American Literary Realism and Nervous “Reflexion”

Abstract

American Literary Realism and Nervous "Reflexion"American literary realism flourished in the late nineteenth century, along with rapid developments in the sciences of the brain and nervous system.The literature that was so devoted to accurate representation, in other words, grew in tandem with the science devoted to explaining how humans perceive and apprehend the world.While we have long assumed the importance of science to realist movements, the primary connection has been drawn rather narrowly, between scientifically objective observation and realist aspirations to truthfulness in representation.Scholarship has not attended to realist writers' interest in sciences of the brain and nervous system or explored the effect of rapid developments in neurology and brain biology on these writers' conceptions of mimesis.But there was an effect.As "mental physiology" intruded upon realist aesthetics, some of the writers we most associate with realism loosened their allegiance to the model of the detached observer and opened their conception of literary production to a biological model of image transmission.New ideas about the apprehension of reality-say, of the indexical reception of realityimpressions in neural tissue or the furrowing of memory pathways in brain circuits-dislodged the image of the of the cool, untouched, representing consciousness.And ultimately the model, of unconscious brain and nervous system processes as the manufacturers of literature challenged that of the conscious reporter.

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