Leafing through the Body

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Leafing through the Body

Bodily Involvement in Literary Reading

Master Thesis 14 August 2009

Dr. Barend van Heusden & Dr. David S. Miall

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Abstract

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Introduction

Reading a work of literature can be a truly magical experience. It can be an experience which leaves an enormous impact on you and at the same time can be unexplainable to others. A literary text can bring you to places that you have never seen before in your own life, it can introduce you to the most extraordinary people and it can make you feel really powerful emotions. It amazes me and fascinates me that books – basically black scribbling onto a stack of white paper bound by a cover – can achieve all of this.

As much as I love my reading experiences for what they are; comforting, challenging or touching, I am very much enthralled by what exactly happens within us when we read. The most intriguing aspect of my personal reading experiences is the level of absorption I am able to instantiate when I am reading: I can become totally shut off from my spatial and temporal reality. I only notice this of course when I put my book down for some reason. Only after I finish reading do I become aware of the fact that my limbs have ‘gone to sleep’ or that I am hungry or that somebody came in to the room. This makes me wonder what function the body has during my reading and the readings of other people with a high level of absorption.

I realize that not everybody experiences reading literature in quite the same way that I do and therefore absorption must be a character trait that is developed more in one person than in the other. And as a character trait, absorption is not specifically or solely related to the reading experience. People who developed the absorption trait, can immerse themselves in movies, paintings and music; they can even ‘get lost’ in non-aesthetic activities such as conversations with other people, daydreams, and probably even in something as trivial as doing the dishes (personally I can be completely absorbed in cooking risotto, for instance). However, I think that there is a difference between aesthetic and non-aesthetic absorption in the sense that they could have different purposes. Non-aesthetic absorption could facilitate an escape from daily worries, whereas aesthetic absorption could facilitate such an escape but also provide a new understanding of or an insight in something. Of course this difference is not that clear-cut and should be further explored, however that is not my primary focus here.

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two lies a better definition of what they both are and how they both relate to matters such as absorption, yet I choose to begin with defining the literary reading experience separate from this comparison. However, I will come back to the literature vs. pulp issue since I think that it is important to be aware of it and to think of ways how to investigate it further.

Moreover, absorption in my view seems to be related to the body. This is an intuition of mine, which sometimes can be as unexplainable as some of my more emotional reading experiences. In my observation, the body can be seen as giving signals to the reader, when she is absorbed in a literary work. However, I can also observe that if the reader absorbs herself in a literary text, her awareness of her body becomes diminished, because she can forget, as I can, where or when she is. It has been confirmed though, that readers high in absorption tend to report more feelings1, suggesting that the relation between absorption and the body is a rather ambiguous one.

The difficulty in describing this relation lies in the fact that feelings are involved: my feelings, a normal reader’s feelings, which have not often been considered in literary studies in recent decades.2 It is important to bring attention back to these feelings that play such an important role in all of our individual reading experiences. Are these feelings not why we read and why we all started to immerse ourselves in the study of literature in the first place? I find it hard to believe that anybody who studies literature initially does this for any other reason than their love for books and what these books can do for them. Thus, I want to study the reading experience and all the feelings that come with it, because they are to me the most important reason why I started studying literature in the first place.

In more recent studies on the experience of reading literature, such as cognitive poetics, feelings started to become the topic of discussion as being cognitive processes and neural activity.3 The body is largely ignored in these studies, which seems rather odd, since our body often functions as signal of our feelings and emotions. When we speak of experiencing feelings, we speak of how we become

aware of these feelings and not of what feelings initially are: neural activity. We are not aware of

neural activity, but we are aware of the bodily signals, such as sweaty palms or accelerated heartbeat, that we experience while reading. Therefore it is important to also explore the role of the body in research on feelings as cognitive processes in relation to the experience of reading literature.

Here again the focus will lie on the role of the body and feelings in the literary reading experience and not on other reading experiences such as the reading of pulp fiction. I think that it would be better to start with an investigation of the literary reading experience on its own and compare it to the

1

Examples of these studies are: Kuiken et al. Locating Self-Modifying Feelings within Literary Reading. And: Kuiken et al. The Role of Absorption in Experiential Involvement.

2

In recent decades the shift has been made from interpreting literary texts to asking questions such as: how do we read texts. Such questions have been asked specifically due to the emergence of cognitive science and its blend with literary studies. According to Miall, this “restriction to a cognitive approach has almost entirely eliminated consideration of the role of feeling in literary responses”. (Miall, David. S. Literary Reading. p. 3)

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reading of pulp on the basis of what the outcome will be on this present study. Therefore this thesis could help determine what precisely needs to be compared, so that we can further investigate the

literary reading experience and what it can do for us, what its purpose could be.

When trying to discover what something´s purpose could be, an evolutionary approach is very useful. By determining the processes in which the brain and the body are involved (and are related to each other) in the literary reading activity, we can begin to answer questions of evolutionary importance. Eventually this study could help, however small its contribution may appear, to determine the evolutionary advantage of reading literature.

The problem that remains now and that will be examined in this thesis is what the relationship between the absorption trait, the body and the reading experience exactly entails.

Main Question

To solve this problem, it has to be translated into an answerable question, which will be the central question of this thesis. I have made it clear that feelings play a dominant role in my personal reading experience. Several empirical studies have confirmed that most reader responses involve feelings, and that feeling even plays a rather important role in literary reading.4 This suggests that I am not alone in my observation.

The affective processes that are activated during our reading activities often become apparent to us through our body. Thus feelings seem to be linked to the body somehow and therefore the body would seem to play a pivotal role in the activity of reading, since most readers questioned in several empirical studies report experiencing feelings during reading. However, in none of these studies were the participants specifically asked about their bodily feelings, which could be helpful in discovering what function the body may fulfill in the activity of literary reading.5 The main question that will be addressed in this thesis therefore will be: Do the embodiment and the level of absorption of the reader

play a role in the reading of literary artworks and if so in what respect?

Some of the terminology used in the main question needs further explanation. The term embodiment refers to the reader’s mind being influenced by the fact that she has a body and how this concept thus influences the experience of reading a literary artwork. Furthermore the ‘level of absorption’ refers to the reader’s willingness and competence to absorb herself in a literary artwork. These notions will both be further explained in the first chapter.

