Article
Reference
Kinesis in Literature and the Cognitive Dynamic of Gestures in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes
BOLENS, Guillemette
Abstract
Literature activates and often challenges our cognitive faculties. A desire to better understand its impact goes with an enhanced attention to the potentials of our embodied minds, and the ways in which literature is a manifestation of both situated cognition and imaginary experiences. A reflective focus on the cognitive acts of perceptual simulations, in association with the historical background of a text, can produce a type of analysis that bridges the gap between literary studies and cognitive science via the study of narrated gestures, sensorimotor events, and their dynamic cognitive force in the act of reading. Kinesic passages in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes are discussed in this essay to demonstrate the value of this approach.
BOLENS, Guillemette. Kinesis in Literature and the Cognitive Dynamic of Gestures in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Costellazioni, 2018, vol. 5, p. 81-103
Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:104917
Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.
LL
ANNOII- N. 5 -2018COSTE AZIONI LL
Rivista di lingue e letterature
diretta da Giuseppe Massara
Anno IIn°5 Febbraio 2018
CO ST E AZ ION I LL
ISSN 2532-2001
Poste italiane s.p.a. - Spediz. in Abbonamento postale del 353/2003 - con. in L. 27/02/04 - art. 1, comma 1 - dcb Roma
Narrative and the Biocultural Turn
a cura di Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Vittorio Gallese
Editoriale pag. 5 Introduction by Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Vittorio Gallese pag. 9 Saggi
Siri Hustvedt Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction pag. 23 Patrick Colm Hogan Affective Space and Emotional Time: Learning from L Bái ( )
and L Q ngzhào ( ) pag. 51 Guillemette Bolens Kinesis in Literature and the Cognitive Dynamic of Gestures in Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Cervantes pag. 81 Alberto Casadei Poetry andFiction: A Necessary, and Historically Verifiable, Combinaton pag. 105 Marco Caracciolo A Walk Through Deep History: Narrative, Embodied Strategies,
and Human Evolution pag. 123 Daniel T. Lochman Textual Memory and the Problem of Coherence in Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene pag. 147 Ellen Spolsky Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley pag. 181
p
p
Indice n. 5 - 2018
Rivista di lingue e letterature Direttore Giuseppe Massara
Narrative and the Biocultural Turn a cura di Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Vittorio Gallese
Rubrica di linguistica e glottodidattica a cura di Claudio Di Meola
Coordinamento editoriale a cura di Massimo Blanco
Lavoro redazionale a cura di Mattia Bilardello, Antonella De Michelis e Tommaso Gennaro con la collaborazione di Irene Magon Comitato editoriale
Caporedattore - Christos Bintoudis Vicecaporedattore - Benedetta Carnali
Coordinamento - Massimo Blanco, Valeria Merola Recensioni - Davide Crosara, Gabriele Guerra Rubrica - Daniela Puato
Segreteria e comunicazione - Pierluigi Vaglioni Traduzioni - Mattia Bilardello
Comitato scientifico
Francesca Bernardini Napoletano; Piero Boitani; Paolo Canettieri;
Mario Capaldo; Maria Luisa Cérron Puga; Annalisa Cosentino; Fer- nando De Martinez; Claudio Di Meola; Franco D’Intino; Ettore Fi- nazzi Agrò; Oreste Floquet; Antonella Gargano; Janja Jerkov; Giorgio Mariani; Luigi Marinelli; Mario Martino; Paola Maria Minucci; Do- natella Montini; Sonia Netto Salomao; Armando Nuzzo; Mauro Ponzi; Arianna Punzi; Barbara Ronchetti; Ugo Rubeo; Serena Sape- gno; Maria Antonietta Saracino; Anna Maria Scaiola; Claudia Scan- dura; Anna Maria Segala; Emanuela Sgambati; Angela Tarantino;
Igina Tattoni; Stefano Tedeschi; Francesca Terrenato; Norbert Von Prellwitz; Mary Wardle.
Redazione
Veronic Algeri; Cecilia Bello; Chiara Bolognese; Benedetta Carnali;
Simone Celani; Alessandro Coltrè; Simona Di Giovenale; Francesco Di Lella; Davide Finco; Tommaso Gennaro; Emilio Mari; Chiara Moriconi; Sanela Mušija; Nicoleta Nesu; Daniela Padularosa; Nicola Paladin; Maria Caterina Pincherle; Daniela Puato; Elisabetta Sar- mati; Gaia Seminara; Paolo Simonetti; Ivan Yevtunshenko; France- sca Zaccone.
Consulenza di Federica Spinella e Francesca Zaccone Questa rivista adotta un sistema di double blind peer review.
