The Mind of Then We Came to the End: A Transmental Approach to Contemporary Metafiction

Nathan D. Frank

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Chapter 14 The Mind of Then We Came to the End: A Transmental Approach to Contemporary Metafiction

In: Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction

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Nathan D. Frank

Nathan D. Frank
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 225–244

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004347854_016

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Steven Pinker describes “a digital mind in an analog world” in Words and Rules by referring to virtuality as a “category of regular forms” – “forms that would be created” based on a particular logic, but which remain uncreated mental abstractions until irregularity instantiates unexpected conjugations. A latent virtual consciousness thus harbors formalisms that reflect categorical ways of thinking, and 21st-century novels explore such virtual consciousness at two discrete but compatible levels that effectively render the phrase “consciousness in the contemporary novel” a double entendre. At the first level, novels represent contemporary cultural conditions of the information age. At the second level is a narratological synthesis in which self-aware texts assume systemic authority over a novel’s narration through reflexive techniques that transgress boundaries and complicate attributions of consciousness. At the crossroads of these explorations lies Then We Came to the End, the debut novel by Joshua Ferris that makes a rich case study out of narratologies and critical theories, latent formalisms and the contemporary categories that drive them – which is to say, out of the mind of the novel and the novels of our minds. Through the contemporary fiction of Ferris, we are given further insight into what it means when novels think virtual consciousness and what it therefore means to have digital minds in an analog world.

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Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction

Series: Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, Volume: 51

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004347854

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 08 Jul 2017

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Chapter 14 The Mind of Then We Came to the End: A Transmental Approach to Contemporary Metafiction

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Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction

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