Increasingly, it is in discourses of the brain that we must express our wellness, distress, and identities. Brain Fictions examines the ways that contemporary literature has critically responded to the turn toward the brain in psychiatry, philosophy of mind, and popular culture. Andrew Gaedtke shows how an evolving neuroculture has been represented and contested through emergent literary forms and aesthetic modes.
In works by Nicola Barker, Jennifer Egan, Yaa Gyasi, Ian McEwan, Ottessa Moshfegh, Annalee Newitz, Lucy Prebble, Will Self, and others, experiences of neurological disabilities and differences are shaped by social, discursive, and material networks that extend beyond the space of the skull. These include the conditions of cognitive capitalism in which the brain is construed as an information device and wellness is linked to the imperatives of optimization and enhanced productivity. The brain therefore emerges in contemporary literature as not only an organ but also a cultural artifact endowed with a surplus of meanings. The speculative, modal space of fiction, Gaedtke argues, is a critical venue in which these meanings and their consequences may be tested.
