With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition

What really happens when we read? Caracciolo and Kukkonen’s sophisticated phenomenology of reading as a whole-body act challenges and updates the idea that reader response is something that happens in the reader’s head, swapping the concept that reading might be experienced as a “storyworld,” like an internal 3D cinema, for a more nuanced multisensory model. With Bodies brings together Karin Kukkonen’s cognitive and Marco Caracciolo’s phenomenological approaches to literature, while reviewing, building on, and extending extant, cognitive, narratological research. It also offers a significant contribution to the current crossdisciplinary ecological discourse concerned with paying attention to our whole, interconnected sensory array, including the commonly omitted sensorimotor and kinesthetic. It argues all of these are mentally deployed or imaginatively engaged in the act of reading. Although specifically about linguistic practice within literary narrative, their concept of reader response has wider relevance for rethinking readers’, viewers’, and players’ responses to expanded forms...