Research / Philosophy of Mind, Literature, and Information
Philosophy of Mind, Literature, and Information
Elkins’ philosophical and literary work asks how knowing happens: through consciousness, memory, perception, attention, authorship, lyric authority, visual judgment, mediation, and interpretation. Across Proust, Wordsworth, Plato, Baudelaire, Kafka, Woolf, Maryse Condé, and contemporary AI, this research studies literature as a way of thinking about mind.
The later AI work continues this inquiry in a new register. Large language models make questions once central to philosophy and literature newly urgent: what counts as authorship, how interpretation travels through language, whether objectivity can be modeled, how memory becomes mediated by technology, and what happens when information systems imitate forms of human judgment.
Selected work and projects
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives
Editor, Oxford University Press, Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature, 2022
This edited volume brings Proust into philosophy not simply as a novelist of memory, but as a thinker of consciousness, perception, time, selfhood, ethics, and aesthetic experience. The collection gathers philosophers and literary scholars to show how In Search of Lost Time can be read as a sustained philosophical investigation into how experience becomes knowledge.
Elkins’ chapter, “Proust’s Consciousness,” reframes Proust through several hard problems: the hard problem of philosophy, the hard problem of life, and the hard problem of consciousness. It argues that involuntary memory is only one part of Proust’s philosophical project; many of the novel’s most important experiences are present-tense impressions that resist reduction to memory and instead open onto perception, consciousness, and the difficulty of forming a philosophical position.
The volume was reviewed by Tom Stern in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews and later engaged in Stern’s “Proustian Grief” in the European Journal of Philosophy, with citations to the volume and its individual chapters.
Wordsworth’s Literary Sublime
In Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, ed. Garry L. Hagberg, Springer, 2022
This chapter reads Wordsworth’s sublime as a literary and philosophical structure rather than simply an aesthetic category. It asks how fiction and poetry produce forms of reflection that cannot be reduced to argument, using Wordsworth to show how literary experience can generate philosophical insight.
The chapter sits squarely within philosophy of literature and aesthetics. The volume, edited by Garry L. Hagberg, gathers work at the intersection of fictional worlds, philosophical reflection, aesthetics, language, and selfhood.
AI Comes for the Author
Poetics Today 45.2, 2024
This article examines what large language models do to authorship as a cognitive and aesthetic category, asking how machine-generated language unsettles older humanistic assumptions about intention, authority, originality, and interpretation. James Phelan engages the article in Poetics Today 45.2 as part of an “instructive debate” about AI, narrative, and authorship.
Naming the Lyric: Literature versus Philosophy in Plato’s Symposium
Philosophy and Literature 44.2, 2020
This article argues that Plato’s choice to voice the philosophical account of love through Diotima disguises Sappho as the unnamed female authority behind the dialogue. Alcibiades’s speech echoes Sappho’s lyric descriptions of love, staging a contest between philosophical and lyric accounts of eros.
The article is cited by Rick Anthony Furtak in Kierkegaard, Socrates, and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2025), extending its argument into work on Socratic philosophy, lyric knowledge, and the existential stakes of love.
Middling Memories and Dreams of Oblivion
“Middling Memories and Dreams of Oblivion: Configurations of a Non-Archival Memory in Baudelaire and Proust,” Discourse 24.3, 2002
This article develops the framework of non-archival memory in Baudelaire and Proust. It studies memory not as storage or retrieval, but as a mediated, partial, and transforming process through which literary consciousness relates to loss, time, and forgetting.
The framework was adopted by Alison Luyten in Manuscrítica 28 (2015) as the theoretical hinge for a reading of Woolf’s manuscript revisions, and by Taylor Johnston in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59.3 (2018) for a central Proust/Knausgaard distinction. This is one of the clearest reception trails linking the early memory work to later modernist and manuscript-genetic criticism.
Picture Lessons in Kafka’s The Trial
MLN 136.3, 2021
This article coins the framework of “picture lessons” and identifies “wavering of the scales” as a structural property of Kafka’s juridical scenes. It treats interpretation not as something added to Kafka’s images from outside, but as a formal property built into the instability of the scenes themselves.
The article is cited by Goicoechea in Atenea (2024), extending the picture-lessons framework into later Kafka criticism.
Stalled Flight: Horatian Remains in Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne”
Comparative Literature Studies 39.1, 2002; A. Owen Aldridge Prize
This article identifies Horace’s Ode 2.20 as a structural model for Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne.” It reads Baudelaire’s poem through the persistence of classical remains, showing how literary memory survives as fragment, echo, and stalled transformation.
The article is cited on the Horace-Baudelaire intertext by Sonam Singh in Comparative Literature 64.4 (2012) and by Marko Marinčič in Acta Neophilologica 42 (2009), where Elkins is discussed alongside Michèle Lowrie in work on Horatian remains in Baudelaire.
Memory and Material Significance
“Memory and Material Significance: Composing Modernist Influence,” Modern Language Quarterly 69.4, 2008
This article develops the relationship among Proust, Woolf, and Taine in modernist memory studies. It examines influence not as a line of transmission but as a material and cognitive process through which writers compose memory, perception, and aesthetic inheritance.
Memory, Technology, and Wisdom
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2022
This article connects embodied memory, technological mediation, and the conditions of wisdom. It extends the memory work into questions of technology and mediation, making it an important bridge between the earlier literary-philosophical scholarship and later AI-facing work.
Proust’s Novel Time
In Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023
This chapter treats Proust’s novel as a philosophical exploration of time. It connects narrative form, memory, temporality, and lived experience, showing how literary structure can function as a model for thinking about time.
Proust’s Family at Home
H-France Salon 13.13, 2021
This essay reads Proust through family, domesticity, and the social textures of home, linking literary form to memory, social experience, and self-formation.
History’s Theft and Memory’s Return in Maryse Condé
2006
This article develops the framework of “re-theft” for postcolonial historical recovery: the author stealing back a collective history manipulated and silenced by colonialism and literary establishments. It extends the memory work beyond European modernism into postcolonial literary history and collective memory.
Helix Center Roundtables
2022
Elkins participated in Helix Center public roundtables on coding, language, mind, and natural-language generation before the release of ChatGPT. These events connected literary and philosophical questions about interpretation, cognition, and language with emerging debates about AI systems, including conversations with figures such as Ned Block, Francesca Rossi, and Kyunghyun Cho.