Direttore responsabile Letizia Lucarini Rivista quadrimestrale Anno II n. 5-2018
In copertina:
Andrea Cresti, Landscape/Inscape, 2010
n. 5-2018
Narrative and the Biocultural Turn
a cura di Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Vittorio Gallese
Editoriale
pag. 5Introduction by Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Vittorio Gallese
pag. 9Saggi
Siri Hustvedt Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction pag. 23 Patrick Colm Hogan Affective Space and Emotional Time: Learning from LǐBái (李白)
and LǐQῑngzhào (李清照) pag. 51 Guillemette Bolens Kinesis in Literature and the Cognitive Dynamic of Gestures in Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Cervantes pag. 81 Alberto Casadei Poetry andFiction: A Necessary, and Historically Verifiable, Combinaton pag. 105 Marco Caracciolo A Walk Through Deep History: Narrative, Embodied Strategies,
and Human Evolution pag. 123 Daniel T. Lochman Textual Memory and the Problem of Coherence in Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene pag. 147 Ellen Spolsky Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley pag. 181
Recensioni
Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è reale? La scomparsa di Ettore Majorana,
Neri Pozza, Vicenza 2016 (Michela Bariselli) pag. 205 Daniela Padularosa, Denken im Gegensatz: Hugo Ball. Ikonen-Lehre und Psychoanalyse
in der Literatur der Moderne, Peter Lang, Bern 2016 (Giulia Iannucci) pag. 207 Don DeLillo, Zero K, traduzione di Federica Aceto, Einaudi, Torino 2016 (Paolo Simonetti) pag. 209 Contributor Biographies pag. 213
Kinesis in Literature and the Cognitive Dynamic of Gestures in Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Cervantes
GUILLEMETTEBOLENS University of Geneva
Abstract
Literature activates and often challenges our cognitive faculties. A desire to beer understand its impact goes with an enhanced aention to the potentials of our embodied minds, and the ways in which literature is a manifestation of both situated cognition and imaginary experiences. A reflective focus on the cognitive acts of perceptual simulations, in association with the historical background of a text, can produce a type of analysis that bridges the gap be- tween literary studies and cognitive science via the study of narrated gestures, sensorimotor events, and their dynamic cognitive force in the act of reading.
Kinesic passages in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes are discussed in this essay to demonstrate the value of this approach.
Keywords: cognition; perceptual simulation; sensorimotricity; read- ing; horseback-riding.
Neurophysiological and neurocognitive research has demonstrated in the past decades that there is a foundational correlation between motricity and cognition, and that language pertains in many respects to this correlation.1Cognition is to a great extent grounded in senso- rimotricity, and so is our processing of language.2One key parameter in this perspective is the pervasive cognitive phenomenon called per- ceptual simulation. We pre-reflectively trigger perceptual simulations when we plan and perform an action, when we understand someone’s goal-oriented gesture, and when we make sense of movements de- scribed verbally.
Neuroscientist Viorio Gallese posits that
ES [embodied simulations] and the underpinning MMs [mirror mecha- nisms] by means of neural reuse can constitutively account for the rep- resentation of the motor goals of others’ actions by reusing one’s own bodily formaed motor representations, as well as of others’ emotions and sensations by reusing one’s own visceromotor and sensorimotor rep- resentations. ES can provide a unified explanatory framework for min- dreading as conceived of in the broad sense […]. Our bodily acting and sensing nature appears to constitute the real transcendental basis upon which our experience of the social world is built. […] The discovery of mirror neurons, within the broader context of a new account of the motor system demonstrating its cognitive role, allowed the possibility to con-
1 Cf. Patrick Haggard, Yves Rossei, and Mitsuo Kawato, Sensorimotor Foun- dations of Higher Cognition, Aention and Performance XXII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede, The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
2 Cf. Viorio Gallese and Valentina Cucio, “The Paradigmatic Body—Em- bodied Simulation, Intersubjectivity, the Bodily Self, and Language,” in Open MIND 14 (T), ed. T. Meinger and J.M. Windt (Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group, 2015), 1-23, doi:10.15502/9783958570269; Barbara Marino, et al., “Lan- guage Sensorimotor Specificity Modulates the Motor System,” Cortex48, no.
7 (2012): 849-56; Rolf Zwaan and Michael Kaschak, “Language in the Brain, Body, and World,” in Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, 368-81.
ceive intersubjectivity and social cognition from a novel neuroscientific perspective that emphasizes the crucial role of the acting body. (7)3
By the phrase ‘perceptualsimulation’ I wish to refer to an aspect of em- bodied cognition that pertains specifically to sensorimotricity and the acting body.4I use the term ‘kinesis’ in my research to refer to the feel- ing of movements and gestures in interaction. Perceptual simulations are triggered when we interact with others and cognitively process perceived or imagined movements in real life situations. We equally trigger them in verbal exchanges and when we read (or hear) kinesic information in literature, for instance when we understand a fictional gesture, a character’s gait, or an action verb.5Take for example the verb
‘to swish.’ A perceptual simulation grounds the linguistic processing of a sentence such as ‘she swished across the room.’ The simulation is likely to be multimodal as it may combine the dynamics of a gait with the sight and sounds of fabric in motion, and with tactile sensations of limbs against fabric. It is often the case that, when people are asked to explain the meaning of this sentence, they start moving and kinesi- cally showing the meaning of the verb, several seconds before resort-
3Viorio Gallese, “Bodily Selves in Relation: Embodied Simulation as Sec- ond-person Perspective on Intersubjectivity,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal SocietyB 369: 20130177 (2014), hp://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0177.
