This thesis brings together the contemporary fields of embodied cognitive science and ecological fiction to investigate how literary forms frame and explore processes of mind and selfhood. In recent decades, there has been a move towards an embodied, embedded, enactive and extended understanding of mental processes, referred to as ‘4E cognition’. This embodied account of the mind parallels how the environmental humanities have sought to rethink the divisions between mind, body, and environment. However, these so-called ‘new’ understandings of the mind have long been important to epistemic traditions and cultural vantage points beyond the mainly Anglo-European origins of embodied cognition. Taking inspiration from the fields of postcolonial feminist science studies and critical neuroscience, I put pressure on the 4E paradigm’s assumptions and marginalisations by investigating how six novels from Indigenous North American and Japanese contexts theorise the mind-body-environment relation on their own terms. While these literary theorisations resemble 4E’s critique of the atomised brain, I argue that their distinct depictions of the embodied mind in relation with environments, other humans, and more-than-human others challenge and transcend this framework’s models of cognition.
Over the course of three chapters on ‘relationality’, ‘fluidity’, and ‘materiality’, I think with these novels’ idiosyncratic conceptualisations of mind-body-world relations via narrative contexts that – in contrast to 4E’s theoretical move towards mind-world interdependency – are marked by the loss of ecological relations. In Chapter One, I analyse how Tawada Yōko’s thrice-translated Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016), and Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife (1998) and its rewritten version Antelope Woman (2016) complicate and expand the descriptions of ‘embodied-embedded cognition’ through the themes of translation and kinship. In Chapter Two, I bring the enactive paradigm into critical dialogue with Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995) and Ishimure Michiko’s Lake of Heaven (1997) through the lens of fluidity and water. I argue that these novels exceed the enactive, nondualist metaphor of ‘laying down a path’ via the cyclical and nonlinear directions of water and the multiple, embodied modes of relating to it that are threatened in these narratives by dam-building and displacement. Chapter Three analyses the role of materiality and memory, core aspects of the extended mind model, through narrative contexts of systemic social and environmental change in Ogawa Yōko’s The Memory Police (2019) and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (2020). I argue that these novels depict their own forms of extended cognition through networks of care which challenge functionalist models of extended networks of computational processes. Bringing a comparative, ecological, and literary approach to the study of mind, I argue that these creative texts expose the limits of a descriptive and explanatory account of cognition by embodying processes and forms of thinking through their own irreducible contexts.
