ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
18
In this there is also something Bakhtinian as well. For Bakhtin language is inherently
dialogic and shared. His famous dictum that “The word in language is half someone else’s”
can be applied to consciousness in that consciousness is always consciousness of something or
someone. Bakhtin, M.M., “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin:
U of Texas P, 1981), 293.
19
Joseph E. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life
(NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
20
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground: A New Translation, Backgrounds and
Sources, Responses, Criticism, trans Michael R. Katz (NY: Norton, 1989), 3.
21
The Russian “zloi” can be translated many ways including evil, wicked, malicious, angry or
just simply bad. “Spiteful,” however, is the standard translation since the noun form, “zlost’,”
another key word, is best translated as “spite” in the rest of the novel.
22
See M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), 228. I do not pretend that my reading of Dostoevsky is
original and it owes much to Bakhtin’s Problems in particular. Rather, the reading is intended
to support my application of consciousness studies to literature more broadly. For other useful
approaches see Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Russian Literature,
(’s-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1958), 31-48; Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation,
1860-1865 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986), 310–47; James P. Scanlan, Dostoevsky the
Thinker (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002), 57-80.
23
It is clear from Dostoevsky’s note on the first page that he believes this hyperconsciousness
is a result of “general circumstances” and “actually must exist in our society” and is therefore a
more general diagnosis of Russia rather than a peculiarity of the narrator, even if he has
contracted a particularly strong case of it. It is clear that the target Dostoevsky has in mind is
the materialist and nihilist thinking so in vogue in the previous decade. Dostoyevsky, Notes
from Underground, 3.
24
Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 54.
25
Martha Nussbaum is clearly right to point out that “emotional response can sometimes be not
just a means to practical knowledge, but a constituent part of the best sort of recognition or
knowledge of one’s practical situation.” Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck
and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (NY: Cambridge U P, 1987), 15-16.
26
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
Works Cited
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Bakhtin, M. M. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
by M. M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist, 259–422. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
--. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
Blackmore, Susan J. Consciousness: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
Bor, Daniel. The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains
Our Insatiable Search for Meaning. NY: Basic Books, 2012.
Chalmers, David John. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.
NY: Oxford UP, 1996.
Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. NY:
Scribner, 1994.
Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. NY:
G.P. Putnam, 1994.
--. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. NY: Pantheon Books,
2010.
20