This paper will focus on two works: the neuronovel The Echo Maker (2006) by Richard Powers, a fictional account of Mark Schluter who suffers from Capgras Syndrome, that is, a rare neurological condition that results in the patient’s belief that their loved ones have been replaced with exact copies; and the neuromemoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness (2012) by Susannah Cahalan, which...
In Man Walks into a Room, a neuronovel staging an amnesiac, Nicole Krauss challenges the memory-identity equation. While she draws on neuroscience, she also writes against it, as she emphasizes the explanatory gap and the problem of qualia. To resist the growing authority of neuroscience and its often reductionist discourse, Krauss features a neurosurgeon as a mad scientist coming straight out...