This talk will draw on the notion of plasticity as a neural as well as an ontological/experiential condition as theorised by the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and the philosopher Catherine Malabou respectively, and connect that to the notion of chunking, also theorised by LeDoux and independently by the cognitive narratologist David Herman. The reading will then attempt to explore how the neural and the cultural coordinates of cognition and memory converge in complex theoretical readings and will lastly map that onto Astrid Erll’s recent concept of implicit collective memory. The philosophical aim of this talk is to engage with the broader convergences of memory studies and medical humanities through these theoretical verticals and the consequent research possibilities that emerge in critical theory and cultural studies.

Avishek Parui (PhD, Durham) is an Associate Professor in English and Memory Studies at IIT Madras and an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. He is the author of Postmodern Literatures (Orient Blackswan, 2018) and Culture and the Literary: Matter, Metaphor, Memory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). He is the Principal Investigator of the Centre for Memory Studies (CMS) at IIT Madras and the founding chairperson of the Indian Network for Memory Studies (INMS).