the novel of impressionability,” characterized by an intriguingly avoidant and uncertain style in representing characters’ experience of thinking and knowing. At stake in this genre, she suggests, is a fundamental question about the novel’s claim to being the psychological form, which is revisited to both unsettling and generative effect over the course of the 20th century.

Mehmet Ildiz’s “A Fable to Awaken the Mind” explores how René Descartes’s Discourse on Method presents itself as a fable to manifest a form of mind that is fundamentally reactive. Building upon Descartes’s assertion that the function of a fable is to “awaken the mind,” he argues that fable functions as a kinetic engine which shocks the mind out of its natural state of dormancy. He contends that this literariness provides a unique insight into the mind’s mechanics by triggering an involuntary detachment from reality. By prompting the mind to “imagine many events as possible which are not so,” the fable reveals the mind’s fundamental capacity to operate within a vacuum of speculative possibilities.

In “Protagonicity and Consciousness in the High Realist Novel,” Valeria Mutc will examine how the novel uses the category of protagonicity to make sense of the mind. Focusing on novels by Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, the paper takes as its starting point the idea that a protagonist of a high realist novel necessarily emerges out of the tension between individual and social consciousness. The novel uses protagonicity to reflect on this tension, to trace the formation of the social self, and to call into question how much mental space can be taken up by social consciousness before the erosion of interiority takes place. Ultimately, the paper will argue that the constant negotiation between these two extremes not only shapes the interior makeup of the novel’s protagonists, but drives novelistic narrative progression itself.