Representation and Immersion. The Embodied Meaning of Literature (original) (raw)
Related papers
Toward an Embodied Theory of Understanding Literary Text
Folia linguistica et litteraria, 2024
In this article, I aim to theorize and formulate the understanding of literary text within an Embodied Cognitive Approach. After sketching out the analyses of literary text understanding conducted within the framework of the so-called Common Cognitive Approach, I will proceed to point out their shortcomings. I will then lay the scientific foundations of the Embodied Theory of Understanding Literary Text (ETULT) by referring to direct and indirect evidence from neurology, psychology and so on. I will introduce ETULT in detail, with the help of a fictional piece of evidence, Dante's Divine Comedy. I will also delineate the outlines of some field studies for the future, through developing questionnaires and brain scans (fMIR and EEG). In short, ETULT asserts that understanding literary texts is an embodied act, occurring processually on two levels of representation: Schematic and Embodied (The Two-Layered Representation Hypothesis or TLRH). Upon encountering a literary text, the reader forms a Blended Mediated World which is a fusion of the Text World and the Readerly World (The Blended Mediated World Hypothesis or BMWH). Within this mixed world, while those projected parts from the Text World which correspond with sensorimotor experiences of the reader are understood in an embodied way, the parts that lack embodied equivalence in the reader's sensorimotor experience function as Perceian Representamens, setting the reader in search of relevant Objects of Signs, which occur in the form of sensorimotor experiences (The Object-Search Hypothesis or OSH). The reader then becomes involved in a cycle of coming and going movements between the literary text and the socio-physical environment, demonstrating thus the processual nature of embodied understanding.
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.
Cognitive Philology, 2008
Major theorical studies approached the crucial subject of mimesis focusing on the relationship between literature and reality, maintaining that novels imitate reality through language, translate facts and events into semiotic acts or they establish consistent fictional worlds intersecting the so called actual or ‘real’ one. The present account maintains a different point of view, introducing an ecological theory of narrative reference. According with Gibson’s Theory of Affordances and recent findings in the field of neuroscience, namely mirror neurons, stories, and novels in particular, are addressed as being understood on the basis of individual action-related knowledge. Samples from the european tradition of medieval and early modern knightly novels are provided so as to show how novels do textually encode actions and how narrative events just referring to sensory experiences and interoceptive responses as emotions, feelings, thoughts, deductions or decisions are tightly connected, and to some extent dependent on action-related ones. Finally, a new assessment of novels as ecological niches will be taken into account, aside implications of an ecological theory of narrative reference for philological investigation of novels in the general framework of comparative literatures.
Immersion and defamiliarization: experiencing literature and world
Poetics Today, 2018
Traditionally, immersion has been conceived of as transparently directing attention towards what has been referred to as the “language-independent reality” that is presented by the fictional text (position 1), while defamiliarization is seen as operating through directing the reader’s attention to the artificial nature of the construction of the fictional world (position 2).Drawing on recent developments in cognitive and unnatural narratology we question this view. We argue that immersion may also take place in texts with lower degrees of suspension of disbelief (position 2) and that immersion and defamiliarization can both serve to imitate and direct the attention of the reader towards their immersion in the world (position 3) and by means of providing new perceptions also lead the reader to question the nature of what lies beyond the text (position 4).
Picturing Fiction through Embodied Cognition
2022
This concise volume addresses the question of whether or not language, and its structure in literary discourses, determines individuals' mental "vision," employing an innovative cross-disciplinary approach using readers' drawings of their mental imagery during reading. The book engages in critical dialogue with the perceived wisdom in stylistics rooted in Roger Fowler's seminal work on deixis and point of view to test whether or not this theory can fully account for what readers see in their mind's eye and how they see it. The work draws on findings from a study of English and Dutch across a range of literary texts, in which participants read literary text fragments and were then asked to immediately draw representations of what they had seen envisioned. Building on the work of Fowler and more recent theoretical and empirical languagebased studies in the area, Klomberg, Schilhab, and Burke argue that models from embodied cognitive science can help account for anomalies in evidence from readers' drawings, indicating new ways forward for interdisciplinary understandings of individual meaning construction in literary textual interfaces. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in stylistics, cognitive psychology, rhetoric, and philosophy, particularly those working in the field of embodied cognition.
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.
Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2016
Reading fiction is a silent activity, where readers come to know imaginary worlds and characters from the book's pages. However, we perceive the natural world with more than our eyes, and literature should be no different. Thus, an embodied reading experience is proposed, adding sound effects and haptic feedback to allow readers to listen and feel the narrative text. This paper presents a preliminary prototype for multisensory narratives and an experimental methodology to measure embodiment in literature. Results for the subjective assessment of immersion and user experience from 15 participants in three modalities: haptic, sound, both combined are discussed.
Textual sources of Embodied Literary Reading
Literary works can be analyzed from the viewpoint of how frequently, how systematically, and at what level they engage the reader in somatic activation and imagery. Researchers need to (a) identify text cues that (co-)produce embodied effects and (b) evaluate their distinct somatization profiles. This paper surveys embodied simulation, a scene-bound effect lending itself to a textual approach most straightforwardly. After charting the wider terrain of literary somatization I shall single out two broad categories of cues for scene-bound effects (whereas global effects like suspense and “emergent” reader specific effects like dissatisfaction tend to elude linguistic analysis, so I won’t have much to say about them): My first focus addresses canonical imagery, which, by and large, subserves the functions of “being there” and character empathy. It spans descriptions of objects, persons, actions, and interactions in the storyworld, but also inner experience, i.e. pain, proprioception, and visceral affect. Under a second – in fact overlapping – heading, figurative language deserves attention. It comprises force-dynamic metaphors that cue our understanding of the causality of affect, psychodynamics, and protagonist interaction. Metaphors that augment already established simulative imagery by gestalt effects (double-projection, etc.) add to this. My overall aim is to pinpoint analytic hot spots by discussing the cue-effect relationship of some thirty linguistic devices with a view to case-studies and comparative analyses of “engagement profiles” of texts.