About

We all feel. Even those of us who would rather not admit to having bodily instincts, followed by cognitive affective appraisals and reappraisals, which we then characterise in folk narrative–the language of you and me–as our emotions.

Love, fear, anger, shame, digust, embarrassment, consternation, anxiety, joy, excitement, curiosity. In fact, according to the psychologist Sylvan Tomkins, there are nine major affect systems which can be satisfied by objects which become attached with the relevant affect; and there are a countless number of emotions, because there are an endless number of objects which can receive or satisfy those affects.

But how do we write those emotions? How are those emotions articulated, represented and reissued — and particularly through literature? That’s the subject of my PhD in the School of English at Newcastle University, working with Anne Whitehead and Andrew Crumey. The PhD is in Creative Writing — and so I am preparing a piece of creative writing, a novel, that explores these questions along with the critical component.

And so specifically, what emotions am I researching? More precisely, I am researching affect — those nine, perhaps, in Tomkins’s terms — on the processes of decision-making in the creative process; the process of writing. And, again, to narrow in further, I am looking at indecision in literature, and in creative practice. That is, the affects of anxiety, uncertainty, panic, lack, fear and sadness in the creative process.

Cheery, hey? It’s ok, because I also drink wine, play backgammon, dominoes and scrabble with friends, watch football down the pub, read, have a beautiful cat called Misha, some lovely people in my life, a love of the outdoors and camping, and a relatively high level of energy – which is necessary, because reading about all these ‘ugly feelings’ can sometimes take it out of you.

I hope you enjoy reading. Some more detail about the PhD.

Title of Project

Towards a literary theory of decision: psychoanalysis, psychosurgery and neuroscience and their interrelationships for the study of affect within 20^th century literature and creative writing

What are you setting out to do?

This Creative Writing PhD seeks to product a book-length piece of publishable writing that explores the processes of affect in creative production. It addresses this set of questions through the concepts of decision and the (in)decisive mind. Alongside the creative work, this project aims to produce a component of original scholarly research that furthers our understanding of representations of ‘the decisive mind’ (cognition, affect and psychological understandings of that concept) and literature.

I will do this by building a programme of research that employs literary, psychoanalytic and critical cultural theories to interrogate a body of work of one or a number of authors, still to be determined. This project will also set the critical theoretical approach alongside the increasing knowledge provided by neuroscience, which continues to provide insight into emotions and behaviours, and which is beginning to help critical and cultural theorists (re)read the objects of study within the humanities through a new ontology. While avoiding what Raymond Talllis terms ‘the Neuroscience Delusion’, a tendency to use works of popular science as a basis for interdisciplinarity; and indeed also avoiding the over-determinist approaches of writers such as Jonah Lehrer (The Decisive Moment, 2007), a literary evaluation of the processes of decision requires us to not ignore emerging evidence of how contemporary human societies make decisions, and how we respond to them through arts and literature.

The creative part of the project is a novel based around the fictionalised experiences of the surgeon Egas Moniz, the first physician to practice psychosurgery (the leucotomy) on human patients in 1935; and the experiences of his first patient. The real historical events took place in a milieu of rapid and conflicting theoretical advancements in the fields of mind and psychology; in particular, the operation marks the point of schism between somatic and psychological treatments of mentally ill patients at the time; and of the bifurcation between psychosurgery, the term coined for the range of neurological operations carried out to remedy affective behaviours, and psychoanalysis, its methodological antithesis. This creative project, which has not yet been approached in literature, provides a rich ground for exploration of both the historical determinants and approaches to the treatment of mind, the decision to act, and its relation to writing. (Moniz was also a poet, and this plays a part in the novel). Through this project, the processes of writing itself are addressed.

The research questions can be summarised as:

1. In what way is decision represented in literary acts in relation to critical, cultural and scientific theories of mind and decision?
2. What can an exploration of the creative writing process on the subject of decision reveal about the creative process itself; in particular, the act of creative decision?
3. What are the consequences for cultural understandings of the mind of the revisiting the schism between the routes of psychoanalysis and psychosurgery in the first half of the 20^th century?
4. What can be added to or problematized by a review of a ‘literary theory of decision’, particularly through a (re)reading of literature alongside the emerging knowledge of emotion and decision?

Why are you attempting to do this?

The place of affect (emotion) in literature is gaining importance within the fields of literary studies, critical theory and psychology, as researchers grow more comfortable with interdisciplinary approaches to understanding how the mind generates narrative. As such, I believe this is an important project and one that has further potential to be explored or theorised beyond the current investigations into this work.

In particular, I am interested in the relationship between language and power within literary acts, particularly where they relate to theories of mind and, specifically, decision: the individual power to decide and act, and how this is written in contemporary literature. In particular, I hope to develop research expertise in exploring the forces of creative literature in relation to this domain of understanding, to conceptualise theories of how language and decision are interlinked.