Papers by Marco Caracciolo
Narrative, 2019
A significant strand of contemporary fiction engages with scientific models that highlight a cons... more A significant strand of contemporary fiction engages with scientific models that highlight a constitutive interdependency between humanity and material realities such as the climate or the geological history of our planet. This article looks at the ways in which narrative may capture this human-nonhuman interrelation, which occupies the foreground of debates on the so-called Anthropocene. I argue that the formal dimension of scientific knowledge—as manifested by diagrams or metaphors used by scientists—is central to this narrative remediation. I explore two analogical strategies through which narrative may pursue a formal dialogue with science: clusters of metaphorical language and the global structuring of the plot. Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), for instance, builds on a visual representation of meteorological patterns in a storm (lifted from an actual scientific paper) to stage the narrator’s mental illness. Two other contemporary works (Orfeo by Richard Powers and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki) integrate scientific models through the overall design of the plot. By offering close readings of these novels, I seek to expand work in the area of New Formalism and show how formal choices are crucial to bringing together the human-scale world and more-than-human phenomena.
What is the role of interpretation—the close reading of individual texts—in cognitive literary st... more What is the role of interpretation—the close reading of individual texts—in cognitive literary studies? In attempting to come to grips with this vexed question, my article focuses on the complex divides that separate the practice of interpretation from cognitive-scientific research. I argue that cognitive literary studies can only fulfill their potential by moving beyond interpretation, and I survey lines of research that have already put into practice this intuition. Secondly, I explore a heuristic use of interpretation, where insights from cognitive science are leveraged—in what I call a “cognitive thematics”—to illuminate a background of metacognitive questions.
Leon Festinger’s account of cognitive dissonance, published in 1957, has become one of the most s... more Leon Festinger’s account of cognitive dissonance, published in 1957, has become one of the most successful theories in the history of social psychology. I argue that Festinger’s framework—and the research it generated over the last sixty years—can shed light on key aspects of readers’ engagement with literary characters. Literature can invite the audience to vicariously experience characters’ dissonance through an empathetic mechanism, but it can also induce dissonant states in readers by encouraging them to take on attitudes and beliefs that are significantly different from their own. I suggest that there are two strategies—or patterns of reader-response—through which the audience can cope with the dissonance between their own worldview and the characters’: attitude change and imaginative resistance. In the first, readers adjust their own beliefs and values according to what they have experienced and learned in adopting characters’ perspectives. By contrast, in imaginative resistance readers’ worldview prevents them from establishing an empathetic bond with characters. I integrate these hypotheses into a model that builds on theoretical as well as empirical insights into reader-response.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Mar 2014
Mfs Modern Fiction Studies, 2012
Internally focalized passages in narrative often employ metaphors to capture the experiential sta... more Internally focalized passages in narrative often employ metaphors to capture the experiential states of the focalizing character. My investigation of these metaphors—‘phenomenological metaphors’, as I call them—has two important precedents in the fields of narratology and literary stylistics: Dorrit Cohn’s (1978) treatment of ‘psycho-analogies’ and Semino and Swindlehurst’s (1996) approach to metaphor and ‘mind style’. After positioning phenomenological metaphors vis-à-vis these related concepts, I put forward the central claim of this article: metaphorical language plays a role in readers’ engagement with focalizing characters because it can sustain readers’ illusion of experiencing a storyworld through the consciousness of a fictional being. But what is it about metaphorical language that makes it especially suited to bring about this effect on readers? In order to answer this question, I use Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) as a case study, presenting two different lines of argument. First, I contend that metaphors reflect, at a linguistic level, the seamless integration of perception, emotion and language that characterizes our everyday transactions with the world. Second, I look at the relationship between understanding metaphorical language and readers’ empathy for characters, arguing that the continuity between these psychological processes is grounded in their perspectival nature: just as metaphors invite recipients to adopt a new perspective on a conceptual domain, engaging with a focalizing character encourages readers to ‘try on’ his or her experiential perspective and worldview. Taken together, these hypotheses provide an explanation for the effectiveness of phenomenological metaphors at conveying to readers the qualitative ‘feel’ of characters’ experiences.
