Department of English

Considered against the backdrop of California's pastoral obsession to realize Eden, Frank Norris's The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) reveals how his respective brand of American naturalism interprets the changes to California's physical space during the 1880s. Through his preoccupation with the pervasive discourse of force-theory that dominated late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century thought and his penchant for drama and romance, The Octopus becomes much more than an epic tale of struggle between the railroad and the wheat ranchers. Rather it explains the various layers of conquest and imperialist discourse within the text which both promote and explain the drastic reengineering of California's land and water resources during this period. By reading Norris's deterministic program through an ecocritical lens, we see how the novel sheds light on California's past, present, and future environmental transformations revealing a Golden State that is more of a tarnished ideal rather than the earthily paradise so many longed to find.

This essay examines Craig Childs’s use of paradox as a key rhetorical device to represent the deserts of the American Southwest as depicted primarily in The Secret Knowledge of Water (2000). To understand how Childs employs this device, I draw upon the pragmatic rhetorical tradition and ecocriticism’s materialist turn to show how scientific and poetic discourses as well as the desert’s agency create a physical and philosophical contact zone, one where the reader confronts the borders that mark epistemological systems, divisions between the human and the nonhuman, and the discursive and disciplinary strategies and positions used to evoke the mystery and wonder of these regions. Reading The Secret Knowledge of Water through these lenses encourages us to rethink our relationships with aridity and the vast spectrum of matter (human and nonhuman alike) shaped by this reality with the broader goal of identifying how we might more effectively imagine and enact bioregional habitation.

In 1749, David Hartley radically proposed that the brain is the organ of thought. His Observations on Man maps mental phenomena against physiological processes and formulates a materialist theory of mind that far exceeds the work of John Locke. After Joseph Priestley published an abridged version of the text in 1775, this new brain-based account of sentience significantly altered the status of the body in late eighteenth-century Britain. Priestley’s prefatory essays, along with his defence of materialism, published in Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), sparked debates about the body’s role in perception. This article examines Hartley’s and Priestley’s work as a challenge to traditional Christian and neo-Platonic views that were hostile to the body. These two men of science inaugurated British Romantic brain science and initiated a revaluation of embodiment that opened up a new arena of scientific discourse that has affected modern understandings of the body.

A recent BBC radio program about the history of the brain noted that ancient Greeks “dissected the brains of live criminals” (Bell). One listener registered surprise that these “fathers of experimental physiology ... were philosophers” (Monasterio). Despite “the growing field of medical ethics,” philosophy and medicine are widely considered separate disciplines (Casarett  125). Even practitioners fail to recognize “that medicine has a moral dimension” (Casarett  127). This division, however, did not always exist. In fact, modern neuroscience grew from eighteenth-century British Romantic philosophical explorations of the brain (Richardson 182). Brain science was reborn in 1749 when David Hartley asserted that “all ... Ideas, and intellectual affections, must reside in the Brain” (Hartley 81). This novel proclamation intrigued his colleagues, who began experimenting with and theorising about the central nervous system. A medical doctor, Hartley addressed his treatise to “all Physicians and Philosophers” (87). For the amalgamated projects of medicine and philosophy, the possibility of a material mind had both physiological and metaphysical implications. Yet, the nascent state of separation is present in the discourse this debate produced. I argue this split occurred as practitioners began bracketing philosophical issues in favour of pragmatic concerns. By examining texts by eighteenth-century doctor-philosophers, including Hartley, Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Brown, I trace the rupture of medicine and philosophy. I also show how practical matters, like diagnostics and treatment, displaced philosophical debates about the status of mind as material or “essentially different from matter” (Brown 25). This historical perspective contextualises current debates regarding “the future ... philosophy of medicine” (Casarett 137).

In 1749 physician David Hartley made the radical proposition that “the Brain is . . . the seat of the rational Soul” (81). His Observations on Man maps mental phenomena against physiological processes in order to formulate a material theory of mind. This new brain-based account of sentience significantly altered the status of the body in late eighteenth century Britain, particularly after Joseph Priestley republished an abridged version of Observations in 1775. His prefatory essays, which critiqued dualist theories of mind proffered by Scottish Common Sense philosophers, along with his ardent defence of materialism, published in Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), sparked intense debate regarding the sentient principle and the body’s role in perception. Hartley’s and Priestley’s work overturned traditional Christian and neo-Platonic views of the body as an “incumbrance of clay,  . . . fetters of matter, and . . . [a] dreadful contagion of flesh and blood,” thus opening a new arena of scientific discourse that  profoundly altered modern understandings of the body (Priestley 47). My presentation examines their work from a philosophical and cultural perspective with respect to the history of brain science and its influence on Romantic theories of poetry and imagination.

