Literary Narrative and Mental Imagery: A View from Embodied Cognition

Abstract

IntroductionMental imagery is reportedly one of the commonest things people remember about their narrative reading in the long term (Sadoski et al.), and it correlates with various other dimensions of reader response, most notably with emotion (Krasny and Sadoski).The objective of this article is twofold. In the first part, I will discuss two issues central to any theoretical inquiry into mental imagery: embodiment and consciousness. I will do so against the backdrop of second-generation cognitive science-more specifically, the increasingly popular research framework of embodied cognition-and I will consider two caveats attached to its current exploitation in narrative theory. In the second part, I will attempt to cast new light on readerly mental imagery by offering a typology of what I propose to be its four basic varieties. The typology is grounded in the framework of embodied cognition, and it is largely compatible with key neuroscientific and other experimental evidence produced within the framework. It is, however, primarily based on introspection, the one tool available to me for accessing conscious experience. Even though individual predispositions towards imagery (e.g. the tendency to image more or less often, more or less vividly, in greater or lesser detail, or within specific sensory modalities) are known to differ significantly, the proposed varieties are meant to capture imagery structures operating, in full or in part, across these differences.The notion of mental imagery is used in its narrow sense here so as to capture those instances in which modern silent readers of literary narrative, while reading an expression X, experience some form of sensory representation of what they (more or less literally) understand to be X.1 Despite individual variations in susceptibility to mental imagery, all readers experience mental images some of the time, and some readers experience them all the time (see also Sadoski and Paivio 74). Such experiences can be grounded in any sensory modality, deploying the external senses-i.e., the visual (sight), the auditory (hearing), the olfactory (smell), the gustatory (taste), and the tactile (touch)-as well as the internal senses-i.e., the interoceptive (pain, hunger, etc.), the proprioceptive (balance, limb and organ position, etc.), or the motor/kinesthetic (movement-related proprioception: effort, acceleration, etc.). They can, and very often do, combine several of these modalities.Extant theoretical literature on mental imagery thus defined is small but thematically and methodologically diverse. Authors tend to focus on highly specific questions such as those concerning the art of composing imageable face or flower descriptions, respectively (Jajdelska et al.; Scarry), or the links between spatial imagery and readers' childhood memories (Burke). As a consequence, this article is probably the first attempt to categorize readerly mental imagery in the most general of terms, as a set of distinct embodied experiences, each with a unique combination of essential properties. However, as literary scholarship is more and more accepting of crossovers into cognitive science, the theoretical literature accounting for mental imagery keeps growing steadily. The contemporary second generation of cognitive science, and especially the framework of embodied cognition, can indeed be very helpful to advancing our understanding of mental imagery and other lower-order (e.g. affective) aspects of reader response. Perhaps most notably, narrative scholars have begun to explore what goes under the name of embodied simulation (for a review, see Caracciolo, Embodiment at the Crossroads).Embodied simulation stands for several interrelated cognitive phenomena that are currently being unraveled with the help of fMRI and other experimental methodologies and that are perhaps most notoriously represented by (but not restricted to) mirror neurons. Briefly put, it has been suggested that in the processing of language referring to sensorimotor contents, whether it is an isolated phrase such as grab the cake (Raposo et al. …