Featuring a foreword by renowned neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux, The Elusive Brain is an illuminating, comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. This fascinating book explores how literature interacts with neuroscience to provide a better understanding of the brain’s relationship to the self. Jason Tougaw surveys the work of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Siri Hustvedt, and Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay—analyzing the way they experiment with literary forms to frame new views of the immaterial experiences that compose a self. He argues that their work offers a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Building on recent scholarship, Tougaw’s evenhanded account will be an original contribution to the growing field of neuroscience and literature.

The Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience

Literature & Fiction

Tougaw, Jason

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Fields of Reading draws on the major divisions of the curriculum — arts and humanities, social sciences and public affairs, and sciences — to present well-crafted and high-quality writing from these fields. Chosen by six editors who are all distinguished teachers and writers, the selections progress from individual essays to paired texts to casebooks that contain multiple readings on an engaging topic. Students are thus exposed to important readings — and conversations — by key voices in contemporary intellectual life — and asked to engage in the kind of reading, writing, and cross-curricular thinking they encounter in college. An additional emphasis on rhetorical purpose (reflecting, reporting, explaining, and arguing), helps students understand how subject, intent, and audience influence the form and style of their own writing.

Fields of Reading: Motives for Writing

Reference

Sommers, Nancy

Comley, Nancy R.

Scholes, Robert

Klaus, Carl H.

HAMILTON, DAVID

Words, Language & Grammar

Bedford/St.Martin's

Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Strange Cases is the story of the mutual influence of the case history  and the British novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Fictions from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw and  case histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have found  narrative impetus in pathology. The writer of a case history faces a  rhetorical bind unique to the human sciences: the need to display the  acumen of a scientist and the sympathy warranted to the suffering  patient. Repeatedly, case historians justify their publicizing of  extreme, often morbid or perverse, states of mind and body by  appealing to readers to take pity on patients and to recognize the  narrative as a vital social document. Diagnosis and sympathy, explicit  rhetorical modes in case histories, operate implicitly in novels,  shaping reader-identification. While these two narrative forms set out  to fulfill an Enlightenment drive to classify and explain, they also  raise social and epistemological questions that challenge some of the  Enlightenment's most cherished ideals, including faith in reason, the  perfectibility of humankind, and the stability of truth.

British & Irish

Routledge

"Bats, nurses, Marlene Dietrich, a malevolent figure in a bear suit, two cowboys playing king-of-the-mountain on a rosebush, a group of men placidly eating babies at a makeshift picnic table, while, above them, a tree grows more babies: Marcel Dzama is back. As readers will learn in The Course of Human History Personified, he's a sleepwalker, a sleepdrawer--""I draw during the day, but the ideas come at night."" He records his visions in a bedside-table notebook. The finished work, in ink and watercolor, in a limited color scheme, against empty backgrounds, stripped of narrative context, offers many possible interpretations. Its cast of characters is expansive and in each drawing their roles become more complex and defined. Dzama's influences include Blake, Goya, Botticelli, and James Ensor and his sources encompass native mythology, Inuit art, Dante's Divine Comedy, medieval paintings and American folklore. The title, The Course of Human History Personified, is borrowed from Dante and recalls the grandiose artistic and literary cycles of the nineteenth century such as Thomas Cole's 1836 The Course of Empire, where nature plays as large a role as humans. Here nature is personified--imagined characters and trees and beasts assume base human characteristics. If it's a dark view of the world, it's also an entrancing one."

Marcel Dzama: The Course of Human History Personified

Arts & Photography

Rosenfeld, Jason

Individual Artists

David Zwirner

Strange Cases is the story of the mutual influence of the case history and the British novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fictions from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw and case histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have found narrative impetus in pathology. The writer of a case history faces a rhetorical bind unique to the human sciences: the need to display the acumen of a scientist and the sympathy warranted to the suffering patient. Repeatedly, case historians justify their publicizing of extreme, often morbid or perverse, states of mind and body by appealing to readers to take pity on patients and to recognize the narrative as a vital social document. Diagnosis and sympathy, explicit rhetorical modes in case histories, operate implicitly in novels, shaping reader-identification. While these two narrative forms set out to fulfill an Enlightenment drive to classify and explain, they also raise social and epistemological questions that challenge some of the Enlightenment's most cherished ideals, including faith in reason, the perfectibility of humankind, and the stability of truth.

Fields of Reading draws on the major divisions of the curriculum — arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences — to offer well-crafted and high-quality writing from these fields. Chosen with the rhetorical purposes of composition in mind by editors who are all distinguished teachers and writers, the selections progress from individual essays to paired texts to casebooks that contain multiple readings on engaging topics and compelling issues. Even more than its predecessors, the new edition emphasizes the cross-curricular reading, thinking, and writing expected in college as it exposes students to key cultural conversations that involve major voices in contemporary intellectual life. The print text is now integrated with e-Pages for Fields of Reading, designed to take advantage of what the Web can do.

In The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism, Jason Tougaw marries neuroscience and family lore to tell his story of growing up gay in 1970s Southern California, raised by hippies who had "dropped out" in the late sixties and couldn't seem to find their way back in. "There's something wrong with our blood," the family mantra ran, "and it affects our brains"―a catchall answer for incidents such as Tougaw's schizophrenic great-grandfather directing traffic in the nude on the Golden Gate Bridge, the author's own dyslexia and hypochondria, and the near-death experience of his notorious jockey grandfather, Ralph Neves. With shades of Oliver Sacks and Susannah Cahalan, this honest and unexpected true story recasts the memoir to answer some of life's big questions: "Where did I come from," "How did I become me," and "What happens when the family dog accidentally overdoses on acid?"

The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Dzanc Books

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Books by Tougaw, Jason