On the notion of ‘liberated embodied simulations’ in literature, see Hannah Wojciehowski and Viorio Gallese, “How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology,” California Italian Studies2, no.1 (2011), hp://eschol- arship.org/uc/item/3jg726c2.
4 Cf. Guillemee Bolens, Le style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit lié- raire, préface d’Alain Berthoz (Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, 2008). English translation: The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 11-19: “Action compre- hension and perceptual simulations.” For a recent article on perceptual sim- ulations, see Markus Ostarek and Gabriella Vigliocco, “Reading Skyand See- ing a Cloud: On the Relevance of Events for Perceptual Simulation,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition43, no. 3 (2017):
579-90.
5 I discuss perceptual simulations in literature in publications accessible at hps://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/authors/statistics/32253.
ing to language. To express their understanding of the sentence, they enact their perceptual simulation.6
My claim is that perceptual simulations ought to be investigated in lit- erary criticism. Literature constitutes a twenty-seven-centuries old lab- oratory and archive7of the multifarious ways in which humans have been practicing language as a correlation between cognition and motricity. These archive and laboratory constitute one of the major contributions literary studies may bring to the table now shared by the humanities and neurocognitive science.8
Kinesis permeates literature. Even the most abstract works refer in one way or another to felt gestures and perceived interactions. They may do so literally and/or figuratively, by narrating a movement or by con- veying information by means of kinesic similes.9Either way, readers’
motor resonance and embodied cognition become involved in dynam- ic acts of understanding, fundamentally grounded in motor cognition.
Some of such dynamic acts are perceptual simulations. To study per- ceptual simulations as an integral part of literary criticism entails a shift of aention, which ought to be seen as complementary to other trends in literary criticism, rather than exclusive. It provides access to one link in the chain—but a link that is key and often overlooked.
6 Cf. Autumn B. Hosteer and Rebecca Boncoddo, “Gestures Highlight Per- ceptual-motor Representations in Thinking,” in Why Gesture? How the Hands Function in Speaking, Thinking and Communicating, ed. R. Breckinridge Church, Martha W. Alibali, and Spencer D. Kelly (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), 155-74.
7Cf. Terence Cave, “Situated Cognition: The Literary Archive,” Poetics Today 38, no. 2 (June 2017): 235-53.
8Cf. Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism(Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Paul B. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art(Baltimore: The Johns Hop- kins University Press, 2013).
9 I discuss kinesic similes inThe Style of Gestures, chapter 2: “Kinesic Tropes and Action Verbs,” 66-99.
An evocative example of perceptual simulation in literary reception may be found in The Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the most important medieval English authors, wrote it towards the end of the fourteenth century. In it, “The Tale of Sir Thopas,” told by Chaucer’s intradiegetic persona, is interesting for its well-established parodic quality. In the following passage, parody is kinesic:
Sire Thopas fil in love-longynge, Al whan he herde the thrustel synge, And pryked as he were wood.
His faire steede in his prikynge
So swae that men myghte him wrynge;
His sydes were al blood. (CT, VII, 772-7)10
[Sir Thopas fell in a yearning for love,/ As soon as he heard the thrush sing,/ And spurred as if he were crazy./ His fair steed in his spurring/
So sweated that one could wring him;/ His sides were all blood.]
The image is surprising of a horse so sweaty and bloody that it could be wrung. It is unlikely that anyone (now and back then) has ever seen a sweaty horse being twisted and squeezed in the way a towel may be wrung to extract water from it. Yet, we are able to figure out such a move. We use aspects we have experienced (e.g., wringing a towel) and blend them into a sketch of the action.11Beyond the numerous variations in each reader’s imagination, we are able to retrieve some kind of gestural dynamic, no maer how vague and impossible when applied to the body of a horse. We retrieve a gestural dynamic, more
10Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, online edition. Texts and transla- tions prepared and maintained by Larry D. Benson, available at hp://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer, last modified April 8, 2008 (last accessed June 11, 2017). Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Middle English text is from Larry Benson, Gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 2008).
11 On Blending, see Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think:
Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
than a clear-cut and stable picture of the action, although we may sub- sequently come to stabilize it into a representation. During the first seconds of linguistic processing, we are pre-reflectively eliciting a ki- nesic dynamic that affords some semantic resolution to the verb ‘to wring’. In a second phase only, we assess the idea of a wrung horse as impossible, funny, ludicrous, horrifying, or anything else. In order to reach that stage, a kinesic simulation is first triggered, which pre- reflectively turns the words read or heard into some meaning, no mat- ter how sketchy and transient.