4

Examples of these studies are: Miall & Kuiken, 2002; Kuiken, Miall & Sikora, 2004, Miall, Feeling in the

Comprehension of Literary Narratives, in: ‘Literary Reading’, 2006.

5

The term bodily feelings may seem to suggest that I am speaking about a specific type of feeling. This is, however, not the case. Because we are not always that aware of our body, we use a lot of metaphorical language when speaking about our feelings, instead of pointing out physical pointers of our feelings. By using the term

bodily feelings in the empirical study in this thesis, I am simply trying to make my participants more aware of

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Chapter Division and Related Sub-Questions

An explanation of how this question will be examined follows through the division of this thesis into chapters with corresponding sub-questions. One of the chapters will be devoted to the empirical study that has been conducted while the other two each deal with more methodological and theoretical sub-questions that will help answer the main question.

The first chapter is concerned with a review on the literature that is written on the three topics that form the main question; embodied cognition, feeling in literary reading and absorption. Embodied cognition, which is the field of research in which this thesis can be situated, will be examined first. The sub-question that will form the focal point of this part is the question of what is embodiment and in what way is the topic of embodiment incorporated in cognitive science at the moment? The subject of feeling in literary reading and the sub-question of how the involvement of feeling in literary reading has been reviewed so far and how this involvement has been studied over the last few years, will take up the second part. The sub-question of what is absorption and how does this phenomenon relate to literary reading will be examined in the third part on absorption.

Chapter two is concerned with empirical studies in general and the setup of the empirical study that has been devised for this thesis in particular. The analysis of the results of this empirical study will be explored and the new hypotheses that arise from these results will form the basis of the discussion with which this chapter will close.

The third and last chapter of this thesis is devoted to the question of the role of the body in literary reading. All of the sub-questions and the analyses of the empirical study will be drawn together in this chapter to answer the central question.

Theory & Methodology

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experience is all about. Empirical studies could provide a more viable justification for the study of literature all together and this study in particular, because it can give my personal intuitions more ground to stand on.

Bibliographical use

For the review of literature written on embodied cognition in the first chapter, Gibbs’ Embodiment in

Cognitive Science, published in 2005, will mainly be used. For the second part of this chapter on

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Chapter 1: Studies on Embodied Cognition, Literary Feelings and

Absorption

The three pillars that form the title of this chapter stand on their own as three different fields of research, but in the context of this thesis they form a network of tightly interwoven concepts. A thorough understanding of this network requires an understanding of each of the individual concepts at first. The parts that make up the whole of this theoretical framework will be elaborated upon one by one. However, since they are so tightly interwoven with each other, some overlap at times cannot be avoided. At the end of this chapter their coherence will be fully revealed, after which the ‘missing pieces’ in this framework will also be pointed out.

1.1) Embodied Cognition

A body is not just something that we own; it is something that we are – Merleau-Ponty

1.1.1. Phenomenological History of Embodiment

The concept of embodiment finds its roots in the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and opposes dualistic views of mind and body. Embodiment basically refers to the idea of a person’s mind being influenced by the fact that that person has a body. But as the motto above already indicates: the concept of embodiment is difficult to explain and especially difficult to capture in our language which is greatly influenced by the idea that mind and body are two separate things. We soon fall into the traps of dualism when explaining what embodiment is all about. We are mind and body intertwined: the body is operated by the mind (or brain rather) and the thoughts of the mind are influenced by the body. As we can see, trying to explain the interconnectedness of mind and body is only possible by taking them apart from each other. Thus, being aware of the difficulty that our use of language poses to explain this concept, its history will now be further elaborated with careful consideration not to fall into the trap of dualistic thinking.

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organism.’6 Or: it is because we have a body that we can perceive the world around us and therefore our body is just as essential in the existence of the world for us (individually) as our heart is essential to our own existence. It seems a rather simple idea, but can be experienced as very counterintuitive. In any way it is the basis of embodied thinking.

1.1.2. Cognitive Science

With the term ‘embodiment’ cognitive scientists refer to the role of a person’s own body in her everyday thinking. More and more scholars today in various fields such as psychology and neurology see the importance of our body for the workings of our cognition. This has not always been the case. As Raymond W. Gibbs asks in his book Embodiment and Cognitive Science that was published in 2005: ‘why has cognitive science been so neglectful of embodiment in constructing theories of perception, cognition and language?’7

This neglecting of the body’s role could be traced back as early as Plato, who believed that the body was a mere distraction standing in the way of intellectual life. From Plato to Descartes and onwards a dichotomy between mind and body existed. Cartesian dualism evolved into an epistemological tradition of the rational mind vs. the irrational body, giving rise to many other dualisms such as subjective vs. objective, knowledge vs. experience and reason vs. feeling.8 When in the 1950s cognitive science emerged, these ideas gradually lost ground. At first cognitive scientists mostly continued to assume that cognition was autonomous and disembodied. However, at the same time some cognitive scientists started to question the reasons for excluding the body, along with consciousness, emotion and experience, from the study of cognition. Many scholars in the field tried to avoid or overcome the strict separation of mind and body but came up with questionable strategies to do so. In recent decades, for example, a popular strategy has been to reduce all mental events to brain processes, as Gallagher & Zahavi point out in their article ‘The Embodied Mind’.9

However, the situation is now changing. The amount of empirical research supporting the idea of embodiment and its implications for all sorts of daily actions is growing fast, as Gibbs illustrates by the many examples he gives in his book. However, as in every discipline, there are some disagreements and points of discussion within the field of cognitive science that centers their questions on embodiment. The most pressing of concerns is probably the lack of agreement on what the term ‘embodiment’ exactly entails. Gibbs, following Lakoff & Johnson in their 1999 study on the embodied mind, argues that ‘embodiment’ as a term may refer to at least three levels of ‘personhood’: neural events, the cognitive unconscious and phenomenological experience.10 With the term neural

embodiment they refer to the structures at the neurophysiological level of the brain. The cognitive

6

Merlau-Ponty. A Phenomenology of Perception. p. 235

7

Gibbs, R.W. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. p. 3

8

Ibid.

