ABSTRACT
Marie Darrieussecq (b. 1969) is the only living writer considered here, and the only writer to engage with the new models of the mind emerging from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. A trained psychoanalyst, Darrieussecq is equally at home with more traditional understandings of the mind, and maintains an irreverent and often sceptical stance towards all the ideas on which her fiction draws. This chapter explores Darrieussecq's conception of consciousness, her depiction of the images and words of mental life, her interest in the irrational mind of dreams, madness, and the unconscious, and her treatment of the body and brain upon which the mind supervenes. As a writer with a keen sense of her own literary ancestry, a stake in traditional psychoanalytic conceptions of mind, yet also an enthusiasm for science and for science fiction, Darrieussecq's work stands as a twenty-first century milestone to mark how far the authors have travelled since Proust, and the continuity of the route.