In a letter to Tom Poole, dated 16 March 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge announced that he had “overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley” (CL II: 706). He objected to the passive account of mind implied by the doctrine of Vibrations, and its corollary, Necessitarianism. Coleridge’s dismissal of materialist psychology and his turn to German Idealism has been widely discussed. Less attention has been given to other responses to Hartley’s theories. Hartley’s material account of mind gained widespread readership when Joseph Priestley republished a bowdlerised version of it in 1775. Priestley’s prefatory essays, which criticised the dualist theories of mind proffered by the Scottish Common Sense philosophers, placed Hartley’s Observations (1749) in a polemical context that sparked debates, which raged all throughout the Romantic period, regarding the relationship between mind and body. By introducing empirical research into the mind-body question, Hartley and Priestley inaugurated cognitive science in the Romantic era. While dualists such as Coleridge rejected Associationism because of its materialist assumptions, others accepted the Associationist premise though they disagreed with Hartley’s mechanistic account of perception.  Erasmus Darwin and Humphry Davy are two such men. While they accept the premise that all higher order mental functions are physiological processes governed by physical laws, they discard the Newtonian theory of vibrations. Instead, they posit active theories of mind based on “the laws of organic life” (Darwin 10). In the first volume of Zoonomia, published in 1794, Darwin proposes sensorial power, or the spirit of animation, as an alternative to Hartley’s vibrations. Possessing “the power to commence or produce motion,” this material substance comprehends characteristics generally attributed to spirit. (12). Sensorial power, which is a “secretion . . . in the brain and spinal marrow,” is Darwin’s explanation of how the mind works on a physiological basis (57). The mind, then, is not only embodied, as in Hartley and Priestley’s view, but an active, organic process. While Darwin considered perception from a medical standpoint, Davy approached it from the perspective of chemistry. His notebooks from 1798 to 1802 contain fragmentary attempts to formulate an active theory of mind. According to Davy, the mind has the power to modify sensory stimuli. Prefiguring modern enactive accounts of cognition, his view makes the mind an active participant in its own formation. My presentation considers the theories of mind posited by Darwin and Davy within the context of Romantic era cognitive science. I argue that their response to earlier theories helped engender the shift away from Enlightenment views of the world, which dichotomised humans and animals, body and soul, reason and emotion, to the less polarised Romantic view. Neither man categorically rejects Hartley’s theory, despite its entrenchment in Newtonian mechanism. Instead they transform his materialist hypothesis into a theory that blends aspects of Enlightenment thinking with Romantic organicism. Thus, they occupy that liminal time when one historical period slides, almost imperceptibly into the next, until new ideological frameworks appear. From these Enlightenment beginnings, I argue, emerges the Romantic vision of the enactive mind.

This presentation examines Wordsworth’s theories of mind and imagination through the lens of enaction, a late twentieth-century cognitive theory advanced by neurobiologist Francisco Varela. I argue that Wordsworth’s theory of cognition not only relies on concepts of the embodied mind advanced by late eighteenth-century British empiricists, but that it pushes these progressive theories further. I contend that, contrary to the accepted understanding of the empirical mind as passive, Romantic men of science such as Erasmus Darwin advanced active, but still materialist, theories of mind that attempted to correct David Hartley’s and Joseph Priestley’s passive theories. While these ideas influenced Wordsworth, the poet’s theory of cognition is not merely active, but enactive. That is, the mind half-creates what it perceives; or, in enactive terms, it brings forth a domain of significance relevant to it.

According to enaction, percipient organisms do not passively receive data from the environment to reconstruct an accurate image of the external world. Nor do they superimpose their own reflections onto the world. Instead, enabled and constrained by organization—or the configuration of the body and its sensory apparatus—each organism enacts its knowledge of the world through active engagement with its surroundings. In short, the percipient subject exists in a codependent relationship with the external world.

My work sheds light on subject-object relations in Wordsworth’s poetry and helps reconcile ostensibly contradictory representations of the mind and its relationship to nature in the early poetry. Wordsworth employs the language of materialism and transcendentalism in poems such as The Prelude (1799, 1805) not out of philosophical confusion, but as a way to mediate between the two competing philosophies, much as enaction mediates between structuralist and poststructuralist epistemologies. In my analysis, neither subject nor object takes epistemological or ontological priority. Instead, both are enacted through organizationally delimited (bodily and environmental) interactions. Reading Wordsworth’s theory of mind in terms of enaction provides, in my view, a more accurate understanding of his concept of imagination that is firmly grounded in the historical context of the Romantic mind-matter debates. My presentation allows us to better understand Wordsworth’s concept of imagination as his contemporaries might have.

This paper examines Coleridge's epistemology and ontology through the lens of autopoietic enaction. I argue that his theory of knowledge stands as an important alternative to Cartesian accounts of the mind, and that theories outlined in Biographia Literaria and "Theory of Life" function recursively.