I begin with the passage of the wrung horse because it is paradoxically easy to manage. We retrieve perceptual memories that afford the pos- sibility of mentally enacting an impossible and blatantly fictional move, by means of a gestural dynamic that belongs to our kinesic repertoire and which we are liable to transfer from prior experiences in different contexts to the fiction we read. This constitutes an example of dynamic blending in motor cognition.
We do not have access to the way our neurons function on a sub-per- sonal level. But we do have access to the perceptual simulations our minds produce when reading, since simulations are part of how and whatwe think. Neuronal functioning is inaccessible without the me- diation of scientific equipment and technology, but perceptual simu- lations are cognitive, and their outcome may become the focus of re- flective aention. Initially purely cognitive, they may then become in- tellective. When we read the wrung-horse line in Chaucer, we cannot observe our neurons firing at the moment when we make sense of Chaucer’s words, but we do have access to the dynamic image of a wrung horse. If we grasp this blatantly fictional idea (and then per- haps decide that it is absurd, humorous, etc.), it entails that we pro- duced a simulation of a wringing movement applied to a horse-like sort of embodiment. Literary interpretations are often based on such perceptual simulations, which generally remain unacknowledged. The shift of aention I advocate is to include this process into our reflective analyses. This is a way of pondering why we think we understand a narrated movement the way we do, and of addressing our ideas as an outcome of our cognitive participation.
Before exploring this further, one point is worth making. By writing a text that triggers the uncanny perceptual simulation of a horse being wrung dry, Chaucer’s text draws our aention to our participation in the production of kinesic information. The communication is therefore kinesic in its object as well as in its action. In such a passage we expe- rience the fact that literature prompts in us a cognitive act pertaining to kinesic intelligence, i.e., to our capacity to make sense of move- ments, including impossible movements. The stranger the triggered perceptual simulation, the more noticeable our participation. In such instances, literature has something to say not only about kinesic events taking place in the plot, but also about our active experience of kinesis in literature.
To delve deeper into the role of perceptual simulations, on which literature relies, I now wish to discuss two further passages involving horses, one taken from Cervantes’s Don Quixoteand the other from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.12In these passages, a complex kinesic dynamic interconnects horse and horseman. The first passage is from Cervantes:
La del alba sería cuando don Quijote salió de la venta tan contento, tan gallardo, tan alborozado por verse ya armado caballero, que el gozo le reventaba por las cinchas del caballo. (I, iv)13
[It must have been about daybreak when Don Quixote left the inn, so happy, so gallant, so delighted at being a properly dubbed knight that the very girths of his horse were bursting with his joy.]14
12 For an excellent analysis of kinesic effects in Macbeth, see Mary Thomas Crane, “‘Cabin’d, Cribb’ed, Confin’d’: Images of thwarted motion in ‘Mac- beth,’“ in Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence, ed.
Kathryn Banks and Tim Chesters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
13 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha I & II, ed. Manuel F. Nieto, (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2006).
14 Cervantes, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. John Rutherford (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 41.
A literal translation of the last sentence would be, “so that joy [gozo]
was exploding to him through the straps of the horse.” The second passage I wish to discuss is from Shakespeare. It presents Macbeth in a soliloquy.
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself And falls on th’other. (I. 4, 25-8)15
Each reader may interpret those lines differently. Yet, before reaching the interpretive stage, one needs to retrieve the kinesic aspects of the texts. A minima, and if the passages are to make any sense at all, some perceptual simulations are likely to be triggered, not so much of exact movements and postures, but rather of the underlying dynamic, di- rection, and tensive qualities of such movements.
In both passages, a modification in the horseman’s tonicity may be in- ferred. In the case of Don Quixote, his feeling of joy is so intense that it is about to explode through the straps holding his horse’s paunch. The formulation suggests that some pressure is exerted onto leather straps, diffusing the stretching pressure from the rider’s limbs onto the horse’s equipment and body. A modified tonicity, emotionally experienced and expressed by the horseman, is transmied to both the mount and its harness. To convey this emotional and tonic distribution, the grammat- ical function of subject of the verb is aributed to the emotion itself, gozo.
The stretching spreads out under the action of joy. Cervantes found a way to use language so as to convey the complex (and potentially hu- morous) emotional experience of an explosive tonicity in Don Quixote, whose excitement manifests itself in the tensive quality of his whole posture, legs and possibly arms included. To reduce this passage to ab-
15 William Shakespeare,The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. John Jowe, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (Oxford:
Clarendon, 2005).
stract concepts, such as happiness, satisfaction, or excitement, would unduly reduce Don Quixoteto its plot alone.16
Shakespeare’s tragedy is equally remarkable in the way in which the conflicted mind of Macbeth is expressed through conflicted directions.
