Reports

ΜΝΗΜΟΣΥΝΗ: Nel mezzo del engram

Morris, Amy S.

My project is in the mode of the “humanities,” not the neurosciences; I cannot evade
the genre of a first-person account. While my own “attention” is explicitly one subject of
this project, another is the concept of attentiveness, a topic—and an issue—of major
cultural importance. This project is not about me. (I’ve written that already.) It’s about a
perspective on neurological issues that science doesn’t have (and, arguably, wants to
avoid), and that certain disciplines of humanities insist on [pre]understanding from
afar. In a sense, I am imitating Dante’s rhetorical presentation of his own interior self as
a whichever brain, while standing in Augustine’s caves of memory, hearing Virgil’s
discourse about Aeneas looking at the images of history on the walls in Carthage. I’m
not claiming to be another Dante, but my narrative will witness, while my logic will
argue.

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More About This Work

Academic Units
Italian Academy
Publisher
Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University
Series
Italian Academy Fellows' Seminar Working Papers
Published Here
March 31, 2011