Poetics and the Problem of Consciousness

This session seeks papers that investigate poetic interiority through the lens of philosophical problems of consciousness. Specifically, it envisions work that probes the ways poetry, as a genre, serves as a particularly useful site for interrogating the philosophical problem of experience, most notably articulated in David Chalmers’s seminal essay “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995). While the intersection of consciousness and literature has traditionally been the purview of scholars of the novel, this session posits that the unique aesthetics of poetry provide penetrating insights into the problem of conscious experience which are inaccessible in other genre-specific literary forms.

The hard problem of consciousness has dominated contemporary philosophy of mind since the 1970s, largely ignited by Thomas Nagel’s pioneering essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (The Philosophical Review, 1974). According to Nagel, there is something it is like to be conscious, and within this observation lies the truly enigmatic problem of consciousness. Later, Chalmers distinguished between the so-called easy problems and the hard problem. For Chalmers, the easy problems encompass aspects of awareness, such as the ability to categorize and react to external stimuli, the capacity to focus attention, the distinction between sleep and wakefulness, and the voluntary control of behavior. Chalmers considers these problems “easy” because they lend themselves to scientific explanations. The hard problem, conversely, concerns experience: Why should mindedness entail a subjective component in the Nagelian “something-it-is-like” sense? As a reader, you could plausibly apprehend this paragraph without a corresponding subjective encounter. However, you experience it as well: the movement of your eyes, the appearance of the words on the screen, the contrast of black against white. Indeed, there is something it is like to read this sentence. But how, and why? Despite advances in both philosophy of mind and neuroscience, the question remains inscrutable.

With these philosophical concerns in mind, papers may address any aspect of the intersection between poetry and consciousness. Possible theoretical approaches include examining the ways poetic form mimics conscious experience, how poetry, like consciousness, resists tidy descriptions; how poets employ metaphor to convey interior states and mental perceptions; ways that the conscious self functions as the center of poetic narrative gravity; and reflections on why poetry as a literary form offers the most direct access to the conscious, experiencing self. These questions are merely suggestions, however, and the session’s papers will showcase the great breadth of methodological perspectives on the subject. Work on poetry from all languages and literary periods will be considered.