Strand: Fiction and Other Minds
Speaker(s): Laura Salisbury, Sowon Park, Ben Morgan (chair)
Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - 16:00 to 18:30
'The Skull on the Wall and the Minds of Others'
Laura Salisbury (Exeter University): Using To the Lighthouse as a focus, Laura Salisbury discussed how Woolf explores the possibilities and impossibilities of using the novel to penetrate the resolutely material minds of others.
'Q R and Sympathy'
Sowon S Park (Corpus Christi College, Oxford): In To the Lighthouse Lily Briscoe asks ‘How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?’ Sowon Park discussed the role of mindreading in Woolf's novel alongside theories of mindreading elaborated by neuroscientists Eric Kandel and Simon Baron-Cohen.