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Mental Imagery in the Experience of Literary Narrative: Views from Embodied Cognition

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Defined as vicarious sensorimotor experiencing, mental imagery is a powerful source of aesthetic enjoyment in everyday life and, reportedly, one of the commonest things readers remember about literary narratives in the long term. Furthermore, it is positively correlated with other dimensions of reader response, most notably with emotion. Until recent decades, however, the phenomenon of mental imagery has been largely overlooked by modern literary scholarship. As an attempt to strengthen the status of mental imagery within the literary and, more generally, aesthetic discipline, this dissertation proposes an analysis positioned at a confluence of literary theory and the cognitive sciences, especially the emergent research framework of embodied cognition. Questions asked throughout the dissertation include the following: a) What are the basic varieties of mental imagery in the reading of literary narrative? b) By what contents or narrative strategies are they most likely to be prompted? c) What is it like to experience a mental image of a particular variety? d) What are its psychophysiological underpinnings? e) How does a mental image of a particular variety relate to perception? f) How does it relate to higher-order meaning-making? Four prototypical imagery varieties are distinguished on the basis of two variables with two values each (referential vs. verbal domain; inner vs. outer stance). Gradual transitions and in-between imagery varieties are acknowledged. The imagery typology and related hypotheses are grounded in introspection but carefully supported with indirect empirical evidence and, whenever possible, formulated so as to facilitate direct validation.
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... The perceptual code involves the creation of mental images that are experienced as having perceptual qualities across a range of sensory modalities (Gentsch et al., 2016). Importantly, it appears that readers switch between codes during reading, with some passages evoking vivid imagery, whereas other passages or genres are processed in a verbal code (Kuzmičová, 2014). Kuzmičová (2014) identified, partly based on research and partly based on introspection, four different kinds of mental imagery occurring during reading. ...
... Importantly, it appears that readers switch between codes during reading, with some passages evoking vivid imagery, whereas other passages or genres are processed in a verbal code (Kuzmičová, 2014). Kuzmičová (2014) identified, partly based on research and partly based on introspection, four different kinds of mental imagery occurring during reading. Briefly, and according to her terminology, enactment imagery occurs spontaneously and creates the experience of actually being in the story. ...
... Introspective reports (Kuzmičová, 2014) and theories of reading (Zwaan, 1999) posit that readers experience, at least some of the time, mental images in the mental models they create while reading. These images appear to be comprised of information from multiple sensory modalities . ...
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... Imagery is the subject of much research. Anežka Kuzmičová (2013Kuzmičová ( , 2014 discusses the prototypical types (enactment, description, speech, rehearsal) of mental imagery evoked by narratives from an embodied cognition perspective. Kuzmičová (2012, p. 275) states that imagery from visual descriptions is not correlated to perceptual experience and resembles the experience of voluntary visual images. ...
... Imagery is the subject of much research. Anežka Kuzmičová (2013Kuzmičová ( , 2014 discusses the prototypical types (enactment, description, speech, rehearsal) of mental imagery evoked by narratives from an embodied cognition perspective. Kuzmičová (2012, p. 275) states that imagery from visual descriptions is not correlated to perceptual experience and resembles the experience of voluntary visual images. ...
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The study presents an experiment aimed at discovering similarities and differences in how American and Ukrainian participants perceived contemporary free verse. Three poems were examined from the perspectives of intertextual/infratextual/intratextual context dimensions. The presence of intertextual characteristics – reflecting social reality and metaphoric content – was recognized by the majority in both groups of participants, yet across the groups, there were differences in the degree of value placed on each characteristic. Differences in views on the infratextual contexts reflect the variability of functions performed by the initial/intermediate/closing parts of the poems. As regards intratextual context dimension, there were significant similarities in the participants’ views on the imagery, in the constructed text-worlds, emotional responses, interpretations, and encountered difficulties. The analysis of the intratextual contexts of the poems indicates that some texts may drive readers’ interpretations, thus reducing the role of culture in their reception.
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... Different discourses on imagination have given rise to still unsolved questions about its modalities and effects, particularly in relation to the construction of aesthetic and symbolic constraints: they derive from our imaginative abilities to regard and manipulate things and experiences of the real world through the wide spectrum of their unexpressed potentialities, even transcending the given ones. The imaginative manipulation of reality involves the embodied activation of our sensorimotor system, which is reused when the mindbrain processes counterfactual images, elaborates them through language and different media, or when it is receptive to mental imagery (Kuzmičová, 2013(Kuzmičová, , 2014 triggered by linguistic and visual artworks. ...
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... VR environments can affect the reader's interpretation of the written stories, which alters the original meaning. A possible solution can be found in how the interplay of embodied cognition (Baceviciute et al., 2021), mental imagery (Kuzmicova, 2013), and visualisation in VR (Pianzola et al., 2019) impacts the inner experience of the reader. ...
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