About the author:
Marina S. Ragachewskaya, DSc in Philology, Associate Professor, Minsk State Linguistic University, Zakharova 21, 220034 Minsk, the Republic of Belarus.
E-mail:
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1000-4238
Abstract:
Fiction and the relevant conceptualizing academic discipline have been developing in parallel. Human consciousness is simultaneously a tool for understanding the world and its artistic representation and the object of human comprehension of our inner nature. Consciousness has been represented in fiction beginning from its perception as a material substance in the Middle Ages, through naming the emotions, expansion of the range of feelings depicted in the Renaissance literature, through the first-person narration and identification of the thought and the word, towards the discovery of the unconscious and the ways of its representation in the epoch of Modernism, and equation of the processes of consciousness and the principles of functioning of the artificial intelligence during the Postmodern period. Consciousness as a tool became an object of artistic discovery in the 20th century inspiring the emergence of the “novel of consciousness” genre. The English writer and critic D. Lodge in his work “Consciousness and the Novel” expounded the basic caveats about human consciousness, drawing attention to the contingence of fiction and science, as well as fiction and the history of its studies.