9

Gallagher & Zahavi. The Embodied Mind. p. 131

10

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unconscious is build up from of all the mental operations that allow for conscious experience. The phenomenological experience is already conscious, or at least accessible to consciousness, and

consists of basically everything that we can be aware of, such as our own mental states, our bodies, and our environment and social interactions. Gibbs distinguishes between these three levels to make clear that people are not just brains; neither are they just experiences or bodily interactions. Rather they form a coherence of all of these ‘embodiments’. He adds: ‘the three levels of embodiment together are constitutive of what it means for someone to be a human person with a particular identity and different cognitive abilities.’11 While the reason why Gibbs chooses to go along with the threefold division of embodiment that Lakoff & Johnson propose seems viable, the conclusion which he connects to this choice goes a bit too far. Furthermore the division into three different levels of embodiment will not be hold on to in this thesis, since it points to the concept of embodiment of the

mind. This definition poses a small problem, in the sense that it connects the body and the mind, by

dividing them and attributing cognitive processes to the mind as being embodied. The emphasis in this thesis will lie more on the actual body and how it influences our thinking and acting in the world: that is what is being meant by embodiment in this study.

1.1.3. Emotion and Cognition

One of the cognitive abilities that Gibbs is referring to is emotion. However the relationship between cognition and emotion is not unequivocal. Emotions are complicated collections of chemical and neural responses, forming patterns. They are biologically determined processes with a long evolutionary history.12 The devices in the brain responsible for emotions are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states. This is the first close link between emotion, cognition and the body: the same brain regions that deal with emotion, also deal with our body and our awareness of our body. All of these above mentioned devices can be engaged without consciously deciding to do so. Thus all emotions use the body to ‘express themselves’ but they also affect numerous brain circuits: the vast variety of emotional responses is responsible for the changing appearance of body and brain. These changes form the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.13 Here we can detect already a difference between the terms feeling and emotion, to which shall be returned later on.

Hence emotions are not simply or completely ‘mental sensations’, as some scholars believed, but also rely on tactile feelings from the physical world around us that become part of our inner emotional experiences.14 Take for example the well-known feeling, which you experience when first being in love, of having butterflies fluttering in your stomach. This feeling cannot be categorized objectively as an ‘upset stomach’ apart from something that elicits this response. Our bodies play an important role in our experiences of emotions. The embodied feeling in this example is kinesthetically similar to ‘the

11

12

Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens. p. 50

13

Ibid. p. 51-52[my italics]

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fluttering of butterflies’. Our interaction with the world around us through our body makes us aware of butterflies and how they flutter, so that we can project this unto ourselves, or rather into ourselves. The butterfly example illustrates that the world around us, which we know through our bodily interactions with it, influences our inner mental states.

But why do we have emotions? If they are developed throughout a long evolutionary history, they must have a biological function. According to Antonio Damasio, a leading expert in the neurophysiology of emotions, their biological function is twofold. The first function is the production of a specific reaction to the situation that induced it. The second function is the regulation of the internal state of the organism such that it can be prepared for that specific reaction.15 The biological purpose of emotions seems quite clear, especially when looking at the obvious examples of pre-historic people being attacked by wild animals, in which emotions could significantly improve one’s chances of survival. This is because emotions tell your body how to act in certain situations. For instance in the event of a wild animal attacking you, you feel fear and that particular emotion will instantiate either a fight or a flight reaction.

Although emotions nowadays could be seen as redundant in the sense that we are no longer constantly in immediate danger of being attacked by wild animals, they are certainly not a dispensable luxury. Emotions provide all organisms with survival-oriented behaviors, but in organisms equipped with consciousness, and therefore capable of knowing they have feelings, another level of regulation is reached, in which consciousness allows feelings to be known and thus promotes the impact of emotion internally.16 Instead of only having the capacity to react on whatever actions emotions instigate, humans are aware of the fact that they have emotions and to a certain extent can exert power over how to handle them. We can suppress our emotions, we can postpone our reactions, and we can regulate how we deal with our emotions. But as Damasio points out: ‘Ironically, of course, the engines of reason still require emotion, which means that the controlling power of reason is often modest.’17 In other words, because we have consciousness we have more power to control our emotions, but because that power is also fuelled by our emotions, it only has fairly relative influence.

Emotions are tightly linked with both body and brain. We become aware of our emotions through our body, which mediates them to our mind or brain, where an appropriate response will be thought off, which is then send back to the body, so that the body can react according that emotion, against it or can work to suppress it. But since we are consciously emotional beings, as Damasio points out, this structure will not always work as we envision it. We can sometimes have the feeling that we do not know how to act, or that we are overpowered by our emotions and that we cannot make ‘rational’ decisions. On this basis we can say that emotions are indispensable factors in a large part of our responses, actions and thoughts, or in general in our dealing with the world.

15

Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens. p. 53-54

16

Ibid. p. 56

17

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Another way to look at the possible functions of emotions, besides seeing them as a mode of survival like Damasio does, is putting them in a communicative context. Emotions may sensitize people to certain types of information and instigate them to process other types of information; they help to determine what knowledge is relevant to the situation and has to be activated.18 In this context, we can also better grasp the importance of the involvement of our emotions in the reading activity, which will be examined later.

When speaking about emotion, the word feeling will unavoidably be called upon as well. But in what kind of relationship do these two concepts stand? According to Damasio, we feel emotions. But what exactly are feelings and how are they related to cognition and more importantly to the body? Kuiken et al. make a potentially useful distinction between feeling, affect and emotion in their article ‘Forms of Self-Implication in Literary Reading’. The term feeling indicates a bodily sense within awareness of all experienced affect, including emotions, moods and attitudes. Affect is defined as discrete change in facial expression, posture and gesture that accompany (intense) emotions, moods and attitudes. The term emotion is used to refer to a discrete and psychobiological reaction pattern, such as occurs in anger, sadness and fear, independently of awareness.19 It seems that these three terms are organized into a hierarchical structure, in which feeling can encompass both emotion and affect. Feeling distinguishes itself from emotion and affect in the awareness of the person experiencing it. This coincides with the idea that affect and emotion are less likely to occur within the literary reading experience than feeling, since feeling is something which the reader can be aware of and therefore is better capable of reporting having a feeling, than when experiencing emotion or affect.20 Furthermore affect seems to be the outward expression of emotions or feelings felt within the body and emotions seem to be what triggers the feeling or the expression of feeling in the first place. In this thesis the term feelings will be used when speaking about responses to literature, since this term encompasses emotion as well. That is why we say: ‘I feel anger’ or ‘I feel sadness’. Besides, feeling, as Kuiken and his colleagues point out, can express more subtle nuances in experience, which seems appropriate to keep in mind when talking about reader responses to literature.

