Goosebumps, Shivers, Visualization, and Embodied Resonance in the Reading Experience
The God of Small Things
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3203805 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Naomi Rokotnitz (0000-0002-6769-4348, Worcester College, Oxford, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 273-293 |
| Publication date | 2017-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/03335372-3868603 |
| OpenAlex | W2705354977 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 32 |
This article contributes to studies of the heuristic, metacognitive, and social values of literary works by interrogating ways literary description can induce experiential involvement in the reading process through mobilizing what the neuropsychologists Maria Vandekerckhove and Jaak Panksepp call our "affective consciousness," a form of prereflective reception that arises from bodily experience. Focusing upon Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, the article proposes a theoretical framework for interrogating the forms of priming, bias, and insight gained via these physical dimensions of reading. In particular, it examines a narrative technique termed "embodied anchors," by which Roy conveys her characters' experiences and their interpretations of those experiences through image clusters that function both as metaphors and as physical cues, simultaneously affecting both "basic" and "moral" emotions (as differentiated by the clinical psychologists Bunmi O. Olatunji and Jorge Moll). The article analyzes how these embodied prompts activate readers' preconscious modes of perception, modify cognitive skills, and intensify the effects of reading by anchoring ideational content in readers' bodies, rendering abstract concepts physically tangible, thus providing alternative and parallel means of communicating and manipulating knowledge. This knowledge, it is argued, can be integrated into readers' range of experiences in ways that parallel "real-life" encounters, potentially facilitating profound learning
Aesthetics · Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Consciousness · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Experiential learning · Linguistics · Metacognition · Narrative · Pedagogy · Perception · Preconscious · Psychoanalysis · Unconscious mind · Action Observation and Synchronization · Humor Studies and Applications · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology
Motor Cognition
Cognition in the Wild
The Brain's concepts
The Disgust Scale
Seeing, acting, understanding
A critical look at the embodied cognition hypothesis and a new proposal for grounding conceptual content
A unifying view of the basis of social cognition
The Social Neuroscience of Empathy
Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures
Why rejection hurts
Listening to Action-related Sentences Activates Fronto-parietal Motor Circuits
Somatotopic Representation of Action Words in Human Motor and Premotor Cortex
The Phenomenological Mind
Situating Abstract Concepts
Presence in the reading of literary narrative
Does injustice affect your sense of taste and smell? The mediating role of moral disgust
Too far gone in disgust
The Ethical Subject of The God of Small Things
Material anchors for conceptual blends
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.71 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2024 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |