Culture and Consciousness

William S. Haney II is a University of California Davis Ph.D. Professor of English. He has also taught at the University of Maryland and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. His edited books and books focus on American and British literature and culture today, often from a consciousness-studies perspective. These include Humanism and the Humanities of the Twenty-First Century (Bucknell 2002), which he co-edited along with Peter Malekin. He is currently working on two books: Sacred Theater (coauthored), and Cybercultures and Cyborgs and Consciousness.
Culture and Consciousness claims that the enormous interdisciplinary boom of consciousness research has profound implications for literary and cultural research, and that there are significant potential benefits to this research in twenty-first century. This book aims to demonstrate how consciousness studies can be used to help us reconsider our approaches to key issues as well as the basic assumptions of theory and criticism. The book’s first half explores major issues in humanities. It does so by examining them from a perspective that includes all aspects of mind and consciousness. Haney shows that theories surrounding identity, truth, and language are not able to resolve the issues. The rest of the chapters will apply the concept of intersubjectivity for the reading of particular works. This book has a key message: Questions of literary and cultural theory regarding binaries like presence and absence, pattern, randomness, the given or the made, the individual or the collective, will continue to escape the mind as a reservoir for rational thought. Haney argues that the duality of self and of other can be overcome at a certain point in unity.