How do readers experience literary narrative? Drawing on narrative theory, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind, this book offers a principled account of the dynamics underlying readers' responses to narrative Through its interdisciplinary approach, this study combines close readings of literary texts and theoretical discussion in ways that shed light on the deep connection between narrative, literary fiction, and human experience

The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach

Enactive Ethics and Hermeneutics—From Bodily Normativity to Critical Ethics

ABSTRACT Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones entails various time-discourses which the following will trace: (I) The Temporal Trace as Form and Imprint by which the text itself leaves an iconic mark of the configuration of space into the novel’s narrative time. (II) The Temporal Trace as Content and Stream through which the text accounts for the fact that it is not bound to any human notion of time. And, finally, (III) The Temporal Trace as Experience which aims at elucidating the experiential time of the reading process. Utilising Paul Ricœur’s thoughts in Time and Narrative (Vol. 1–3, 1988), I will analyse and read these notions of time with and against Ricœur’s integration of phenomenological time, the interplay of trace as well as the various forms of mimesis introduced in his work. Solar Bones traces multiple temporalities that make it necessary to partially reconceptualise the visceral nature of experiencing time in literary texts.

“that Rarefied Amalgam of Time” – Tracing the Temporal in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones

Writing Wounded: Reading Djuna Barnes's Writership as Affective Agency

This first novel of Mexican film director, scriptwriter, poet, multi-award-winning playwright, journalist, and political activist, Sabina Berman, appeared in English translation in 2012. Berman’s a...

“I Am, (Therefore and with Difficulty) I Think”: An Enactive Reading of Sabina Berman’s Autistic Narrator

Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales, composed in the 2nd century CE, is considered a unique literary work, in which the author claimed to have recorded the dreams he had received from Asclepius over a long period of time. Modern historians explore the value of the Sacred Tales both as a literary work and as a personal oneiric record of actual dreaming experiences. In this article, I take into account the modern insights offered by the embodied human cognition paradigm in order explore the possible long-term influence and repercussions of the Sacred Tales on the readers’ imagination and dreaming experiences. In particular, I suggest that Aristides’ oneiric descriptions would have been meta-represented in the readers’ minds upon reading the text, priming specific images, representations, mental, and emotional states as well as expectations about potential divine revelations during the ritual of incubation. Later, those readers who would find themselves in similar bodily, mental, and emotional conditions like the ones experienced and described by Aristides, could have implicitly used the primed representations for meta-representing a personal epiphany of Asclepius. Thereby, the Sacred Tales would have provided the raw material to feed the readers’ imaginative simulations and to elicit a personally meaningful divine revelation.

The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach

Citations

Enactive Ethics and Hermeneutics—From Bodily Normativity to Critical Ethics

“that Rarefied Amalgam of Time” – Tracing the Temporal in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones

Writing Wounded: Reading Djuna Barnes's Writership as Affective Agency

“I Am, (Therefore and with Difficulty) I Think”: An Enactive Reading of Sabina Berman’s Autistic Narrator

Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales

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