Mind over Matter? Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed as Counternarrative

Abstract

Mental disorders have become the topic of numerous contemporary Americannovels. Attesting to the ongoing fascination with the workings and thesciences of the human mind, many of these texts turn to neuroscientificquestions. This paper offers a close reading of one of these`neuronarratives' - Joshua Ferris's acclaimed 2010 novel The Unnamed, astory in which the protagonist is afflicted with an utterly mysteriouscondition that disrupts his sense of self as his mind appears to beseparated from his body. In this paper, I aim to show how such a dualistconception problematizes not only the concepts of self and agency as theunnamed disease is linked to contemporary lifestyles in corporateAmerica, but also helps to craft a counternarrative that challengesrecent materialist conceptions and neuroscientific theories.