My essay joins the contemporary cognitive-narratological debate on whether readers bring to bear ... more My essay joins the contemporary cognitive-narratological debate on whether readers bring to bear on fictional characters the folk psychology that they apply to real people. While arguing for a continuity in readers’ engagement with real and fictional minds, I point out that some literary techniques harness our imaginative, empathic skills to a greater degree than is likely in real life. Specifically, internally focalized texts encourage readers to simulate characters’ experiences in a first-person way, going beyond our usual second- or third-person stance towards other minds. This can create the illusion that we penetrate more deeply into the mental life of characters than we could ever penetrate into that of real people. In the second part of the essay, I use a short story by Julio Cortázar as case study for arguing that readers’ first-person involvement with characters can also explain the unsettling effect of texts evoking non-ordinary or impossible mental states and experiences. The thrust of this article is that the narratorial function of “authentication” (in Lubomír Doležel’s term) is crucial in creating an empathic bond between readers and characters: since in some situations the narrator’s statements about the mental states of a character cannot be falsified, they are taken to be direct reflections of the character’s experience, thereby inviting readers to adopt an empathic mode of engagement.
It is sometimes said that fictional consciousnesses are represented in narrative texts. I aim to ... more It is sometimes said that fictional consciousnesses are represented in narrative texts. I aim to show why this kind of representationalism is fundamentally flawed. Drawing on the work of philosophers who, like Daniel D. Hutto, have advocated the “enactivist” approach to cognition, I argue that consciousness and subjective experience cannot be captured in representational terms; consciousness can either be had (in a first-person way) or attributed (in a third-person way). I suggest that we tend to adopt the same basic stance towards real people and fictional characters: we make a “consciousness-attribution” on the basis of external signs (such as gestures and language) thought to be expressive of consciousness. In some special cases, however, literature invites us to adopt another stance (which I call “consciousness-enactment”), whereby we enact (or perform) the experience that we, at the same time, attribute to a fictional character. In my article, I explore the consequences of these ideas on major narratological problems, such as the experientiality of narratives and focalization.
After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its ... more After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as "enactivism" has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the Background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher (2010) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a "joint process of sense-making": just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the Background of the recipients of the story.
The last, five pages long chapter of J. M. Coetzee's Foe is well known for its impenetrability. I... more The last, five pages long chapter of J. M. Coetzee's Foe is well known for its impenetrability. In my article, I attempt to deal with these interpretive difficulties by taking a step backwards and regarding the chapter as a metafictional allegory for the reader's making sense of the novel itself. I also argue that these pages seem to be centrally concerned with the embodiment of the narrating character (on my account, a fictional counterpart of the reader). Thus, drawing on recent work in cognitive linguistics, I put forward the following hypothesis: Coetzee's novel lays bare the embodied nature of meaning-making, showing that interpretation is grounded in patterns of bodily interaction with an environment similar to those traced by the narrator of these pages.
Poetics Today, Jan 1, 2010
Journal of Literary Semantics, Jan 1, 2011
Publications by Marco Caracciolo
The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups—such as an ant colony or a flock of birds ... more The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups—such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight—is not just a behavioral feat, but reflects a full-fledged form of collective cognition. In this article, I build on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies to explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective agent (in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker); animals that communicate a shared mind through dance-like movements (in Lydia Davis's The Cows); and animals that embrace a collective " we " to critique the individualism of contemporary society (in Peter Verhelst's The Man I Became). I argue that, when individuality drops out of the picture of human-animal encounters in fiction, empathy becomes abstract: a matter of quasi-geometrical patterns that are experienced by readers through an embodied mechanism of kinesthetic resonance.
Many claims have been advanced about the effects of specific narrative strategies on readers' eng... more Many claims have been advanced about the effects of specific narrative strategies on readers' engagement with characters, but the available evidence is still limited. One question in particular stands out in the current debate. Is first-person narrative more or less conducive to empathy and trust for the protagonist than third-person, internally focalized narrative? This essay tackles this question by examining the effect of narrative perspective on readers' responses to a complex, and potentially unreliable, character. To this end, we conducted an experimental study with 76 Dutch high-school students. Contrary to our predictions, the manipulation of narrative perspective did not affect empathy for the character, but did affect trust. We suggest that the increase in trust in third-person narrative depends on the external narrator's authority, which validates the perspective of the protagonist. The essay discusses these and other findings, combining experimental research with a qualitative analysis of readers' comments on the character.
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Papers by Marco Caracciolo
Publications by Marco Caracciolo