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continuity which
also
transcended that past while bringing new forms to
life and carrying older shapes, genres; and themes forward as transforma–
tions and radical reconfigurations.
Denis Donoghue:
Steven, wouldn't you nevertheless still say that if it is
bereavement it is either unacknowledged or repudiated bereavement? That
seems to me a sentiment that is immensely significant and perhaps difficult
to deal wi tho
Steven Marcus:
Yes, you are right. I myself in reading certain post-mod–
ern texts have found what I take to be unacknowledged bereavement in
their interstices. That is to say between hops from one gravesite to anoth–
er I have detected moments in whith there is a space that can only be filled
with the sense of loss, a mournful absence that has been repressed. I don't
think that the sense of loss is or has been worked through.
Gunther Stent:
In the circles in which I move, there actually is a very
active utopian movement, partly evoked by President Bush's declaration
that the closing decade of the twentieth century is the decade of the brain.
I am referring to the novel discipline of neurophilosophy and its utopian
solution of the ancient mind-body problem. Neurophilosophers contend
that now, at last, with the tremendous advances that have been made in the
understanding of the brain, it will pretty soon be possible to reduce or
explain all mental processes in terms of neurophysiology. Though this con–
tention is widely accepted, no neurophilosopher or anyone else, as far as I
know, actually troubled to work out the details of this utopian human con–
dition. What would a society be like in which neurophysical reduction of
the mind has been achieved? How would people act if they believed that
love, moral responsibility, faith, or esthetic pleasure are nothing but the ebb
and flow of potassium and sodium in identified cerebral networks? I am
waiting for a latter-day neurophilosophical Bellamy to write a credible
Looking Backward from the Year 2100.
Dmitri Urnov:
My question to Dr. Donoghue and Dr. Marcus concerns
the point they both touched upon but didn't elaborate and that is the end
of the century as the end of the world. They talked about
fin du monde
in
the 1890s, and it came true in 1914. It would be naive and simply stupid
to ask for possible scenarios. But what tendencies do you believe would be
dominant in ending our world?
Denis Donoghue: I
don't see or feel around me anything corresponding
to the sense of an ending which one certainly feels through the literature
of the 1890s. Most people nowadays, for example, are not terrified by
