Research / Philosophy of Mind, Literature, and Information
In literature, consciousness is never an abstract mechanism. It has a voice, a history, a body, and a way of moving through time.
Across literature and philosophy, Elkins studies how knowing happens: how consciousness organizes experience, how memory reconstructs the past, how perception is mediated, and how narrative shapes the self.
Proust is a central anchor, but these questions extend across poetry, modernism, postcolonial literature, visual judgment, authorship, and technological mediation.
Present experience
The volume treats In Search of Lost Time as a sustained philosophical investigation of consciousness and experience, not only memory. Its essays explore perception, time, selfhood, ethics, and aesthetic experience.
“Proust’s Consciousness” argues that Proust’s philosophy cannot be reduced to involuntary memory, foregrounding present-tense perception, experience, and consciousness itself.
Wordsworth’s sublime shows how literary experience can generate philosophical insight through perception and reflection, rather than argument alone.
Read via DOI →The framework of “picture lessons” locates interpretation and wavering judgment inside the visual instability of Kafka’s juridical scenes.
Reconstruction and duration
The essay asks how technologies of memory change not only what people retain, but what counts as knowledge and wisdom. It connects classical philosophy and literary accounts of embodied memory with technological mediation, digital systems, and large language models.
Narrative form becomes a model for thinking about memory, temporality, lived experience, and the structure of consciousness.
Family and domestic experience illuminate the relations among memory, social formation, identity, and selfhood.
Non-archival memory in Baudelaire and Proust emerges as a partial, mediated, and transforming relation to loss, time, and forgetting.
Proust, Woolf, and Taine show influence as a material and cognitive process through which writers compose memory, perception, and inheritance.
The framework of “re-theft” extends this inquiry into postcolonial historical recovery and collective memory.
Language and judgment
Diotima and Sappho stage competing philosophical and lyric accounts of eros, authority, voice, and what kinds of language can produce knowledge.
Large language models unsettle humanistic assumptions about intention, originality, authority, and interpretation by turning authorship into an operational question.
Read via DOI →Classical remains persist as fragment, echo, and stalled transformation, making literary memory a problem of mediation and authority.
A continuing inquiry
Questions about memory, interpretation, authorship, attention, and mediation now also shape Elkins’s work on artificial intelligence. Language models make these questions operational because they increasingly interpret, remember, generate, and act through language.
These earlier philosophical and literary questions inform the current research; they were not originally framed as AI research.