The Experience of Literariness: Affective and Narrative Aspects

Abstract

This chapter presents a concept of the embodied mind in literary reading. Arguing for the body as an active participant in shaping the aesthetic experience, it begins with examples of the active body taken from Donne, Woolf, and Wordsworth. Empirical study of readers’ systematic responses to foregrounding (striking stylistic elements) is then shown to demonstrate the central role of feeling (Miall DS, Kuiken D, Poetics 22:389–407, 1994), while a follow-up study (Kuijpers MM, Miall DS, Bodily involvement in literary reading: an experimental study of readers’ bodily experiences during reading. In: Hakemulder F (ed) De stralende lezer: Wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar de invloed van het lezen. Stichting Lezen Reeks (Dutch Reading Foundation), Delft, pp 160–182, 2011) verifies the bodily effects of foregrounding. A review of ERP (evoked response potential) studies of emotion and language lends support to the claim that the early response to foregrounding, occurring less than 500 milliseconds after the encounter with a word, is likely to be characterized by feeling. The last section of the chapter reports on the ambiguities of the unreliable first person narrator of Graham Greene’s short story “The Innocent.” The responses of one reader to the story are analysed, showing the conflicts of feeling that shape her understanding and that have grown out of the reader’s embodied mind and feelings. For her the power of the story appears to lie in the issues it leaves unresolved.