Toward an Embodied Theory of Understanding Literary Text

Abstract

In this article, I aim to theorize and formulate the understanding of literary text within an Embodied Cognitive Approach. After sketching out the analyses of literary text understanding conducted within the framework of the so-called Common Cognitive Approach, I will proceed to point out their shortcomings. I will then lay the scientific foundations of the Embodied Theory of Understanding Literary Text (ETULT) by referring to direct and indirect evidence from neurology, psychology and so on. I will introduce ETULT in detail, with the help of evidence from fiction, Dante's Divine Comedy. I will also delineate the outlines of some field studies for the future, through developing questionnaires and brain scans (fMIR and EEG). In short, ETULT asserts that understanding literary texts is an embodied act, occurring processually on two levels of representation: Schematic and Embodied (The Two-Layered Representation Hypothesis or TLRH). Upon encountering a literary text, the reader forms a Blended Mediated World which is a fusion of the Text World and the Readerly World (The Blended Mediated World Hypothesis or BMWH). Within this mixed world, while those projected parts from the Text World which correspond with sensorimotor experiences of the reader are understood in an embodied way, the parts that lack embodied equivalence in the reader's sensorimotor experience function as Perceian Representamens, setting the reader in search of relevant Objects of Signs, which occur in the form of sensorimotor experiences (The Object-Search Hypothesis or OSH). The reader then becomes involved in a cycle of coming and going movements between the literary text and the socio-physical environment, demonstrating thus the processual nature of embodied understanding.