Imagination, experience, emotion: Marco Caracciolo's enactivist theory of fiction reading

Abstract

In order to investigate the affective dimension of fiction reading, this article discusses Marco Caracciolo’s narrative theory. Examining how literary texts produce affective effects on readers requires finding a theory of human cognition capable of integrating, within a single descriptive model, the sensory and representational components involved in the process, so as to explain how the text stimulates an imaginative experience capable of generating affective responses. Within the emerging field of cognitive narratology, this article locates this model in Marco Caracciolo's enactive theory, which posits that reading involves invoking the reader's experiential memories through the stimulation of expressive devices in the text. To test the applicability of his theory, we analyze excerpts from Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, focusing on the articulation of expressive devices that may evoke the enactive experience of perceptions and affects, culminating in the experience of horror. At key points, complementary theories are discussed, such as Daniel Hutto's radical enactivism, Stephen Asma and Rami Gabriel's evolutionary theory of emotions, and Daniel Dor's theory of language. Thus, the article fosters discussion on the potential contributions of enactivism to literary theory by introducing Caracciolo's propositions—one of the founders of this emerging transdisciplinary research.