This dissertation explores the connections that exist between Gertrude Steins late nineteenth-century psychological studies at Harvard University, her fin-de-sicle brain research at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and her early twentieth-century cubist writings. This study is important to neuraesthetic researchers, because it appears that Stein produced a secret series of cubist brain maps from approximately 1912 to 1935, and then published her first explicit brain map in _The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind_, in 1936. The cubist brain maps that Stein produced during this period can be conceptualized as evolving, neuraesthetic writing practices that reflect her complex, scientific insights and her varied, artistic associations. One of the primary differences between Steins cubist writings and those of her literary peers is that she deploys the cubist painting strategies of Pablo Picasso, for the purpose of portraying the human central nervous system. In addition to exploring the scientific meanings of Steins multidimensional, performative and introspective cubist puns, my study examines how Stein uses color in her cubist writings, as a means of anticipating the visual effects of future scientific discoveries and connectivity maps, such as the Brainbow system, which uses the fluorescent protein from the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria to label the central nervous systems of genetically modified mice with distinguishable colors. Also, this project examines how Stein uses color words and other simple devices from the English language to illustrate the brains cellular structures, neural networks and neuroanatomical features. This studys primary aim is to explore how Steins dissociative writings function within western culture as neuraesthetic modes of masterpiece creation, brain representation and consciousness translation. Through the serial production of cubist brain maps, Stein posed important questions about the modern science of the reading brain. By developing allegorical methods of brain representation, Stein contributes to the western practice of neuroesthetics by foregrounding the role that creative writing plays in the production of imaginary, laboratory practices and imaginative, brain imaging technologies.

William James denies consciousness as an entity and this rejection lies in the background of my thesis. I searched the main reasons for this rejection in his philosophy. Throughout this search, I perceived two modes of existence of consciousness, that active and passive. As James improves his thoughts on consciousness over the main arguments of classical empiricists, I explained his radical empiricism and pragmatism in relation to them. It is difficult to answer whether we are completely active or passive in the ways of our thinking and behaving. However, although it includes some problems and inconsistencies, James&amp / #8217 / s philosophy presents a more plausible explanation of our thinking than rationalism and empiricism, since it can appreciate the changes of our life in an unfinished world of pure experience. Therefore, my inquiry into the existence of consciousness in James depends on this plausibility of the main characteristics of radical empiricism in connection with the classical empiricists.

My dissertation argues that the writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence are animated by a shared belief that the way human beings experience and understand their worlds needs to be radically transformed. Their works expose how human experience is canalized by habits reinforced through education and custom, and they explore the ways people might overcome these limitations to expand the receptive possibilities of their experience, illustrating more fruitful ways their readers might engage their worlds. Their novels offer a radical recasting of the human subject and its situation in the environment, one that valorizes a turn away from the fixity of conceptual certainty and an embrace of experiences that trouble clean distinctions between the human being and its world. Reading through the lens of radical empiricism, this project makes the case that Woolf and Lawrence are together engaging in a similar project: they are working from a shared interest in intensive explorations of the seemingly ineffable qualities in concrete human experience and in bringing those accounts into language to suggest the relational constitution of the human being with other people and the environment. They are working experimentally to discern the extent to which the human being can know first-hand its place in the extensive world. In doing so, the authors come to understand such a human being differently, as simultaneously discrete and non-discrete. By examining the methodological and philosophical intersections of these two authors, this project serves as a first step in suggesting a radical empirical British modernism. Woolf’s and Lawrence’s approaches to experience have philosophical implications that become more apparent when read in conjunction with William James’s philosophy of radical empiricism and the related philosophies of Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead. While “radical empiricist” is not a common moniker for these philosophers, my project makes the case for the consideration of several of their works as reflective of a line of confluent thought that illuminates the concerns of some modernist literature with developing a new understanding of the human situation through an inclusive attention to lived experience. The project is organized into four chapters. In the first chapter, I establish the radical empirical philosophical situation of Woolf’s and Lawrence’s writing, revealing in their novels how the dispositions of the characters facilitate different worlds, and elaborating the attentive approaches that they valorize through their novels. In the second chapter, I explore their critiques of abstraction, elaborating their concern with fixed abstract forms while countering readings of their work as anti-intellectual or apophatically mystical. In the third chapter, I examine how in and through their novels they engage the difficulty of articulating preconceptual experience, and I explore how they productively use ambiguity towards this end. In the fourth and final chapter, I examine the relational situation of the human individual that their novels disclose and the sort of self-understanding that they champion through their work.

This thesis is about expanded narrative, a new field of experimental narrative practices that are not represented by single subjects or by categories such as ‘interactive’. It is defined by works that present a challenge to the form, fiction or nonfiction, in terms of the content, structure, style of writing or audience engagement. Extending the cognitive term ‘perceptual multistability’, that refers to switching between interpretations experienced when we look at an ambiguous figures, such as, the Necker cube, this thesis develops the position that expanded narrative practices and specifically locative narrative, a genera of expanded narrative, hold the potential to prompt the experiential effects of multi-stability. The metaphor of multi-stability introduced here stands in for three aspects of experience: language, perception and belief. While ambiguity and misperceptions have been recognised in the literature of experiential narrative practices, further exposition is required. The thesis asks what are the conditions in which the qualities of the metaphor of multi-stability may be prompted and what framework usefully articulates the parameters of experience? Drawing upon the writings of the philosopher William James, subsequent pragmatists, cognitive neuroscience and narratology, it explores how a radical empiricist perspective can form the basis of a non-foundational experiential framework that questions the status of knowledge and the problems of translation between experience and narrative interpretation. It suggests that the subjective classification of imagined and perceptual objects can be affected by the relations between the narrative form, the environment and the participant’s beliefs. The major contributions of the thesis are (1) the development of the Jamesian experiential framework that sets up cross-disciplinary parameters for the thematics of experience to engage with the ontological and epistemological challenges of evaluating and designing for multistability presents; (2) a relational approach to interpretation and coding participants’ feedback of locative narratives; (3) that is employed in the development of a collection of speculative strategies for evoking the effect of the metaphor of multi-stability, based on the development of four published locative narrative apps and ten prototypes. While highly contingent, participant introspective accounts of experience are central here to the methodology, the process of serial hypothesis forming and the iterative development of prototypes and locative narrative case studies. This research does not attempt to draw causal connections from science to that of narrative experience or vice versa. The thesis first considers the field of expanded narrative and the semantic and pragmatic framings of the term narrative and narratological framings of language as multi-stable. It goes on to examine the antecedent and coexistent practices of locative narrative. The epistemological implications for misperception, the function of representation and intentionality in perception are examined in relation to the environmentally situated perceptual, interpretative, aesthetic and emotional dimensions of experience. This research contributes to research in narrative and creative practices. It extends the form of locative narrative with the concept of multi-stability that has a wider application with the field of expanded narrative, creative practice and narratology.