Melba Cuddy-Keane- Doctor of Philosophy
- Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto
Melba Cuddy-Keane
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto
About
43
Publications
14,162
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244
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Introduction
Melba Cuddy-Keane’s areas of research are modernism, narratology, and book history/print culture. Her writings on Virginia Woolf link narrative form to political and pedagogical engagements, and her work on modernism investigates conceptual pluralism, often using contested words to understand cultural debate. Her recent work explores interfaces between narrative and cognitive neuroscience and psychology, focusing on offline and embodied cognition. She is completing a book on “Narrative’s Brain.”
Skills and Expertise
Current institution
Publications
Publications (43)
My online visual essay, “Mapping Mrs. Dalloway: London as a Networked City,” has received over 6000 views in the last 4 years, most viewers downloading the file in either Powerpoint or pdf format. The large number of users and their global reach (Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia, Australia) make this a wonderful opportunity for collecti...
Beginning with Virginia Woolf’s question, when writing a novel, “Who thinks it?” this article proposes that behind every storyworld is a storymind whose action constitutes a cognitive plot. Redeploying Gérard Genette’s “narrativization by focalization,” I argue that description is always focalized, focalizing is an act of perception, and unfolding...
Following Brian Richardson’s typology of multiversion narratives that are multilinear, this paper posits a complementary form termed multiphysical—a hybrid term between multiphysics and metaphysics that refers to narratives that hold a linear event constant while cycling it through overlapping depictions of ontologically distinct realms. Like multi...
This chapter’s purpose is two-fold: to propose an approach to distributed cognition as qualia and to probe modernist narratives and cultural history for insights about such qualia’s effects. Following Daniel Dennett’s distinction between scientific ontology, dependent on empirically verifiable (or falsifiable) truth, and ‘manifest ontology,’ or the...
This project is about the mapping of space “beneath,” whether of literal or imagined realms. The tangled maze of interrelationships, however, means that the traditional linear academic paper is here an inadequate form. Just as the underworld requires stratigraphical mapping, so too my poster and accompanying web pages are designed to be read three...
The modernist storymind has long been associated with discontinuous and multidirectional time: mind time layered over clock time. This chapter’s argument is that, just as temporal experience in modernist narrative is mobile and pluralist, so too the reader’s spatial imagination is led through dynamic and mobile shifts. Seeing in modernist narrative...
The complexity of global relations as we understand them today requires new strategies for mapping, exceeding the boundaries of traditional cartography. In the humanities and social sciences, space is being increasingly conceived as experiential, dynamic, multi-layered, and multi-perspectival, and nowhere more so than in ways we imagine the world....
Readers have been fascinated by the detailed references to London in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925); scholars and students have traced the characters’ precise routes; tourist sites offer guided walks along these paths. This on-line essay, however, concerns not what Woolf’s characters would have seen walking in London, but the patterns descri...
This chapter draws on theories of embodied cognition to read Florine Stettheimer’s dancing figure entitled Wave (1912), arguing that its ambiguous bodily schema, a simultaneous stepping forward and stepping back, enacts a conceptual schema of oscillating between different impulses. The mobile nature of Stettheimer’s maquette is explained first thro...
Against long-standing views that ground Virginia Woolf’s novels in individual subjectivity, this chapter advances three claims: that Woolf was intensely concerned with communities throughout her career; that she confronted the difficulties of communal formations in multiple, complex ways; and that she was a radical revisionist who overturned the tr...
If the ethical modern subject takes its point of departure from Hamlet’s problem--how to act in an ethically uncertain and ambiguous world--the ethical modernist subject must take a further step, preserving uncertainty and ambiguity in order to act in ethical ways. Many modernist narratives endorse what we might call a weak or a minimalist deontolo...
The notion of a Victorian/Modernist Divide relies on binary constructs defining the two periods through oppositional characteristics, and theories identifying the turn of the twentieth century as a moment of radical change. I test these assumptions in three ways: (1) quantitative analysis, using word graphs produced by the Ngrams Viewer, assessing...
Daily habits are useful. Habitual thinking, by contrast, is limiting, even potentially dangerous. It dulls perceptual freshness and stifles our ability to generate new ideas and to think in new ways. A complex, changing world requires flexible minds. Yet how cognitive flexibility functions, which brain regions support it and, perhaps most important...
Desmond MacCarthy belittled Mrs Dalloway as “a long wool-gathering process,” while in To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay shields her thoughts from her husband’s prying invasiveness with the self-deprecating remark, “Only wool gathering.” Wool-gathering—a rambling habit of mind—has nonetheless been recognized as crucial to both Woolf’s depiction of cons...
