Body and Tool: An Enactive Approach to Perceptual Entrainment in Fiction and Science Fiction

Body and Tool explores representations of perception in fiction, science fiction, and science fiction film by using two key ideas from cognitive science: a) perception is the embodied exploration of the environment, and b) tool use impacts perception. I argue that it is crucial to examine fictional representations of perception at the body-tool interface . My focus on tool use counters the pervasive view in both fiction and literary criticism that perception is a function of "brain-processing"---our current version of the Cartesian mind/body split. I also argue that the less we examine the tool as mediator of perception, the greater the ideological power of the tool over us. Fiction and film offer copious evidence of the selective filtering of perception through tool use; by making tool-interaction my object of study, I demonstrate the embodied nature of cognition and probe what is foreclosed when tools themselves are used to amplify the belief in the mind/body split. Beginning with Samuel Richardson's canny use of the letter in his epistolary novel, Clarissa, I track the under-examined body-tool interface to show how novelists use human-tool interactions to demonstrate the limitations of overreliance on information purveyed by tools. Chapter 1 also analyzes the "scientific" appropriation of the telephone and camera to create idealized, "fixed" perceptions in Marcel Proust's The Guermantes Way, comparing the perceptual distancing effects of telephone and camera with those of the time machine in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. In the rest of the dissertation, I consider the cyberpunk concept of the (computational) uploadable consciousness, teasing apart the perceptual shifts which take place when minds (and bodies) meld with tools. Chapter 2 argues that when the body-tool interface is fuzzy, the virtual realities it constructs allow for radical (re)configurations of self/other, while Chapter 3 examines what happens when perception is "maxxed out" by the body-tool-based construction of simulacra that may as well be real. Finally, Chapter 4 looks at the excised body in film representations of thought-controlled prosthetics, arguing that this excision tacitly justifies imperialist projects while reifying extended mind theory---the idea that the tools we use cognize along with us.