The oceanic literary reading mind: An impression

Abstract

The mind and brain processes of the literary reading mind are most accurately defined as oceanic: the mind is an ocean. This is the essential premise that I put forward in my book Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (Routledge, 2011).1 The statement is of course a metaphor. It follows in a long line of metaphorical apprehensions of the human mind, from Plato’s notion of the mind as a wax tablet to the more modern — some might say reductive — ideas of the human mind as a machine or a computer.