With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition

“Given the rise of cognitive approaches to narrative, the publication of Caracciolo and Kukkonen’s With Bodies is extremely timely. In combining and extending the works of both authors, it constitutes a unique contribution.” —Nancy Easterlin, author of A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

We read not only with our eyes and minds, but with our entire body. In With Bodies, Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen move systematically through all elements of narrative and put them into dialogue with recent research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of mind to investigate what it means to read literary narratives bodily. They draw their findings from a wide corpus of material—narratives from antiquity to the present and composed in various languages, from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall—and craft their embodied narratology to retool current theories about authors, narrators and characters, time and space in storyworlds, and plot. Their investigation serves as a foundation for wider discussions on embodied narratology’s contributions to literary history, computation and AI, posthumanism, gender studies, and world literature.