With Bodies

Karin Kukkonen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. She is the author of Probability Designs: Literature and Predictive Processing.

We read not only with our eyes and minds, but with our entire body. In With Bodies, Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen move systematically through all elements of narrative and put them into dialogue with recent research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of mind to investigate what it means to read literary narratives bodily. They draw their findings from a wide corpus of material-narratives from antiquity to the present and composed in various languages, from Apuleius's Metamorphoses to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall-and craft their embodied narratology to retool current theories about authors, narrators and characters, time and space in storyworlds, and plot. Their investigation serves as a foundation for wider discussions on embodied narratology's contributions to literary history, computation and AI, posthumanism, gender studies, and world literature.