First movement, latest movement: corporal organisation of the sense in literary reading

Abstract

Traditionally, alluding to literary knowledge implied limiting specific characteristics of a work or establishing different methodologies in order to approach it and interpret it. Recently, thanks to new perspectives like the cognitive poetics, literary studies included among their interest the cognitive processes that impregnate the discipline in multiple senses. The principal aim of the text is to collect, with the help of cognitive sciences and neuroscience, some of the current cues about the literary reading phenomenon. Reading and understanding a text are embodied expressions that, consequently, are nourished by the corporal and interactive experience of the reader. Although an important number of the studies focused on the figure of the reader that favours emotion, the objective here is to go back to a previous state when sensorimotor mechanisms are called. Reading becomes an exercise of simulation where a resonance between the text and the embodied memory (motor, tactile and interoceptive sensation) of the reader is produced.