I.

Capturing consciousness has been the spur to many great literary ambitions but in the last three decades we have witnessed a remarkable growth in consciousness studies in many fields, and especially in the natural sciences. Disciplines as disparate as cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, cognitive linguistics, evolutionary biology, anthropology and phenomenological psychiatry have found a common focus in consciousness, making it an exceptionally multidisciplinary field. Literary studies are not unaffected by the “cognitive turn”: significant emerging areas spurred on by the recent growth in consciousness studies are neuro-literary criticism and “evo” (evolutionary) literary criticism, whose messianic tones were captured in the 2002 special issue of Poetics Today. Entitled “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution,” it pronounced that “evo” and “neuro” approaches will “revolutionize the study of literature by overthrowing the rule of poststructuralism” (Poetics Today 167). To what degree this nascent field will overturn poststructuralist knowledge still remains to be seen. However, it is clear that there are unresolved and ongoing methodological issues arising from attempts to generate an integrative framework that can accommodate responses across the divide between the “two cultures.” By examining the particular case of Steven Pinker on Woolf, I will foreground the general issues. I will then consider certain neuroscientific discoveries which illuminate and provide a scientific framework for the literary methods developed by Woolf and other modernists. Though neuroscientific evidence varies vastly in its explanatory scale, Antonio Damasio's science of consciousness has stunning parallels with Woolf's model of mind, a link which has not been made by cognitive or evolutionary literary critics. This paper will argue for the significance of affect, offered as the “feeling of knowing,” in developing an adequate theory of consciousness that speaks across the divide between the two cultures, as well as for the centrality of Woolf to the field of consciousness studies.

II.

Towards the end of his internationally acclaimed book The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, Antonio Damasio, one of the world's leading neuroscientists, poses this question: “[A]s a consequence of our greater understanding of consciousness, [will] we…eventually be able to gain access to each other's mental experiences”? (305).