1.1.4. Embodiment and Literary Reading

‘In order to locate the reading process we must study the embodiment of cognitive categories and the reliance of higher-level symbolic categories on such embodied schemata.’21 In order to grasp what Monica Fludernik suggests with this statement, a closer look will now be given to the field of cognitive poetics. In his book Cognitive Poetics. An Introduction first published in 2002, Peter Stockwell points out that feelings, seen as psychological and communicative functions with cognitive

18

Kneepkens & Zwaan. Emotions and Literary Text Comprehension. p. 126

19

Kuiken et al. Forms of Self-Implication. p. 174

20

Ibid.

21

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aspects are easily applicable to the study of literature through this field of research.22 Cognitive poetics combines literary studies with the topic of embodiment. It offers cognitive theories that systematically account for the relationship between the structure of literary texts and their perceived effects in readers and it brings intrinsic approaches to reading literature to the fore again. It is important to understand that reading for cognitive poetics refers to a completely natural phenomenon, namely the act of reading. The main object of study for cognitive poetics is thus not the literary text or the reader of the text, it is the process of reading itself that is being investigated. Stockwell draws a clear distinction by referring to literary texts as artifacts and to readings as natural objects. For scholars working within the field of cognitive poetics, ‘readings’ are the data through which patterns across readers and texts can be generalized.23 One of the most crucial notions with regard to cognitive poetics is the notion of context. Different readings of literary texts, both academic and everyday, have no objective status, but are relative to their circumstances, their context. The reading of a literary text in the context of a seminar can bring forth a whole different meaning of the text, than when that same text is being read for personal leisure. We could say that the meaning of a text depends on the manner in which the text is being used. Stockwell adds that context encompasses both social and personal circumstances.24 This is essential to the understanding of the aims of cognitive poetics.

The foundations of cognitive poetics lie mostly in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, thereby covering a large part of the whole field of cognitive science. While cognitive linguistics is certainly useful to analyze certain linguistic aspects in literature and our perception of literary works, it does have its limitations when it comes to expressing emotions. That is why Stockwell deems cognitive poetics necessary to explore literature to the fullest extent. This could be further explained by what Reuven Tsur, cognitive linguist, states about the workings of our brain: ‘language is a predominantly sequential activity of a logical character, typically associated with the left cerebral hemisphere, whereas diffuse emotional processes are typically associated with the right cerebral hemisphere.’25 The problem is thus that while we can name emotions, language does not appear to be well suited to convey their unique diffuse character. The problem with this argument is that using language is taken as a purely logical activity, while this is certainly not always the case, especially not in literature. While language can in essence be seen as logical, in literature authors try to use language to describe non-logical subjects. With other words: the division that Stockwell and Tsur make here is too black and white, too artificial. Cognitive psychology on the other hand provides us with a lot of useful information on the workings of our cognition; however it lacks precise information on the processing of language and thus literature as well. According to Stockwell, cognitive poetics can overcome the shortcomings in analyzing literature of both cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. While there is certainly truth to Stockwell’s observation, some questions could be asked

22

Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics. p. 171

23

Ibid. p. 2

24

Ibid.

25

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with regard to his ideas on the emotional side of literature which according to him is difficult to comprehend using just one of these approaches. First of all, is it true that the expression of emotions is a vital part of literature as Stockwell states, and if so what does that even mean? When we compare literature with pulp fiction for example it seems that in pulp texts the expression of emotions is even more important, than in literature, or at least more obvious, more present.

The basic premise behind the disciplines of cognitive linguistics and psychology is that all forms of expression and conscious perception are bound in our biological circumstances. Or as Stockwell puts it: ‘we think in the forms that we do and we say things in the ways that we do because we are all roughly human-sized containers of air and liquid with our main receptors at the top of our bodies.’26 We have embodied minds, in other words. This also means that all of our experiences, ideas and beliefs are expressible only through language that also has its roots in our material existence. The fact that we share most of the same factors of existence accounts for many of the similarities in languages across humanity. Language use is thus something universal and something highly individual at the same time. Cognitive Poetics, in Stockwell’s view, has the potential to offer a unified explanation of both individual interpretations as well as interpretations that are shared by a community or a culture.27 This makes it a field of research that is also of special interest for evolutionary research on the usefulness of literature and literary studies.

One of the most interesting questions that might be asked with respect to text comprehension in the context of cognitive poetics is ‘what emotional experience is aroused by the cognitive processing of the text and in what way does that emotion influence subsequent cognitive processing?’28 This is a question that still needs an answer and that will probably form a constant driving force for the studies of cognitive poetics.

While cognitive poetics offers us a new type of intrinsic approach to reading literature, which certainly proves to be useful, it also raises some issues such as: what do cognitive approaches actually accomplish? Empirical studies could be considered here as a vital complement to cognitivism, since it can test the claims of cognitive poetics. Additionally, while cognitive poetics provides insight into how we read literary texts and comes close to determining what the role of the body could be in the reading activity, it does not give a lot of attention to the matter of feeling in literary reading, which seems strange since the body of a person necessarily has a strong connection to feelings felt by that person. In this context of literary reading it seems almost impossible not to connect the embodiment of the reader to her reading experience and the feelings evoked in her by this experience. For cognitive poetics the reader remains a theoretical one. No use is made of empirical studies of literature and actual readers, which does seems to be necessary in order to grasp the role of feeling in literary

26

Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics. p. 4

27

Ibid. p. 5

28

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reading. Furthermore, because cognitive poetics has ‘avoided the route of empirical studies’ in the words of David Miall, ‘it is in danger of falling back into the old hermeneutic model of text interpretation that it has proposed to supersede’.29 Thus by taking up empirical studies in their research, cognitive poetic scholars could avoid the hermeneutic circles which they shunned in the first place.

