Enactive literariness and aesthetic experience

from mental schemata to anti-representationalism

Alfonsina Scarinzi

pp. 261-278

in: Aesthetics and the embodied mind, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to challenge the current cognitivist view of literariness in cognitive literary theories, according to which literariness in the reader's interaction with literary texts is constituted when a linguistic deviation from the reader's expectations has the cognitive function to alter and to change the reader's mental schemata making the mind better equipped for processing in future. In this chapter I reject this cognitivist notion of literariness because of its dualistic approach, its disembodied view of the mind and hence because of its phenomenological and enactive implausibility. In developing an enactive notion of literariness that takes into account the embodied mind thesis and hence the view that cognition is embodied action I discuss the role of anti-representationalism in enactivism and answer the question of how anti-representationalism can contribute to a conceptual shift from cognitivist literariness to enactive literariness. My claim is that in the experience of literariness a visceral bodily pattern of organism-environment coupling that constitutes the reader's embodied meaning is defamiliarized and refamiliarized creating in this way the reader's consummatory experience of the embodied process of sense-making of deviations from expectations.