Grad Studies: Exploring Weird, Unpopular…and Prescient Ideas on Consciousness

Doctoral candidate Kayla Carden was in high school when she fell for Victorian poetry. “Long, long ago,” she reports, “I recited Gerard Manley Hopkins' ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ for my school district's Poetry Out Loud competition.” This past year she received the Errett W. McDiarmid Graduate Fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts to support completion of her dissertation about that era, "Putting the ‘I’ in Eye: Late Victorian Physicalisms." Describes Carden, “I'm essentially studying three very strange writers of late Victorian Britain and what they have to say about what ‘consciousness’ is—specifically, what they have to say about it in their science writing and their poetry.” She graciously responded to questions via email.

Would you say more about your dissertation topic?

Physicist John Tyndall, poet-philosopher Constance Naden, and philologist Alexander John Ellis all had very peculiar, somewhat similar arguments attempting to prove the mind is, to some degree, physical (though perhaps not just a brain), which made them outliers in a culture mostly hostile to that kind of thought. I'm interested in their prescient, sometimes contradictory ideas because they held these views in part because of their art despite detractors believing their materialism might threaten poetic, "immaterial" pleasures. I’m writing about the history of materialism and vision and why my three writers, even though they never directly communicated with one another, are still deeply intertwined in a kind of early physicalist history.

What was the genesis of your interest in that topic?

Early on in grad school, I began to think about minor, amateur, sometimes "bad" poetry in the Victorian era because so much of even the best of late nineteenth-century poetry is riddled with lyrical self-doubt and anxiety. This led me to Naden's poetry—which I think is decidedly not bad and sometimes quite good, even if it was never bestselling—and then to her even more unpopular, even more nontraditional collaborative essay writing about her and a friend's philosophy of mind called "Hylo-Idealism." The investigation into weird, unpopular theories of mind that she was inspired by tumbled into me reading Tyndall and Ellis afterwards.

Have certain professors significantly nurtured the project? 

I would not have gotten this far without my advisor Brian Goldberg's support. We don't necessarily study the same things, but he's helped a lot with fostering my interest in prosody since I began working with him. Professor Elaine Auyoung was one of the very first people I met here on campus and convinced me to take the offer to come study here: She has done a great deal to help me think more about theories of mind and why we bother studying English at all. 

What do you enjoy most about teaching?

I was skeptical of teaching coming in, mostly because I was worried I would be hopelessly bad at it! But ironically, towards the end of my time here, the thing I've learned is that I really enjoyed teaching the most out of this experience. There's something very fun and sometimes rejuvenating about getting creative with the curriculum—and about interacting with undergraduates who are just beginning to consider things critically. Even classes I've TA'd for in subjects I had little prior experience with, like “Banned Books” or “Children's Literature,” were fascinating just to see how different subfields can help different English majors and non-majors alike grow and learn to further enjoy reading and writing.