Chris started following the work of Lucy Smith, University of Sydney, Department of Philosophy.
Chris started following the work of Andy Car, University of Sydney, English.
Chris started following the work of Kelly Dance, University College London, Anthropology.
Graduate Student, English
Thesis Title: Psychoactive Scriveners: Drugs, Language, and the Philosophy of Science in the writing of Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick
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Dr Peter Marks
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About
PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Sydney.
Thesis abstract: Drawing upon science, the history and philosophy of science (and the so-called speculative turn), and studies in language and rhetoric, this thesis examines literary representations of psychoactive drugs and their effects, both real and imagined, in a range of drug-related fiction and essay works by Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick. Writing between the literary-rhetorical and the political spheres, about the new 'facts' presented by biochemists and psychopharmacologists, and in response to the rise of drug-cultures, both Huxley and Dick produced original utopian visions and paranoid political critiques, whose thematics, variously inspired and alarmed, surveyed the role of the 'psychoactive' subject in their respective increasingly biochemical epochs. In making the claim that these works are important for contemporary understandings of science and the philosophy of science (including contemporary ideas about diagnosis of schizophrenia, the nature of perceptual reality, and hallucinations) this thesis advances a theory of 'psychoactive scrivening' in which it is argued that writerly engagements, narratives, or modalities that are 'poisoned', or otherwise altered, can teach us as much about physics as metaphysics, and as much about mental disorder as metaphor.
Expected completion date: September 2013.
