eventually decided to include different storylines in different time periods in order to reflect the way in which people’s lives briefly intersect and then move apart. A review of his previous novel, Mr Mee,in The Timesnewspaper commented that ‘More than once, Crumey makes his reader pause, rest the book in his lap, and acknowledge that life really is quite extraordinary.’ By putting life on ‘pause,’ the novel as a genre permits reflection on the contingency of past and future.
Through philosophy and art, then, understandings of the way individuals and societies experience time – which is fundamental to our humanity – can be enhanced. A workshop on Experiencing the Future: Time, Consciousness and Memory took this further. Psychologists have represented memory as a kind of self-narrativising. Such insights are informing the ways in which literary critics analyse more formal stories, like the novel. Through combining these two disciplines, it may become more feasible to understand psychological conditions such as depression, where a sufferer’s narrative of themselves, their ability to project a positive view of their future on the basis of their valuation of their past, becomes impaired. This workshop brought together literary critics, philosophers and psychologists to think about the perspectives on the self that are shared between art and the mind.
Experiencing the Future
Papers at this workshop were presented by philosophers, literary critics, and psychologists:
Dan Hutto on Narrative and Understanding Reasons
Jonathan Lowe asked Is it Possible to Experience an Event Before it has Happened?
Patricia Waugh looked at Nostalgia and the Future Anterior in Modern Fiction
Charles Fernyhough discussed Experiencing the Past and Future in Childhood
The day was concluded with a poetry reading by Ruth Padel.
The workshop on Experiencing the Future related to an international project on Emotional Experience in Depression which is co-led by Durham’s Department of Philosophy:
www.animal-emotionale.de/eeid
Visions
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