That the spurring and pricking gesture is negated for lack of spur (‘spur’ potentially denoting the metallic artifact as well as a felt dy- namic) does not preclude the fact that we cognitively activate this movement in order then to negate it. If we didn’t, we would not make sense of the lines “I have no spur/To prick the sides of my intent.” The figurative is here inextricably linked to the literal, as the spurring would be exerted on the concrete sides of the abstract concept of in- tention. In grasping the idea of a spurred intention, we trigger a sim- ulation in which a dynamic movement performed with two opposite limbs (such as legs) is applied to another body. This other body is li- able to remain indiscriminate, but it remains that some kind of em- bodiment must function as placeholder in order for the spurring to take place. This in and of itself entails a perceptual simulation. Without it, the passage is impossible to process.
In Shakespeare as in Cervantes, the distinction between the figural and the literal is blurred, as a figural meaning is conveyed via the highly concrete dynamics of narrated movements. In Don Quixote, joy nearly explodes through straps; in Macbeth, after the warrior has lamented his lack of spur, the abstract concept of ambition vaults and overleaps itself: “I have…only/Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself/And falls on th’other.” Strikingly, the final line of the quotation seems to fall short of its ending, omiing the word ‘side’ while leading us to infer it by anticipation. This creates the effect it expresses of an overreaching move that falls short of itself.
16 For a thorough analysis of this passage and a discussion of kinesis and tonic- ity in Don Quixote, see Guillemee Bolens, introduction to L’humour et le savoir des corps: Don Quichoe, Tristram Shandy et le rire du lecteur(Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016), hps://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:88506.
In Macbeth’s lines, it is noteworthy that no horse is referred to. And yet, the passage suggests one, because of the notion of spurred and pricked sides. The action performed on the concept of intention cues our inference of a situated embodiment that corresponds to that of a horse, simply be- cause the laer is spurred. Context grounds the possibility of relevance17: for humans, a horse affords spurring more readily than, say, a grasshop- per. Historically too, spurring was more likely to apply to a horse in Shakespeare’s England than to another animal. Owing to this first tar- geted, yet obstructed, inference, the ensuing actions of vaulting and over- leaping are oriented towards a horse-like embodiment, which elicits the metaphorical dynamics expressed by Macbeth. However, it is unclear how vaulting and overleaping are distributed between the bodies of horse and horseman—whoever or whatever the horseman is. And does the action take place forward or sideways? The presence of the word
“side” is a clue and invites the idea of a rider jumping into his saddle, overleaping the horse and landing on its other side. Meanwhile, it maers that this is never articulated as such. We are made to infer it, and thereby experience a sense of misapplied, misdirected, and ultimately excessive, obstructed, and tumbling energy.18
In the linguistically crafted artifact of Shakespeare’s lines, the dynamic of an emotional abstraction, ambitionoverleaping itself, becomes at the same time understandable and challenging—while it perhaps also helps diffuse the potential humour in the image of a warrior falling on the other side of his horse. The awkwardness of this image is its meaning, as the text prompts an effort in us, a perceptually simulated contortion, which remarkably conveys Macbeth’s urge and angst. To fully experience literature is to pay aention to such details, which are anything but trivial.
17 Cf. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance, Communication and Cogni- tion(Oxford, Malden (MA), Victoria (Australia): Blackwell Publishing, 1986, 1995). On literary criticism and relevance theory, see Terence Cave and Deirdre Wilson, eds., Reading Beyond the Code: Literature and Relevance Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
18 See Crane, “‘Cabin’d, Cribb’ed, Confin’d.’” Crane shows how feelings of choking, thwarted movement, and entrapment pervade Macbeth.
The next step is to see if this type of aention helps address the text more fully. For this, let’s return to Chaucer’s “Tale of Sir Thopas.”
But sir Thopas, he bereth the flour Of roial chivalry!
His goode steede al he bistrood, And forth upon his wey he glood As sparcle out of the bronde;
Upon his creest he bar a tour,
And therinne stiked a lilie flour – (CT, VII, 901-7)
[But sir Thopas, he bears the flower/ Of royal chivalry!/ His good steed he mounted/ And forth upon his way he glided/ Like a spark out of the burning log;/ Upon the top of his helmet he bore a tower,/ And in that stuck a lily flower –]
At this point on his chivalric journey, the knight Sir Thopas rides so fast that he is compared to a spark shooting from a burning log. This simile can be found in other Middle English narratives, for instance in Havelok the Dane (late thirteenth century) and The Stanzaic Morte Arthur(fourteenth century). The simile is shared culturally, and the effect is differentially grounded in the readers’ acquaintance with such material, as well as in their respective imagination and experience of racing riders and sparking logs.
