DEFOE’S EMBODIED COGNITION: CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE AND THE DURABILITY OF SELFHOOD IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

This thesis engages the contemporary cognitive turn in literary scholarship to address an overlooked research gap: how does the “mind-body boundary” (Caruth 132) in contemporary cognitive science relate to our conscious experience of trauma, which is traditionally understood in psychoanalytic terms? Like other early English novelists, Daniel Defoe was deeply invested in exposing the inner machinations of the human mind. Defoe’s novels can be considered thought experiments which explore what happens to humans when thrown into jarring, unstable and often traumatic environments. His novels expound how minds and bodies respond viscerally to these dramatically changing spatial contexts, and he tends to depict the mind and the body as a unified system, which I term the “bodily network”. His theorisation of the bodily network opposes the legacy of Cartesian dualism, an influential—then and now— philosophical model that denotes a “strange split between mind and body” (Silver, Mind vii). He anticipated modern cognitive science developments by regarding the mind and body as an interconnected system, especially since neuroscientists and literary scholars now increasingly consider cognition to be an “extended” or “embodied” activity (Silver, Guest). Hence, his work can be seen as a forerunner to the contemporary concept of “embodied cognition” (Shapiro and Spaulding), encompassing the interrelatedness of the bodily network and the environment. In this thesis, I yoke together psychoanalytic and cognitive science approaches to offer a new and more satisfying reading of Defoe that foregrounds the epistemological importance of the early novel in conceiving early theories of the mind. His fiction grapples with the complexity of the bodily network, shaping readers’ understanding of what it means to be a thinking self. He also tests the durability of selfhood, which is oftentimes revealed as fragile as the thinking self is highly susceptible to environmental change and traumatic displacement.