1.2) Feeling in Literary Reading

The idea of embodiment, that types of bodily experience, such as the kinesthetic and the affective, may be significant for understanding the development of thought can be approached from a literary perspective. The literary domain is particularly suitable for considering the role of kinesthetic and affective aspects in thought since literary texts possess features such as foregrounding that systematically organize affective and kinesthetic responses in the service of the imaginative reconstruction of experience.30 In this paragraph a few important facets of feeling in literary reading or the literary domain will be discussed, to establish the connection between embodiment and feeling in literary reading.

1.2.1. Literary Feelings

David Miall, in his book Literary Reading, Empirical and Theoretical Studies published in 2006, suggests that feeling plays the primary role in directing the reading of literary narratives.31 The three properties of feeling that are independent of the kind of processes described by cognitive poetics and that make feeling appropriate for the directing of the reading of literary narratives are: (1) feelings enable us to relate concepts in unrelated fields (border-crossing); (2) feeling prompts us to take a certain stance towards events, preparing us to interpret incoming evidence in a specific way and (3) feeling is generally self-implicating, it occurs when some issue of our self-concept is in question.32 In general: ‘Feeling provides an important, partly text-driven source for literary understanding.’33 Miall does not stress however that feeling is the only factor that directs the reading of literary narratives. A shortcoming of Miall’s suggestion again comes down to the issue of literariness. Do feelings play a prominent role in directing the reading of literary texts specifically or does feeling also play an important role in directing other types of reading or even other activities. It would certainly seem so. The problem with putting the focus on literature and the role our feelings play in the reading of literature is that it sometimes seems as if our feelings play a role in literature only, which is of course not the case.

29

Miall, David. S. Cognitive Poetics. p. 1

30

Miall, David. S. Literary Reading. p. 159-160

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But what than are literary feelings? And why do we even assume that something like literary feelings even exist? The problem lies in the terminology which suggests that we are dealing with a certain type of feeling that is different from feeling in general, while this is not being meant. The term ´literary feeling´ simply points to the fact that the feelings that are being discussed are being felt in relation to a literary text, that they are invoked by a literary reading experience. Just like the term

literary reading refers to the reading of a literary text and not to a specific type of reading manner.

Miall & Kuiken in their 2002 study on literary feelings, distinguish between four different kinds of feeling involved in literary reading: narrative, aesthetic, evaluative and self-modifying feeling. When reading a literary work, readers can experience one of these four different types of feeling or several of them simultaneously. A narrative feeling is typically invoked by something in the world of the text and thus involves identification with a character or engagement with the world that the text describes. Aesthetic feelings are invoked by the form of the text; the reader appreciates a certain use of style for example. Evaluative feelings are those feelings of appreciation for the text as a whole; a statement such as ‘I enjoyed this book’ is comprised of an evaluative feeling. Self-modifying feelings can, according to Miall & Kuiken, only be invoked by a literary text and involve feelings, comprised of combinations of narrative and aesthetic feelings, of the reader having a sense of being changed through reading the literary text in question.34

Don Kuiken, David Miall & Shelly Sikora in another study on reader responses, have also found out that the feelings that we could experience during our reading of a literary text are closely tied with our personal memories. ‘Feelings such as might emerge during literary reading facilitate recall of events that embody similar feelings.’35 We bring our personal memories and past experiences with us when we read a literary text in order to grasp what it says, in order to contextualize the world of the text. These findings can be reinforced by the findings of other scholars, such as Patrick C. Hogan, who states that: ‘Literary emotions are the result of emotion-laden memories that have been triggered by literary events, characters and so on, but are not self-consciously recalled’36 While Hogan does not use the same terminology as Miall, Kuiken & Sikora, by referring to literary emotions instead of feelings, he does point out the same thing. ‘[F]eeling appears to enable a reader to ‘frame’ a particular meaning, to register it for the time being as a possible component of the story, and to draw if necessary on the reader’s prior experience when a feeling matches an occurrence or an issue from the reader’s memory.’37 Our feelings guide our reading experiences, especially if we are reminded of personal feelings in memories while reading a literary text. This use of prior knowledge, in this case emotional memory, for the comprehension of literary texts has been investigated in a field of study called schema

theory.

34

Miall, David S. and Don Kuiken. A feeling for fiction. p. 221

35

Kuiken, Don. Forms of Self-Implication. p. 176

36

Hogan, P.C. Cognitive Science, Literature and the Arts. p. 157

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How do texts interact with reader experience? This is a question of context in relation to literary texts and the act of reading them, which schema theory tries to answer. Schema theory was one of the earliest applications of an approach from cognitive science to literature. Schema theorists try to decide which bits of context are used and which not in a determined way. The main premise of this theory is that language exhibits conceptual dependency, which means that the selection of words in a sentence and the meanings derived from these sentences depend on the sets of ideas and other associations that the words suggest in the minds of the readers. These sets of ideas and associations or the conceptual structure drawn from memory to assist in understanding utterances are called schemas or scripts. A script is a socio-culturally defined mental protocol for negotiating a situation, whether this is a real life situation or a fictional one.38 Cognitive theories on scripts and schema’s have also been applied to real life experiences, not just to the reading of literature.

In a literary context, schemas have also been used to read and comprehend a text and its fictional world. Literary genres, fictional episodes or characters can all be understood as part of schematized knowledge used during the act of reading. The more we read, the more susceptible we get towards these scripts. We detect for instance the detective genre in a text and know what to expect from a typical detective plot. We form scripts about how ‘the bad guy’ usually is described, so that we can recognize him the next time we come across him in a literary text. Schema theory sees this schematized knowledge as dynamic and experientially involving and that is exactly where the appeal of schema theory lies for theories of literary reading. The application of schema theory can contribute to our understanding of textual coherence.39

Schema theory has been used to examine the issue of literariness. Everyday discourse is believed to be schema preserving, which means that it only confirms existing schemas. In reading a literary text, schema disruption can take place, offered by surprising elements which challenge the reader’s existing knowledge structure. Such a disruption can be solved either by schema adding or schema refreshment: a notion that is similar to the notion in literature known as defamiliarization or dehabituation, which will be further explained below.40 That is why schema refreshment could be seen as a characteristic component of literary response. Overall schema poetics, the use of schema theory in literary discussion, is ‘a good way of accounting for the fact that different readers produce different interpretations of the same text.’41 And also why different readers experience different feelings while reading a literary text. As Kuiken, Miall & Sikora stressed in their article ‘Self-Implication in Literary Reading’ published in 2004, ‘the scripted progression of feelings embodied in a literary text may remind readers of similarly scripted events that instantiate their personal strivings’ and thus reading becomes self-implicating. Furthermore, ‘affectively similar events can be objectively different and

38

Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics. p. 75 -77

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may bring together scripted events that are conventionally quite different.’42 Such are the implications of the central role that feelings in relation to memory play in the reading process, as explained in the paragraph on literary feelings.

