This session of the Fiction and Other Minds Seminar will have two speakers:
Dr Nadine Sigalov: Embodied Entanglements: Synesthesia, Hypermnesia, and Creativity Between Literature and Neuroscience in The Memory Artists and The Beautiful Miscellaneous
This study explores the intersection of synaesthesia, memory, and creativity as depicted in Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artists (2004) and Dominic Smith’s The Beautiful Miscellaneous (2007). By intertwining narrative elements with neuroscientific insights, these novels foreground synesthetic experiences as a means to challenge the entrenched duality of art and science. In doing so, the analysis highlights an epistemologically entangled framework (devised by Kristin Zeiler), where science and art co-develop and co-emerge, fostering a nuanced understanding that transcends dualistic approaches.
Employing a New Materialist lens, the study explores how synaesthesia fosters embodied interconnectedness, where sensory and cognitive dynamics reshape conceptions of self and the world. The protagonists’ intertwined hypermnesic and synesthetic experiences illustrate the transformative potential of blending subjective and objective perspectives. Through synesthetic creativity and the reimagining of memory dynamics, these narratives connect literary creativity to neurodiversity’s innovative potential. Moreover, they present reading as an embodied act that transforms sensory and cognitive interplay into a process of discovery, enriching memory and imagination through synaesthesia. Drawing on concepts such as Karen Barad’s intra-action, Patricia Waugh’s affective realism, and Catherine Malabou’s destructive plasticity, this paper argues that synaesthesia functions as both a narrative device and a sensory process, emphasising its implications for understanding neurodiversity, creativity, and the materiality of experience.
Professor Kate Rossmanith: Master Perceiver: How writers conceptualise themselves as documenters of their worlds
Australian writer Helen Garner was awarded the 2025 UK Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction for How to End a Story, becoming the first writer to win the award with a collection of diaries. It is said of Garner, and she says of herself, that her ‘sharp gaze roams widely’. Judges praised the diaries for their ‘ecstatic attention to details of everyday life’, and they have been compared to those of Virginia Woolf. What does it mean, for writers, to document a moving world? How do writers conceptualise their witnessing-and-recording selves? This paper considers the concepts of personhood and of existence that animate a documentarian’s mind and that give rise to a feeling of knowledge.
The seminar is convened by Professor Ben Morgan (ben.morgan@worc.ox.ac.uk) and Dr Naomi Rokotnitz (naomi.rokotnitz@worc.ox.ac.uk).
As always, the talk will be followed by drinks for all attendees.
About the Seminar Series: The Fiction and Other Minds seminar series showcases current research in the Cognitive Humanities by hosting scholars working at the interface between literary studies, visual and performance art, phenomenology, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences. The seminars explore how features investigated by the cognitive sciences can be tested and expanded across different cultural contexts, media, and artistic genres. In particular, we explore how literary texts often challenge and differentiate theoretical insights—especially through their attention to the culturally situated aspects of cognition—and how cognitively informed approaches to literature can deepen our understanding of the embodied and affective processes that underpin meaning-making, including literary reading. For more information, please see the Fiction and Other Minds research strand page.
