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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press
By Thomas C. Caramagno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Pp. xi+362; 6 illustrations. $30.
In this century, characterized by the explosion of knowledge and the rise of the specialist, interdisciplinary studies pose special problems. As the knowledge base expands and training becomes more specific, breadth is sacrificed for detail, and expertise in more then one discipline is harder to achieve. How then to evaluate a work such as The Flight of the Mind, which attempts to bridge literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and neuropsychiatry--three separate bodies of knowledge, three different languages, and three approaches to generate meaning? Short of creating a generation of multi-specialists I think we need some guidelines for interdisciplinary studies; otherwise the findings of one discipline are in danger of losing their original meaning and validity when used in another frame of reference.
The author of The Flight of the Mind is not convincing in his attempt to replace psychoanalysis with neuroscience as a critical approach to Virginia Woolf and her work. Caramagno states his intention to reexamine Virginia Woolf's "madness and her fiction in the light of recent discoveries about the biological basis of manic-depressive illness." He challenges Freudian critics who read "symptoms or texts as...
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