In this context, one feature is unique to Chaucer’s narrative: the shoot- ing spark simile is immediately followed by the information that Sir Thopas, while riding at full speed, is wearing a tower on top of his helmet, in which is placed a lily flower. The tower and lily can be read either as a heraldic crest designed on the helm, or as an ornamental device placed on top of the helmet. Elaborate medieval helmets could be adorned with three-dimensional objects, shaped for instance in the form of animals, wings, or horns. In the Renaissance, when such a fashion disappeared, only two-dimensional heraldic pictures re- mained topical. But in a 14th-century narrative, a miniature three-di- mensional tower can safely be inferred from the lines above, “upon his crest” meaning “upon the top” of his helmet, as Larry Benson’s translation indicates. Meanwhile, it is certainly unusual that a lily is placed in such a tower.
In this passage, the succession from spark to lily cues a dynamic that combines extreme linear speed (a spark shooting from a log) with the movement transmied by a fast galloping knight to a flower sticking out from a cylindrical container on top of his helm.19If we decide that the tower and lily must correspond to a static heraldic representation, the pursuit of relevance will make us block the motion suggested by the vocabulary and grammar of the passage. But if we accept the pos- sibility of a three-dimensional tower, the lily’s supple stem becomes inferentially free to yield to an interestingly conflicted dynamic.
Such a dynamic may be seen as humorous, all the more because it im- pacts a lily. In note 907 of the Riverside Chaucer, Larry Benson empha- sizes the lily’s heraldic dimension: “Guy of Warwick has an unspeci- fied flower as his crest […]. The royal house of France sported a fleur- de-lis or lily […]. But the lily stuck in the tower is unparalleled and probably, like Thopas’s escutcheon, fanciful.”20Chaucer was writing during the Hundred Years War. The Canterbury Taleswas his last work, still incomplete when he died in 1400. From 1337 until 1453, England and France fought over the succession to the French throne. The lily was so strongly associated with the emblem of French kingship that, in order to substantiate his claim to the French crown, Edward III quartered the English coat of arms to include the fleur-de-lis into it, next to the three golden lions of English monarchy. In such a historical context, Chaucer’s lines may conceivably lead to a political interpre- tation. But for it to be even possible, room must be made for the text’s inferred dynamics. Unless an increased aention is paid to possible inferences elicited by a perceptual simulation considered reflectively, such aspects can be (and generally are) entirely missed, when strictly nothing forbids them, especially in a parodic text wrien by Chaucer.21
19 For more on diegetic dynamics, see Bolens, L’Humour et le savoir des corps.
20 Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 2008), 922.
21 For such aspects in Chaucer’s poetics, see Bolens, “La narration des émo- tions et la réactivité du destinataire dans Les Contes de Canterburyde Geoffrey
There is a critical value in kinesic narrative effects, which in the present case lies in their awkwardness and potential humour. Fast linear speed (the horseman glides like a shooting spark), linked to the tempo of a galloping horseman, leads to the cognitive contortion of two contrast- ed dynamics (just as in Shakespeare) and their impact on the soft wav- ing stalk of a lily, planted in an ornamental tower on top of a helm.
We are not told whether the lily is real (and supple) or artificial (and stiff). Any interpretive decision in that regard is our own, as much as any sense of awkwardness and humour. But the text does afford the possibility of such interpretations. A focus on perceptual simulations brings this type of cognitive and intellective aspects to our reflective aention, which may henceforth become critically relevant when linked, in this instance, to the historical context of Chaucer’s lifetime.22 To see a lily as funny has a different political implication during the Hundred Years War than today. It may be read as a way of turning the emblem of a contending power into a laughable, unthreatening, and manageable object.
As already pointed out, an increased aention to kinesis in literature ought to be complementary to other critical perspectives and ap- proaches. Laura Hodges offers an excellent reading of “The Tale of Sir Thopas” in her 2014 book Chaucer and Array: Paerns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and Other Works. Her focus being on equipment, fabrics, clothes and armours, she expounds on the “costume rhetoric” in “The Tale of Sir Thopas,”
providing rich historical information to address the text in an un- doubtedly compelling interpretation. However, when considering the helmet, tower, and lily, she dissociates those features from their nar- rative context, which leads her to freeze the picture. Tower and lily become static objects in a list of items: “The lily image […] combines whiteness, delicacy, and beauty. However, a tower displaying a lily,
Chaucer,” Médiévales 61 (2011): 97-118, hps://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/
unige:19337.
22 On Chaucer’s involvement in the Hundred Years War, see Peter Brown, Geoffrey Chaucer(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
however accurately it might serve as a family emblem or devotion to the Virgin, is not a fearsome image. A beautiful appearance […] sup- plants strength and force” (162). Hodges refers to Benson’s note (quot- ed above), connecting the lily to the fleur-de-lissported by the royal house of France, as well as to Sherman Hawkins, who suggests that the lily must be read as a symbol of the Virgin Mary.23 Burrows, Hawkins and Hodges offer valuable information, but dissociate the lily from its narrative context, thereby extracting it from the dynamics induced by the text. They arbitrarily separate the spark simile from the lily in the tower despite the immediate proximity of these elements in plot and text.
