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Virtual Minds, Victorian Novels, and the Question of Modeling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2020

Elisha Cohn Open the ORCID record for Elisha Cohn [Opens in a new window]
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Extract

Snagsby's paper shop in Bleak House (1853) deals in “all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper—foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands—glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention.” While one might imagine this stifling bookish environment as especially inviting for an object-oriented reading, this passage has recently attracted what I might call a newly inflected kind of subject-oriented reading. This description from Bleak House makes an appearance in two recent critical monographs concerned with how the reader's cognitive capabilities meet words on the page to transform them into a felt reality. How does a passage like this act on our minds, creating mental images or offering a sense of embeddedness in an unreal “reality”? How does fiction become phenomenological?

Type
Review
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 471 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

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