The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach

by Marco Caracciolo

Recent developments in cognitive narrative theory have called attention to readers' active participation in making sense of narrative. However, while most psychologically inspired models address interpreters' subpersonal (i.e., unconscious) responses, the experiential level of their engagement with narrative remains relatively undertheorized. Building on theories of experience and embodiment within today's "second-generation" cognitive science, and opening a dialogue with so-called "enactivist" philosophy, this book sets out to explore how narrative experiences arise from the interaction between textual cues and readers' past experiences. Caracciolo's study offers a phenomenologically inspired account of narrative, spanning a wide gamut of responses such as the embodied dynamic of imagining a fictional world, empathetic perspective-taking in relating to characters, and "higher-order" evaluations and interpretations. Only by placing a premium on how such modes of engagement are intertwined in experience, Caracciolo argues, can we do justice to narrative's psychological and existential impact on our lives. These insights are illustrated through close readings of literary texts ranging from Émile Zola's Germinal to José Saramago's Blindness.

244 pages, Hardcover

First published June 13, 2014

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the literary-theoretical debate, Marco Caracciolo’s The Experientiality of Narrative marks a milestone, yet it walks a fine line between theoretical innovation and phenomenological redundancy. The fundamental weakness of the work lies in a core problem of early cognitive narratology: with immense conceptual and interdisciplinary effort, it ultimately validates a trivial truism: that readers experience literature on the basis of their own real-world experiences. Caracciolo tends to eclectically apply scientific findings from 4E Cognition to highly complex, socio-cultural acts of reading. Because he rejects empirical reception studies and argues purely introspectively, his methodology risks becoming circular, elevating his own academically trained reading experiences to a universal standard.
The true, lasting value of this book lies not in the insight that experience shapes reading, but in the precise operationalization of how this occurs through the conceptual toolkit of his "Network Model". By establishing formal analytical categories such as "experiential traces," the "experiential background," and (most importantly) the methodological distinction between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment, Caracciolo liberates literary studies from two major dead ends. He overcomes both the text-immanent reductionism of classical structuralism, which degraded characters to mere bundles of words, and the disembodied abstraction of first-wave cognitivism.
Caracciolo thus provides a speculative (can we say heuristic?) but highly adaptable vocabulary. He equips narratology with the tools to precisely trace the somatic and affective dimensions of reading within the text itself, moving beyond vague everyday notions like "empathy" or "identification". Ultimately, the work is not a definitive methodological end product, but it remains an indispensable catalyst for an embodied, post-structuralist approach to textual analysis.

[Roy Kenagy]

RK NARRATIVE ANF FOLDER in progress