Consciousness studies today has become a deeply divided discourse. The first division lies within the problem of disciplinary and discursive territoriality, which in some instances approaches chauvinism: philosophers may claim seniority, having mulled over the meaning of thought throughout and even as recorded history, while incomparably better-funded cognitive scientists can approach this last unexplored frontier with the swagger underwritten by split atoms, decoded genomes, modern miracles. This situation underscores the caution that every conscious person is an authority on consciousness, a caution worth bearing in mind but which is perhaps overstated, since one could say that every breathing person is an authority on oxygen, with more or less the same significance. Second division: there are generally reckoned to be two kinds of approaches to consciousness, dualism and materialism. The former view, most famously hypothesized by Descartes, absolutely cleaves mind from matter, while the latter view suggests that the hunk of electrified meat lodged in my skull is inseparable from the processes by which I formulate and write this sentence. (Note that these are approaches, not models, and very wideopen approaches at that. Indeed, proposed materialist models for consciousness can seem to differ as much as the two approaches themselves do.) And finally, a third, cataclysmic division: among these sects, both philosophers and scientists, dualists and materialists alike, there are those who firmly hold that consciousness is unknowable, that the workings of consciousness are precisely that which consciousness cannot fathom.

So what has this to do with literature, let alone James Joyce? Nothing at all, if one can believe Raymond Tallis, who in a Times Literary Supplement screed entitled “The Neuroscience Delusion” rejects the entire notion of “neuroaesthetics” (he does not seem to be familiar with the term “cognitive poetics,” but that's probably just as well).