Exploring Embodied Consciousness: The Intersection of Science and Sensuality in Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

Abstract

This paper aims to investigates how Shafak constructs a literary space in which the rationality of science intersects with the emotive and sensorial dimensions of human life, revealing the complexity of embodied existence. Engaging with 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019) the study explores how the protagonist, Tequila Leila, negotiates personal trauma, memory, and identity through a framework that fuses neurological time with deep sensuality. Crucially, this expanded research integrates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of “Phenomenology” and C.P. Snow’s “Two Culture” to deepen the understanding of Shafak’s narrative. While Snow’s “two Cultures” thesis outlines the historical schism between the sciences and humanities, Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology” offers the ontological remedy, positing that the body is not merely an object of science but the very condition of consciousness. The analysis demonstrates that Leila’s final memories after her death are not cognitive retrievals but activations of a “body schema” that persists in its grip on the world. By reimagining the novel as a “perceptual field” where the boundaries between the dying subject and the living city dissolve, Shafak challenges Western dualisms of mind-body and reason-emotion, offering a holistic vision in which science and sensuality are reconciled in the flesh of the text.