As explained above, our everyday experiences and especially our reading experiences are largely governed by scripts and schemas. However, while these schemas are certainly important for ‘survival’ it is also vitally important to question our familiar, everyday behavior and thus our schemas. Because the world around us changes and evolves, we need to reinvent ourselves from time to time as well. Literary reading, according to Miall and others, ‘provides one vehicle for going beyond the customary, familiar world and for re-conceiving our role within it. Through literary reading we dehabituate; we are enabled to contemplate alternative models for being in the world.’43 In this sense we can already hint to a possible adaptive function of literature; that is, literature’s primary function could be to equip us to better understand and respond to our environment. And it is able to do so, by invoking and reshaping our feelings ‘offline’, in isolation from behaviors and actions in the everyday world that have real consequences.44 But this idea will be further explored later. For now, dehabituation remains an important aspect of the literary reading experience, since it makes us question ourselves, our beliefs and our view on the world. Those reading experiences in which the feelings of the reader are involved, especially if that reader is high in absorption, are the ones which really help us dehabituate. A special way in which to achieve this dehabituation is through a certain use of language: foregrounding.

Miall & Kuiken in a 1994 study saw literary language as distinctive in comparison with the uses of language in everyday discourse. The features of literary language that make it distinctive they called

foregrounded, since these stood out against a background of common usage. Such literary features

encompass among others assonance, meter, syntactic inversion and metaphor, and are all effective in attracting the reader’s attention.45

Miall & Kuiken in their research on readers’ responses focus on whether textual features, such as foregrounding, rather than readers’ expectations (as defined by their personal scripts) are responsible for initiating literary processing of a particular text.46 They propose that processes specific to foregrounding offer principles capable of generalization to other distinctive components of literary response. Foregrounding then, elicits a more immediate, vivid and personal response from a reader.

But what, psychologically, appears to signify the encounter with foregrounding? Empirical studies carried out by Miall & Kuiken themselves show that all readers, to the contrary of what might be believed, at least appear sensitive to foregrounding, regardless of literary training. Foregrounding

42

Kuiken et al. Forms of Self-Implication. p. 176 - 177

43

Miall, David S. Literary Reading. p. 17

44

Miall & Kuiken. The Form of Reading. p. 14

45

Miall, David. S. Literary Reading. p. 18

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initiates interpretive activity in the reader, first by defamiliarizing the referent of the text and by arousing feeling, then the resulting uncertainty causes the reader to search for a context in which the new material can be understood. 47 This is a process in which feeling overall plays a key role, because it prompts the reader towards the choice and use of a certain schema or scripts.

1.2.2. Questions still unanswered

Still, there remain a lot of unsolved problems or unanswered questions with respect to the role of feeling in literary reading. These are at least partly due to the fact that different fields working on the matter, such as cognitive poetics and empirical studies, have not yet understood the importance of

really working together to get a better grasp on feeling’s role in literary reading.

What in general is missing, according to Miall, is an overall theory of the role that feeling plays in the process of literary reading. Until now feeling is largely treated as a subsidiary effect, occurring in the cognitive processes being used while reading. Needed therefore is a more focused attempt to integrate feeling into the structures of response already laid out in cognitive terms by cognitive poetics.48 This thesis, by focusing empirically as well as theoretically on the role of the body in the reading activity, is trying to make such an attempt to integrate the concept of feeling in a field such as cognitive science, which could be a step in the right direction towards an overall theory of feeling in literary reading.

Perhaps the most pressing question is how feeling relates to cognitive modes of understanding or interpretation processes. This is where the connection between cognitive poetics and empirical studies of literary reading could start. A question very much related to this is whether ‘literariness’ can be identified with some specific feeling processes in the reader. Although this question does not exactly concur with the main questions of this thesis and therefore will not be discussed here, the issue of literariness remains an important topic in literary studies, which could be explored better within the combination of cognitive poetics and empirical science, ultimately to help determine the value of reading literature.

Off course all the topics related to feeling and its role in literary reading that have been discussed here, are partly or mainly speculative. Feeling remains an uncharted area. Questions could be raised about what resources readers bring to bear through feeling and how far a comprehension model based on feeling might depart from more ‘traditional’ models as for instance the situation model and the mapping of cognitive processes.49 However, the work that is being done in this field of research is very valuable and a development towards more justifiable statements is set in motion. The more empirical studies there are being performed within the field, the more contributions to this development and that is why in this thesis the choice for an empirical study was made.

47

Miall & Kuiken. The Form of Reading. p. 12

48

Miall, David. S. Literary Reading. p. 43 -45

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1.3) Absorption

Cognitive Processes seemingly occur with little input from our bodies. By focusing on objects, people, events that occur in the world around us, something that we do almost every moment of every day, our body sinks into the background of our experience: we become less aware of our body. This feeling of diminished awareness of the body is what Gibbs calls ‘corporeal disappearance’.50 This is not to belittle the importance of the body in our everyday experience; after all we need the body, to even be able to perceive all of these things in the world around us. It is just to point out that we can very easily forget the fact that our body is important for us. Perhaps that is also the reason why so few scientists have focused on the body’s role within the concept of embodiment, or why so few literary scholars have put the emphasis on the body and its role in the literary reading activity. This feeling of corporeal disappearance can occur when we get caught up with something, which completely absorbs our attention.

1.3.1. Trait Absorption

Experience occasionally takes on an engaging and involving quality implicating motivational and cognitive processes that are qualitatively different from those used in the service of instrumental progress toward goals. ‘On the motivational side, ‘trait absorption’ reflects individual differences in the capacity to seek out or create situations in which instrumental functioning is temporarily set aside so that experience can be deepened and enriched.’51 This is basically a phenomenological description by Don Kuiken, of an experience that absorbs. But he sees absorption as a character trait, and calls it ‘trait absorption’ accordingly.

