title: Oscar Wilde and the brain cell.
abstract: This chapter considers Oscar Wilde's interest in the brain cell as an aesthetic object. Offering an account of Wilde's career that analyzes his early interest in physiology and philosophy, this chapter argues that Wilde's uniquely aesthetic take on the brain suggests that he rejects an account of the self as autonomous or self-determining. For many late Victorians brain science threatened both the freedom of human action and the legitimacy of beauty because it had the potential to invalidate conscious experience. But writers whose work Wilde knew, like John Ruskin, W. K. Clifford, and John Tyndall, avoided the despair of materialism by using aesthetic terms in their own discussions of life's invisible materials. Wilde's art collaborates with the contemporary sciences. His depictions of the cell direct the senses to a new field of being that emphasizes the molecular life all humans have in common, in which individual responsibility and activity matter less than the necessity of beauty.
authors.affiliation: Department of English, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. Electronic address: ejc244@cornell.edu.
authors.forename: Elisha
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Cohn
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000166:cytology; D005197:Famous Persons; D049672:History, 19th Century; D007494:Ireland; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D009462:Neurology / Q000266:history*; D009474:Neurons / Q000166:cytology
keywords: Henri Bergson; John Tyndall; Oscar Wilde; aestheticism; atom; materialism; molecular; neuron