Graduate School – Stony Brook University
Embodied cognition, or the idea that cognitive processes are not a brain-bound phenomenon but involve the brain, body, and environment, is central to the second wave of cognitive humanities and has been influential in recent scholarship on literature and art. I utilize insights from embodied cognitive science to examine the experience of presence in a range of under-studied, charmingly problematic contemporary texts that tend to not fit traditional notions of “narrative.” I argue that these texts, so-called weak narratives, afford fundamentally different reading experiences: while not imparting much by way of meaning, weak narratives are remarkably adept at affording an experience of presence, or the sense of “being there,” due to their ability to tap into readers’ embodied knowledge. Using Lydia Davis’s “The Cows” as an example, I will show how re-situating weak narratives from meaning-based (aiming to convey information) to presence-based (aiming to move the reader) allows us to better understand these otherwise strange narrative projects.
Dan Irving is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, working at the intersection of narrative theory, contemporary fiction, and cognitive science. His dissertation examines reading as a situated, embodied activity, specifically looking into the experience of presence in plotless and dialogue-based narratives. He has articles forthcoming in Poetics Today and CounterText.
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