Interestingly, medievalist Joanne Charbonneau comments in 2005 on the dynamic of the passage:
The last section of Sir Thopas describes not a heroic bale against the giant, but rather Thopas seing out on his horse for an adventure that never happens. These lines are packed with non sequiturs and abrupt shifts. The words goode steede al he bistrood (VII, 903) are stereotypical and found in many romances as the following extracts demonstrate;
however, the next action verb, the gliding, is unusual, puzzling, and possibly humorous, given the comparison to a spark: And forth upon his wey he glood/ As sparcle out of the bronde. The action is slowed even further, almost stalling altogether, with the description of Thopas’s crest: Upon his creest he bar a tour,/ And therinne stiked a lilie flour (VII, 906–7). Towers were not uncommon on crests, but sticking a lily on it is. This could be an allusion to the fleur-de-lis associated with French royalty or to Guy of Warwick, who bore a flower on his crest (706-7).
Charbonneau aptly notices the verb ‘to glide’, but doesn’t explain why she deems this lexical choice to be strange. Whether “gliding” conflicts with her perceptual simulation of a horse’s movements or with that of a spark shooting in mid-air is unclear. Nevertheless, she interest-
23 Hawkins, Sherman, “Chaucer’s Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology63, no. 4 (1964): 599-624.
ingly communicates a sense of hindrance in her textual reception.
Then she claims that the reference to the lily in the tower necessarily slows down the action: it is “almost stalling altogether.” This provides a window onto the interpretive processes literary analysis is often based on. Charbonneau perceives a dynamic in some lines but pre- cludes it in others, although nothing in the text justifies such a discrep- ancy. Only an interpretive assessment may lead to decide that the tower and lily are bound to be bi-dimensional and static rather than three-dimensional and dynamic. This example shows that a greater aention to perceptual simulations in literary criticism would be use- ful and interesting for the simple and straightforward reason that crit- ics trigger them when reading. We might thus fruitfully become aware of such cognitive processes and include them into our reasoning—not to give them free rein and promote unsuitably subjective readings, but to find out whywe think what we do, and test the validity of some of our conclusions when they are based on perceptual simulations.24For, those processes take place whether we read the word ‘lily’ as referring to a heraldic emblem or to an actual flower bouncing on top of a gal- loping and parodic knight.
In a methodology aentive to perceptual simulations, the next step is to look in the text for clues that strengthen or undermine interpretive directions. The first line in the lily passage includes a metaphor. Sir Thopas bears the flower (“he bereth the flour”) of royal chivalry (901- 2). While the adjective ‘royal’ strengthen an association with the sym- bol of French monarchy, the flower of chivalry is a common metaphor that refers to the best knight in a court or a narrative. It is synonymous with ‘epitome’ or ‘paragon of chivalry’. Only here, the text uses the trope in a way that emphasizes the concrete action of carrying a flower. Sir Thopas supposedly bears the flower as one wears an em- blem. However, this slightly awkward formulation may also be a way to cue our reception of the information offered five lines later that Sir
24 Cf. David Benson, “Their Telling Difference: Chaucer the Pilgrim and His Two Contrasting Tales,” The Chaucer Review18, no. 1 (1983): 61-76.
Thopas carries a lily on his helm. Even if a reader focuses on the figu- rative valence of the line, the concrete action of “carrying a flower”
persists as centrally relevant.
Finally, the lily is also referred to in the tale when Sir Thopas’s coat of arms is described as being as white as a lily flower (867). Hodges right- ly remarks that “Chaucer compares this blank white space to ‘a lilye flour,’ an image of purity, but hardly an image to inspire terror in an opponent” (158). To have a white coat of arms is equivalent to handing a blank business card today. Pure or not, it is hardly effective in an ob- ject meant to flag one’s identity and social value. Assuredly, knights in white exist in Arthurian legends, who hide their identity with blank shields while performing great feats of arms. However, the point in fighting incognito is to have everybody wonder and ask about such an impressive yet unidentified warrior. A typical example is Lancelot in the thirteenth-century Lancelot en prose. Everybody, including King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, is eager to find out about the mysteri- ous knight’s identity. In contrast, no one is around to ask about Sir Thopas and to care about his unlikely exploits, which is part of the parodic effect in this tale.
In short, the kinesic dynamic of a text is worth paying aention to.
Symbols are of course relevant and topical, especially in a medieval work, but they ought to be situated in their narrative context so that we may perceive the way in which textual dynamics inflect their meanings. Since critics agree that “The Tale of Sir Thopas” is parodic, the lily should, hypothetically at least, be allowed to bounce.
In my next and last example, kinesis is associated with mindreading.
The Canterbury Talesdepicts a group of pilgrims meeting in a suburb of London and riding together to Canterbury to worship Thomas à Becket’s relics. Accompanied by the Host of the inn where they ini- tially gathered, the pilgrims play a storytelling game during their jour- ney. The Host is the master of ceremonies and calls upon them to par- ticipate in the contest. The narrator is a member of the company, and corresponds to the fictional persona of Chaucer himself. As narrator, he offers lively descriptions of his fellow pilgrims, and rehearses their
tales and interactions. In the passage below, the Host notices Chaucer- the-pilgrim for the first time, a while after their departure.