Trait absorption is thus a disposition for having episodes of ‘total attention’ that (1) fully engage one’s representational resources, (2) heighten the sensed reality of the attentional object and (3) alter experience of the attentional object and the self. In the words of Don Kuiken; trait absorption reflects (a) a motivational readiness to engage in experiential, non-instrumental functioning and (b) distinctive cognitive capacities to efficiently identify and richly elaborate objects of attention.52 Thus it is not an experience itself; it is a character trait that allows people who have high levels of absorption, to engage in certain experiences as described above.

Kuiken and colleagues suggest that those high-absorption individuals may be better able to use imaginative resources to interpret situations as lacking clear instrumental valence and thus they can estimate whether they can absorb themselves, when they can expect a situation, such as the reading experience or watching a theatre play to provide opportunities for experiential involvement.53 Experiential involvement is a mode of being in which the person who engages in it finds herself

50

51

Kuiken, Don et al. The Role of Absorption. p. 577

52

Ibid. p. 569

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immersed in an experience for the sake of the experience and thus no functional or practical strivings are involved therein. The absorption trait could prompt people to become involved in such an experience. People who posses a greatly developed absorption trait can more easily spot the situations in which they can become involved without problems, and they will more likely ‘lose themselves’ in such a situation. What this exactly does to our awareness of our body is not completely clear, since this has not been extensively researched yet. On the one hand it would seem that people high in absorption become less aware of their body, as Gibbs suggest, because they focus on a particular experience. On the other hand focusing on a certain experience and your feelings thereby, could make you more attuned to your body.

1.3.2. Reader Involvement

When linking experiential involvement and especially the absorption trait to reading, the term ‘reader involvement’ is sure to come up. In the previous chapter stylistic features such as foregrounding have already been discussed in relation to literary feelings. These could also be related to absorption and involvement in the literary text, but there are other manners in which a reader could become involved in a text as well that are not necessarily connected to stylistic features of a text. Beyond the cognitive strategies that constitute comprehension, the most commonly proposed forms of reader involvement are transportation, empathy and identification.54 All three of these are mostly responses to narrative features of a text and not specifically to stylistic features, as is the case with foregrounding. In the view of Kuiken et al. these theories neglect an important possibility with regard to stylistic features of literary texts and their properties. ‘The stylistic aspects of a literary text may not only have direct effects, but they also may initiate a form of reader’s reflexivity that is itself figurative. Readers may appropriate the text’s figurative forms in reflective reference to aspects of their own lives.55 Therefore, with the warnings of Kuiken et al. in mind these three notions need to be discussed, first of all because they can be linked up to absorption, and furthermore because they could point to the possible role of the body in the literary reading experience.

Transportation

Melanie Green in her 2004 article ‘Transportation into Narrative Worlds’ describes transportation as a mechanism of narrative impact: ‘A transported individual is cognitively and emotionally involved in the story and may experience vivid mental images.’56 Narrative impact is concerned with the implications that a literary text can have on the reader and her real life. According to Green, an

54

Kuiken et al. Locating Self-Modifying Feeling. p. 268

55

Ibid.

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individual’s immersion (or absorption) in a work of literature may allow the implications of the narrative to become part of the reader’s real-life beliefs.57

Transportation is psychologically similar to absorption in the sense that the reader may (un)consciously push real-world facts aside and instead engage the narrative world of the text that she is reading. Kuiken in his article on depth metaphor in aesthetic events points to something similar when he talks about his own experiential involvement in a work of art: ‘the locus of experiencing can be shifted from the world within the work of art to the outside world of the viewer.’58 This may seem a bit contradictory, but with the term ‘outside world’ of the viewer, Kuiken does not refer to the world outside of the viewer, but the world outside of the world of the painting.

Empathy

The intention of art, and particularly literary art, is not so much to describe, or inform, or instruct, as to allow meetings of minds. – Keith Oatley

Empathy, or the human capacity to ‘read other peoples’ minds’, forms a part of what has been called

theory of mind. With the notion of reading other peoples’ minds, theory of mind describes our innate

ability to deduct what other people feel or think by virtue of us sharing the same human cognitive capacities and having (or being) the same human bodies.59

The empathy involved in reading literature is a specific kind of empathy: we do not merely sympathize with a character, we can become that character in our minds. In real life we can empathize with somebody but we remain ourselves.60 To take it one step further, David Miall in his article

Enacting the Other proposes that a literary experience can evoke in us a sense of an animist

dimension: we can even empathize with animals or inanimate objects such as robots or trees through reading literature.61

Empathy has also been a point of fervent discussion, especially in literary studies, mainly because of the following question: ‘Given that we know the characters about whom we are reading are not real, how is it possible to have real emotions about them?’62 But actually this problem could be solved rather easily by looking deeper into what theories of empathy as it exists in real, daily life already tell us: since the actual beliefs and desires of another person are not even possible for me, I have to imagine them. Empathy is first and foremost a capacity of the imagination and in that sense a perfect tool for reading literature and grasping the emotions and drives of fictional characters. Or in the words of Miall: ‘reading fiction works by persuading me to engage in a certain piece of imaginative

57

Green, M. Transportation into Narrative Worlds. p. 247

58

Kuiken, Don. Understanding the Depth Metaphor. p. 7 (my italics)

59

Miall, David S. Enacting the Other. p. 2

60

Oatley. Meeting of minds. p. 446

61

Miall, David. S. Enacting the Other. p. 24

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play, not by getting me to have false beliefs.’ Furthermore, Miall stresses that emotion, once instantiated, has its own inherent power, regardless of reality.63 Because empathy is an imaginative capacity, used to comprehend fictional emotions as well, it does not matter whether the text that is being read matches reality or not; it can still evoke the empathic abilities of the reader. Eventually it has more to do with the reader than with the text: the more empathic abilities, the more imaginative power and thus the less it matters whether the story that is being read, compares to reality.

