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ABSTRACT
This article argues that Ali Smith’s How to be Both (2014) and Will Self’s Umbrella (2012) can be read as employing a metamodernist approach to the depiction of subjective consciousness. The article looks at how both novels follow on from their authors’ engagement with recent advances and debates in philosophy of mind. This engagement results in an implicit model of the mind as extended in both novels. Drawing on work on the relationship between cognition and affect, the article argues that this model of the mind can be understood in terms of an oscillation at the level of consciousness. This article proposes that oscillation is a dynamic fundamental to the mind as depicted in these novels, allowing it to connect the metamodernist framework with contemporary philosophy of mind.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Josipovici, 56.
2 Ibid., 60.
3 Ibid.
4 Vermeulen and van den Akker, 5677.
5 Josipovici, 62.
6 Sacks, 20–21.
7 Ibid., 288 n.14.
8 Clark and Chalmers, 29
9 Choudhury and Slaby, 10.
10 Groes, 352.
11 Self, Walking to Hollywood, 175.
12 Self, Umbrella, 161–162.
13 Ibid., 184.
14 Ibid., 244.
15 Ibid., 162.
16 Clark and Chalmers, 30.
17 Clark, ‘Spreading the Joy’, 467.
18 Ibid., 987.
19 Clark and Chalmers, 39.
20 Ibid.
21 Smith, How, 29.
22 Ibid., 30.
23 Ibid., 49.
24 Ibid., 51.
25 Calvino, 405.
26 Calvino, 87; Hofstadter, 713.
27 Rowlands, 161.
28 Ibid.
29 Smith, ‘John Berger’.
30 Malabou, 5–6.
31 Ibid., 5–6.
32 Ibid., 20.
33 Ibid., 5.
34 Ibid., 5.
35 Critchley, 10–11
36 Ibid., 40.
37 Self, Umbrella, 8.
38 Ibid., 9.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 12.
41 Ibid., 12–13.
42 Ibid., 12.
43 Ibid., 126.
44 Self, ‘Medicating the Masses’.
45 Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 11.
46 Self, Umbrella, 95.
47 Smith, How, 11.
48 Ibid., 13.
49 Ibid., 15.
50 Hofstadter, 709.
51 Ibid., 704.
52 Smith, How, 154.
53 Rowlands, 163.
54 Ibid., 196.
55 Ibid.
56 Smith, How, 62.
57 Self, ‘Modernism and Me’.
58 Smith, ‘Picture This’.
59 Turner.