• CHARACTER: AN INTERDISCPLINARY PANEL (Poster)
• April 3, 2012, 2 PM-5 PM
• 1140 Flanner Hall, University of Notre Dame
• Presenters & Abstracts
• Mark Alfano While there has been much recent debate about the extent to which so-called situationist social psychology threatens Aristotelian virtue ethics, little has been written discussing whether these same sorts of considerations can be brought to bear on other Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian positions. According to philosophical situationists, the traits emphasized by virtue ethics (e.g., honesty, generosity, courage, etc.) do not exist, at least as traditionally conceived, because much of human behavior can be explained and predicted without reference to them. Until now, almost no one has considered the implications of this critique for Aristotelian aesthetics, a lacuna I attempt to fill. My primary interest is not historical, however – I am mainly interested in what the purpose and value of art might be in light of what psychology and other social sciences reveal about human nature. I argue that the canonical Aristotelian defense of narrative art as a tool for character education does not survive the situationist critique, assuming that this critique is successful against virtue ethics in the first place. Nevertheless, a revised version of the defense, according to which art depicts how context and character conspire to produce behavior, emerges from struggling with the situationist challenge.
• Sara Maurer This paper will explore the idea that modernism’s sense of knowing characters imprecisely, sensually, and partially already informs the way Victorian realism presents and “feels for” its neediest characters. In the famous Chapter 17 of Adam Bede, George Eliot protests to her imagined readers that she cannot offer them perfect characters because “what will you do then . . . with your neighbor Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence?” Putting up with imperfect characters, Eliot suggests, will train readers to compassionately deal with imperfect people. Eliot’s theory of character suggests that the most morally useful characters are those who receive sustained narrative attention in order that the reader might experience both their faults and strengths. Her insistence on detail accrued over time is absent from Virginia Woolf’s comments, 70 years later, that a character comes over a writer in an “overmastering impression” that might be compared to “a draught or a smell of burning.” Reporting her own experience of briefly witnessing an old woman on a train, Woolf reports that her sense of the stranger in distress can only be poured out “pell-mell” in words that barely do justice to the experience. Most literary critics would attribute the difference between Woolf and Eliot to the general literary shift from an intensively empirical realism to an impressionist, modernist aesthetic. I would like to emphasize, on the other hand, the divide between Eliot’s imperative that we learn to love our neighbors, and Woolf’s core assumption that we can feel strongly about and for those we don’t know at all. Through a brief analysis of strangers in need who surface and disappear in the novels of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, I will demonstrate that the partial and fleeting imagery associated with modernism has always been a strategy in Victorian realism’s representation of its neediest characters.
• Markus Christen Although the notion of ‘character’ is – at least today – unusual in brain research, there is a broad consensus within neuroscience that the personality of an individual has its “foundation” in specific characteristics of the person’s brain (e.g. with respect to neuronal connectivity). Actually, from a historical perspective, the advent of modern neuroscience was strongly driven by the impetus to find connections between brain and human character – and the rapid growth of social neuroscience in the last decade is an indication that this motivation still prevails within neuroscience. For studying the connection between brain and character (or ‘personality’, the modern term), persons with specific types of brain damage (due to, e.g., stroke, tumors, neurodegenerative diseases, or head injuries) as well as behavioral effects of therapeutic interventions into the brain (using, e.g. lesion procedures, medication, or deep brain stimulation, DBS), were and still are an important source of knowledge – but the methodologies used usually fail to grasp the holistic nature of human personality. In this contribution, I will discuss this problem along four steps. First, I will present a complex case of unintended “personality change” after a DBS intervention to exemplify the problem. Second, I will provide a short historical overview on the kind and relevance of character studies in brain research of the 19th century and modern social neuroscience in order to demonstrate the relevance of this topic. Third, by referring to deep brain stimulation, I will discuss the problem of measuring personality changes and how this affects clinical practice. Finally, I will point to some ethical issues that are involved when measuring character becomes (again) a major topic in neuroscience.
• Veronica Alfano Some Victorian poets react to the rise of the novel by writing dramatic monologues that incorporate prosaic elements; others, however, react by declining to depict detailed plots or realistic characters. Their lyrics instead generate evacuated, incantatory voices belonging to no one in particular. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem beginning “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,” for example, figures memory as vague and undirected desire; standing in for interiority or consciousness, the hazy nostalgia of this poem’s speaker obscures rather than constitutes distinctive selfhood. (Nicholas Dames’s Amnesiac Selves argues that imperfect novelistic memory, in contrast, creates a confident narrator who can lend a clear teleological arc to his or her past.) Brevity and patterns of formal iteration block elaborated characterization, shaping lyric’s intimate impersonality. Such tactics reveal the Victorian longing for an illusory Golden Age of artistic purity, in which poetry was not tainted by materialistic or utilitarian concerns. But I argue that the emptying-out of a lyric’s “I,” and the concomitant indistinctness of the characters it portrays, also hint at a deliberate strategy of authorial self-concealment in A. E. Housman’s popular 1896 volume A Shropshire Lad. Even as he promises to commemorate various lost “lads,” Housman’s repetitive sequence of pared-down poems causes them to fade into forgettable commonplaces. This deliberate failure to differentiate elegized subjects, or to break free of the quasi-anonymous ballad form, ultimately reflects a homosexual poet’s guilty unwillingness to dwell on beloved young men or on personal sentiment. I show that the passionate content of A Shropshire Lad is tamped down by an austere verbal economy that insists on favoring the general over the individual.