Abstract

The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself. Now is a great time to be a literary scholar interested in interdisciplinary work with the sciences. While in the early days, scientifically minded critics fought for the floor in a field dominated by constructivist accounts of the self, today their work has settled into its own legitimacy, aided substantially by the increasing power and relevance of research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory.2 Largely because of these efforts, we are poised at the brink of some of the most exciting and productive...