Presence in the reading of literary narrative: A case for motor enactment
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Anežka Kuzmičová,
Abstract
Drawing on research in narrative theory and literary aesthetics, text and discourse processing, phenomenology and the experimental cognitive sciences, this paper outlines an embodied theory of presence (i.e., the reader's sense of having entered a tangible environment) in the reading of literary narrative. Contrary to common assumptions, it is argued that there is no straightforward relation between the degree of detail in spatial description on one hand, and the vividness of spatial imagery and presence on the other. It is also argued that presence arises from a first-person, enactive process of sensorimotor simulation/resonance, rather than from mere visualizing from the perspective of a passive, third-person observer. In sections 1 to 3, an inter-theoretical argument is presented, proposing that presence may be effectively cued by explicit (or strongly implied) references to object-directed bodily movement. In section 4, an attempt is made at explaining which ways of embedding such references in the narrative may be particularly productive at eliciting presence.
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- The seventh signification of Sindbad: The “Greeking” of Sindbad from the Arabian nights to Disney
- Presence in the reading of literary narrative: A case for motor enactment
- Iconicity in urban place naming (with examples of names from places in Poland)
- At the circus backstage: Women, domesticity, and motherhood, 1975–2003
- Blackhorse Mitchell's Beauty of Navajoland: Bivalency, Dooajinída, and the work of contemporary Navajo poetry
- Semantics and critique of political economy in Adam Schaff
- The message of print, creative advertising: On the abductive guessing instinct as a prerequisite in comprehension
- Narrative cognition and modeling in new media communication from Peirce's semiotic perspective
- The activation of multileveled responses: James Phelan's rhetorical theory of narrative judgments
- Knowledge profiling the occupational therapy concept of occupation: Theory and case study
- The ideal teacher: An analysis of a teacher-recruitment advertisement
- Peirce's semiotics and Russian formalism: The story of Oedipus Rex
- The semiotics of communication