Identification

The term identification in relation to literary reading refers to the reader identifying herself with a character or event or even a feeling described in the text. With help from their own autobiographical memories which they bring into the reading experience, readers recognize certain events or characters described in the text and identify themselves with these aspects of the text. Keith Oatley, author of the article ‘Meeting of Minds’, which was published in 1999, gives an account of identification as it is pursued in reading as well as in watching films. The central difference between the two lies in the fact that in watching a film, we mainly remain a spectator and in reading literature, especially first person narratives, identification is favored. In identification the reader usually assumes the protagonist’s (or the narrator’s) goals and plans and experiences certain emotions when these plans go bad or well.64 In this sense identification is very similar to empathy, but with the exception that identification occurs out of personal experiences and memories of the reader. Thus only when something similar happens to the protagonist that has happened to the reader as well, of which the reader is reminded during reading, identification takes place. Empathy can also occur in the reader when the events in the text are nothing like the reader has ever experienced, simply because the reader’s imaginative powers are so great that identification is not a necessary prerequisite. We could say that identification is a certain form or, as Oatley calls it, a certain species of empathy.65 In his article, Oatley also examines a few empirical studies which investigate the ‘meeting’ between reader and text. One of these studies confirms an earlier theory of Norman Holland that when reading, people recreate in their response to literature the structure of their own habitual attitudes to the ordinary world, as indicated in their memories.66 This confirms the suggestion that people’s memories indeed play an important role in their identification with characters or events in a literary text. Kuiken et al. also found out that absorption is systematically related to cognitive processes affecting identification.67 And thus all of these three forms of reader involvement are linked up with absorption in the sense that they require an imaginative effort from the reader.

63

Miall, David. S. Enacting the Other. p. 4

64

Oatley, Keith. Meeting of minds. p. 7

65

Ibid. p. 8

66

Ibid.

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1.3.3 A text-oriented approach to absorption

Above absorption has been explained as a character trait that could be activated specifically when reading a literary text. However, there are also theories on textual features that could induce absorption, which would mean that these theories see absorption as more than just a character trait. A short review of some of these theories is necessary in order to be able to give a definition of the concept of absorption that is as complete as possible.

Aesthetic distance is a term coined by Oatley to indicate a spectrum of reader involvement with a literary artwork. He states that ‘most great writers encourage a moving back and forth along this spectrum.’68 A good work of literature would be a work that engages a reader to absorb herself in it, but at the same time forces her to take a step back from it to reflect on the text and preferably on herself as well.69 This seems to connect to Green’s notion of transportation and Kuiken’s notion of experiential involvement, in the sense that as a reader you could choose to be in control of the transportation and move, so to speak, in and out of the text in order to be able to reflect on it and let it influence you and your ‘real-life beliefs’. These two components of aesthetic distance – textual influence and conscious decision by the reader – present a kind of absorption that can be ‘turned on or off’; instead of absorption as something one has in a certain degree.

If we take a look at the literariness issue from this perspective, we can point out a difference between reading literature and reading pulp fiction that sets the two further apart from each other. Pulp fiction does not work with aesthetic distance, rather it presents the reader with an exciting narrative that does not allow for the kind of absorption that can be turned on or off.

Another narrative construct that could be related to absorption is deixis, which Stockwell discusses in detail in his book Cognitive Poetics. An Introduction. Deixis is the capacity that language has for anchoring meaning to a context and it can promote absorption in the narrative world, because it is central to the idea of the embodiment of perception.70 Stockwell explains that we are able to project ourselves into a story world by means of deictic pointers. Because we are embodied creatures we understand deictic pointers such as ‘on your left’ or ‘it is behind you’ and when such pointers are used in a text to indicate its spatial and temporal context, we understand these by virtue of ‘having’ or ‘being’ a body and the capacity for ‘deictic projection’.

During absorption in reading our deictic coordinates are translated to a different environment and therefore our body awareness is backgrounded. Since we cannot be or envision ourselves in two places

68

Oatley. Meeting of Minds. p. 8

69

Especially in this case a comparison between reading literature and reading pulp fiction would be useful, since here we can discover a main difference in my opinion: pulp writers would mainly (and solely) encourage readers to absorb themselves, but not necessarily to reflect, which means that in the case of pulp fiction we cannot speak of aesthetic distance.

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at once, one place is foregrounded and the other backgrounded. During absorption in the text world our own world in which our body is, becomes back grounded and thus our body awareness becomes diminished.71 Again this is all set into motion by textual features i.e. the deictic pointers, instead of by the reader herself. But even here, we could argue that to a certain extent absorption still relies on the reader, perhaps certain readers are more sensitive to such deictic pointers or can move more smoothly along the scales of aesthetic distance.

1.4) Theoretical Framework

1.4.1. Coherence

As has been demonstrated by the accounts of the three central concepts above, embodied cognition, feeling in literary reading and absorption are closely interwoven with each other. They can be extracted from this theoretical framework and put into different contexts and by doing so they will have nothing to do with each other any more. But in the context of the literary reading experience they are all tied up together and as is suggested by the main question in this thesis they are all, especially in their coherence connected to the role of the body in this reading activity.

Reading a literary work is an experience in which feeling or emotion plays a crucial role. As has been suggested before, emotional relevance or involvement with the content of a story is more important than literal realism in encouraging absorption.72 When feelings of the reader are brought to the fore, the reader becomes more prone to absorbing herself in the story. As it is, absorption is a character trait, so people who have a more developed trait of absorption, are more prone to absorbing themselves in a literary work to begin with. Through absorption in a literary work and through allowing the feelings to play the main part in the reading experience, readers could experience more feelings of self-modification, which means that they draw more of what happens in the text world into their own world and thereby might even change their sense of selves. In order for self-modifying feelings to occur, reflection and interpretation probably play a large role as well, however with the involvement of feelings, readers are more likely to apply what happens in the text-world to their own lives and vice versa through identification or empathy. Of course this happens on a smaller scale than these bold statements might imply, but still several empirical studies have pointed out that self-modification, on whatever scale, does take place in the more absorbed and feeling-involved reading experiences.73 The way in which our embodied cognition takes up its part in this framework is that by virtue of our having a body we can comprehend the feelings, goals and plans of other people and of fictional characters as well. Our body shapes our thought processes and allows us to feel empathy or identify

71

Galbraith, Mary. Deictic Shift Theory. p. 24

72

For examples of studies: Hoorn, Konijn & van der Veer, 2003

73

Leafing through the Body