Literature, Language, and Human Consciousness

Abstract

SERIOUS INTERDISCIPLINARY EDUCATION at the university level is widely acknowledged to be necessary for survival in a technological age of accelerating complexity. Grant money is earmarked for interdisciplinary experiments; students are excited by new courses which invite them to connect isolated components of knowledge in meaningful ways. Recently, I was one of eleven professors from four universities in a pilot Futures Studies course (at the University of Wisconsin-Superior) which resulted in several followup courses in specific departments. Each had an interdisciplinary thrust and was designed to help students think holistically and creatively-laterally-about controlling change. One focus in the Futures Studies course was human consciousness-an allinclusive term for human awareness, perception, experience; it covers topics like meditation, yoga, altered states of awareness (e.g., dreams, hypnotic trance, mystical ecstasy), psychic phenomena, biofeedback, reason and intuition in the left and right halves of the brain, mind-altering drugs, brain wave measurement. The futuristic question is, of course, can human consciousness be transformed, improved? Beginning to note a varietyv of connections between research on human consciousness and literary expressions of and about it, I developed an English seminar for upper-division and graduate students. The course has proved popular with English majors and has also attracted non-majors who make up 40%O of the students so far. I want to describe the seminar briefly so as to suggest the fecundity of its subject matter in revealing links between literature and language study and other disciplines. During the first weeks of the seminar, common readings give students a foundation in human consciousness and some new perspectives for understanding literature. Summaries of these assignments may be useful here in specifying the content of the course.