Listen to What the Body Says: Reading Unnatural Narratives in Light of Readers’ Affective Responses

Abstract

ABSTRACT In terms of making sense of unnatural narratives, there has been an ongoing debate between the unnatural approach and the cognitive approach—the former captures the distinct qualities of unnatural texts, and the latter examines how linguistic and narrative constructs express human concerns. This study adds an affective dimension to the discussion on combining these two perspectives on narrative and proposes to base the interpretive move on readers’ affective responses. It stresses the heterogeneity of the affective dimension and argues for the necessity of distinguishing between affect and emotion. On the correlation between the affective dimension and interpretive activities, two paths are suggested: the elicitation of affect signposts unnatural readings and the evocation of emotion points to cognitive readings. The essay also applies the proposed approach to reading two affectively distinct unnatural works—Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and Paul Auster’s Timbuktu.