This chapter forges connections between a fictional narrative and the fundamental premise underlying all theories of Embodied Cognition: bodies do not merely express, communicate, or influence thought, they actively create the shape of thought itself. Drawing on various experiments in the field of psychology, I explain how sensations, gestures, and...
The well-recognized problems in the chronology of The Good Soldier can be readily explained once we recognize the palimpsestic date, in the novel, of July 4. The masking of the Declaration of Independence by the imperialist and nationalist violence that erupted, for Britain, on August 4 emerges, in a broad paradigmatic way, as the vital tension und...
This chapter explores three different ways of reading Virginia Woolf: ventriloquize, surround, and bounce. In the context of challenges to historical criticism, the chapter suggests that it is the bounce that that most helps us to open history as it relates to Woolf. It considers how the three methods of reading Woolf stand in contrast to reductive...
Despite difficulties in finding an adequate terminology, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists offer empirical evidence that the body thinks. Embodied cognition may be non-conscious rather than conscious, but it can influence conscious activity and initiate thought on its own. This paper works at the intersections of scientific r...
What impact, during the modernist period, could a writer, writing as an artist, hope to have in the public sphere? In the mid-nineteenth century, Alfred Lord Tennyson was able to write a profoundly personal poem that simultaneously engaged some of the most troubling controversies of his time: the challenges posed by the developing geological and bi...
This paper derives from a talk I presented in Chongqing, China in 2009. I briefly explain embodied cognition as “modal” rather than “a-modal” thought, cite a number of scientific experiments that present evidence of embodied cognition, and turn to narrative examples to show how writers of fiction respond to the challenge of writing about non-verbal...
Modelling the world means being situated in the world, and Virginia Woolf wrote at a time when international theory, international agreements, and international peace work were getting their start. While unlike Henry James and E. M. Forster, Woolf did not write “international novels,” forms of global consciousness pervade her work, articulating thr...
auditory perception; soundscapes; city; diffusion; listening; auscultation; modernist fiction; E.M. Forster; Virginia Woolf
This chapter presents an overview of narratological approaches to Virginia Woolf from the early 1940s to 2005, grouping the works into two phases with the dividing line placed roughly in the late 1970s when the conjunctions of feminism, theory, and narratology were changing the ways Woolf’s work was discussed. Narratology gives us insight into the...
In July 1927, Virginia Woolf participated in the first of three broadcasts she presented on the BBC. “Are too many Books Written and Published?” was a collaborative project, scripted jointly with her husband, Leonard Woolf, in the typical BBC format of the conversational debate. Virginia was not entirely comfortable in front of a radio microphone,...
Modernism/modernity 10.3 (2003) 539-558
The developments of science . . . are welding the world into a whole, whether its people wish it or not.
So wrote Maxwell Garnett, Secretary of the League of Nations Union, in 1924. Today, the clock may be running faster, but the discourse of globalization is surprisingly the same. Contemporary theories, it i...
At a time when the western world was expanding to an inclusive franchise, Virginia Woolf argued the need for a broad public educated in critical thinking and an informed, intelligent, and non-antagonistic public discourse. Drawing on a wealth of historical detail, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere shows how Woolf's literary re...
MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48.2 (2002) 526-528
In "Lady Dorothy Nevill," an essay originally entitled "Behind the Bars," Virginia Woolf dryly alludes to "those comfortably padded lunatic asylums, which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England." But Lady Dorothy, Woolf suggests, being not "an extreme case of the aristocracy," was...
This short essay discusses the 1997 film version of Mrs. Dalloway (dir. Marlene Gorris; screenplay, Eileen Atkins) focusing on Woolf’s own use of cinematic techniques; the use of flashbacks in both novel and film; and the relevance to the theme of shell shock and trauma. By increasing the number of flashbacks and framing each flashback with a focus...
Department of English and Scarborough College, University of Toronto
An attack on my analysis of the relations between community and leaders in Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts, followed by my rebuttal. As for the larger critical significance of the exchange, I quote from my last paragraph: “As someone who has written on the importance of a dialogic community, I try to be guided by two principles: to sound th...
Comedy is the genre of collective experience; however, comic modes differ in the degree of inclusiveness that each implies. By examining the interactions of satiric, amiable, and liminal comedy, we can see how Woolf's final novel, Between the Acts, becomes a fully inclusive form. This form is radical and subversive, standing in antithetical relatio...
Published in 1989, this essay proposes a “kinetic criticism . . . that examines the dynamics of the text in terms both of the way one part of the text negotiates with another part, and the way the texts negotiate with cultural history.” Using Joyce Cary as a case study example, the essay positions him as “an early feminist who was nevertheless stro...
