The Embodied Novel (original) (raw)
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Despite a significant amount of works on cognitive poetics and narratology, a gap in the connection among experimental neuro-cognitive investigation, current explanatory theories in the scientific arena, and their applicability in the field of literary criticism still remains evident. In this paper, which is preliminary with respect to much wider-ranging research currently being carried out, we shall first of all attempt to identify some of the elements that consistently characterise diachronically examined literary fiction. The results of this analysis will be used to put together a model that identifies the initial drive to tell a story as being the transmission of a sense nucleus, rather than in the construction of a complex plot. Then some considerations will be offered on the possible biological-cognitive premises underpinning this tendency, which in their turn may be inserted into an interpretative framework that acknowledges the specific literary tradition in question. Finally, in the field of research into narrativity in literature, the interdisciplinary concept of style will be used to identify the most suitable one for connecting natural and cultural aspects.
Kuzmičová, A. (2014): Literary narrative and mental imagery: A view from embodied cognition
Style, 2014
The objective of this article is twofold. In the first part, I discuss two issues central to any theoretical inquiry into mental imagery: embodiment and consciousness. I do so against the backdrop of second-generation cognitive science, more specifically the increasingly popular research framework of embodied cognition, and I consider two caveats attached to its current exploitation in narrative theory. In the second part, I attempt to cast new light on readerly mental imagery by offering a typology of what I propose to be its four basic varieties. The typology is grounded in the framework of embodied cognition and it is largely compatible with key neuroscientific and other experimental evidence produced within the framework.
"Embodied Social Cognition and Comparative Literature: an Introduction"
Poetics Today, 2020
There is a growing sense among scholars working in cognitive literary studies that their assumptions and methodologies increasingly align them with another paradigmatically interdisciplinary field: comparative literature. This introduction to the special issue on cognitive approaches to comparative literature explores points of alignment between the two fields, outlining possible cognitivist interventions into debates that have been animating comparative literature, such as those concerning “universals,” politics of translatability (especially in the context of world literature), and practices of thinking across the boundaries of media. It discusses both fields’ indebtedness to cultural studies, as well as cognitive literary theorists’ commitment to historicizing and their sustained focus on the embodied social mind.
Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2023
In this paper, I shall argue for the representational character of literary fiction. The aim is not to defend a theory of fiction as representation but to highlight the iconic or experiential nature of literary fiction. Drawing mainly on Beardsley (1981, 1982) and Matravers (2014), I shall outline a notion of representation that helps to make sense of literary fiction as a specific kind of representation or verbal depiction. Literary language gives presence, vitality, and force to the represented world, but verbal representation like visual representation requires the imaginative collaboration of the reader. In addition to grasping the linguistic meaning of the text, the reader must make sense of the actions and attitudes of the characters and consider them, together with situations and events from the author’s point of view. Imaginative collaboration involves more than adopting a propositional attitude of make-believe toward the sentences’ content. It also encompasses mental activities such as visualising, empathising, responding emotionally, and entertaining expectations and desires in response to the represented content. As it is often defended, it is in the reader’s experience that the world of a novel comes into existence. This is not to say that the reader creates the work; rather in understanding a literary work, the reader’s experience is closely tied to the mode of presentation and perspective of the work.
Representation and Immersion. The Embodied Meaning of Literature
Gestalt Theory, 2019
This article is an attempt to link together the notions of representation and immersion within an interdisciplinary framework combining neuroscience, literary studies, and philosophy. What is representation? Can we define its mode of existence and describe its natural habitat? Does it live on the page of a novel, in the brain's circumvolutions, or in-between? Is it possible to intensify our experience of representation through immersive reading? How can we reach such immersive altered state of consciousness? What are its ethical and ecological implications? These are the questions we will be addressing in the following pages, in which we will first explore the neurophysiological conditions of immersive embodied reading, before considering its opposition to the productive, in-control cognitive styles promoted by our rationalist modernity.
Frontiers in integrative neuroscience, 2021
According to ancient texts on poetics, the concept of representation is deeply bound to that of “mimesis;” this last was intended in two main ways: as “imitation” and as “world construction.” In Aristotle’s Poetics, mimesis is theorized as the main form of “world simulation,” giving rise to the complex universe of fiction. The concept of simulation plays a pivotal role in the neurocognitive theories on the embodied mind: within this frame, embodied simulation is intended as a functional prelinguistic activation of the human sensorimotor mechanism. This happens not only with regard to intercorporeality and intersubjectivity in the real world but also in relation to the process of imagination giving rise to literary imagery and to the reader’s reception of the fictional world, since human beings share a common sensorimotor apparatus. Imagination is a central concept in the recent neurocognitive studies since it plays a core role in human life and in artistic production and reception. Imagination has been considered as a complex emergent cognitive faculty deeply intertwined with perception, memory, and consciousness, shaping human life and transforming the limited horizon of our perceptual affective understanding, being, and acting. Although there is an immense bulk of literature on this topic, imagination is still an elusive concept: its definition and understanding change according to different heuristic frames—mainly the philosophical, aesthetic, poetic, and cognitive ones—giving rise to debates about its modalities and effects, particularly in relation to the construction of aesthetic and symbolic constraints. In this paper, we claim that scientific research may take advantage from the literary representation of the imaginative faculties, which occurs in specific tests characterized by dynamic images and motion. In such meta-representation of the imagination, we witness the phenomenological emergence of endogenous dynamic processes involving a cluster of cognitive faculties, activated by triggering the reader’s embodied simulation. One of the main German poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the second part of hismasterwork Faust II, intuitively represents the very process of the imagination and its responding to embodied simulation with regard both to the author’s creative act and to its reception by the reader. At the crossway between literary and neurocognitive, this study aims to highlight the advantage offered to future transdisciplinary inquiries by the literaryrepresentation showing features and dynamics of the still mysterious phenomenon of the imagination.