Til that oure Hooste japen tho bigan, And thanne at erst he looked upon me, And seyde thus: “What man artow?” quod he;
“Thou lookest as thou woldest fynde an hare, For evere upon the ground I se thee stare.
Approche neer, and looke up murily.” (CT, VII, 693-8)
[Until our Host then began to joke/ And then for the first time he looked at me,/ And said thus: “What sort of man art thou?” said he;/
“Thou lookest as if thou would track a hare,/ For ever upon the ground I see thee stare./ Approach nearer, and look up merrily.”]
Larry Benson interestingly translates Middle English ‘fynde’ by Mod- ern English ‘track,’ suggesting that Chaucer-the-pilgrim’s general ai- tude has to do with the endeavor leading to finding and catching a hare, rather than to the moment of discovery per se. In a way or an- other, how do we understand the line “you look as if you would [try to] find a hare”? I have asked a variety of people what they understood in the passage above. Every answer would states, “He [Chaucer-the- pilgrim] is feeling X,” in the form, “He is X”. For example, he is shy;
despondent; evasive; unfocused; focused; concentrated; chaotic, etc.
My purpose is not to put into question those interpretations. No tex- tual features substantiate one interpretation over the other. My point is that they evince an interestingly pervasive tendency: we reach a con- clusion, here an emotional abstraction, such as shyness, on the basis—
left implicit—of a perceptual simulation, which remains pre-reflective.
When reading, we trigger the dynamic we infer from the idea of some- one searching for/tracking/finding a hare, and we perform an act of mindreading whereby we infer the emotion and state of mind corre- sponding to this aitude. When asked what we understand, we name the emotion and obliterate the kinesic simulation on which our con- clusion is grounded. Meanwhile, each reader triggers a perceptual simulation that corresponds to the way he or she imagines the move- ments of a human intent on catching a hare. A 14th-century civil ser- vant, such as Chaucer, and a student of medieval English in 2018 may
have very different experiences in hare tracking. Their perceptual sim- ulations will hence differ in many respects. Literary criticism corre- sponds to a professional expertise that compensates for such historical disparities by finding out about the way Chaucer and his contempo- raries might have processed the image.25But it remains that all mem- bers of Chaucer’s audience, now and then, process it by means of some kind of dynamic and kinesic simulation. Clearly, the perceptual sim- ulation triggered by a person familiar with hare tracking is likely to be more grounded than mine. But it will still be a perceptual simula- tion. Therefore, the outcome of such processes ought to be an explicit part of our interpretations, not only because we will need to adapt them to historical contexts, but also because they might provide inter- esting analytical clues.
Indeed, beyond the differences in simulations, an aention to the very process of simulation and the way it combines kinesis with mindread- ing may lead to possible common denominators between the varying simulations.26Concerning the passage above, all the simulations in- clude the fact that the orientation of the gaze, whether restless or fix- ated, is downward, owing to the Host added comment, “For evere upon the ground I se thee stare./ Approche neer, and looke up murily”
(CT, VII, 697-8) [For ever upon the ground I see thee stare. Approach nearer, and look up merrily]. The purpose of this exchange is explicitly
25Typically, a medievalist should and would research medieval animal lore, and consider other occurrences of the term ‘hare’ in Chaucer’s works (which is beyond the scope of this essay). The hare had sexual connotations in several medieval texts, a fact emphasized by Chauncey Wood in “Chaucer and ‘Sir Thopas’: Irony and Concupiscence,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14, no. 3 (1972): 389-403. However, the problem with Wood’s interpretation of Chaucer-the pilgrim as lecherous is that it clashes with lines 703-5, which directly follow the reference to hare tracking, and which describe Chaucer as avoiding contact and “daliaunce,” rather than seeking too much of it.
26 It should be clear by now that I do not use the term ‘simulation’ to refer to aempts at guessing what others think. Rather, kinesis grounds intersubjec- tivity, and mindreading, i.e., an aention to the other as the instance of an- other mind, is an expression of it.
interactional. The Host is asking Chaucer-the-pilgrim about his iden- tity by requesting eye contact and a beer access to his facial expres- sion. With delightful irony, Chaucer, the expert in social interactions, depicts his personaas having social difficulties and avoiding eye con- tact.27The Host further claims about him:
He [Chaucer-the-pilgrim] semeth elvyssh by his contenaunce, For unto no wight dooth he daliaunce.
“Sey now somwhat, syn oother folk han sayd.” (CT, VII, 703-5) [He seems otherworldly (or, abstracted)28in his behavior,/ For unto no person is he sociable:/ “Say something now, since other folk have spo- ken.”]
Chaucer, in the striking and humorous depiction of his fictional per- sona, brings together acting bodies with intersubjectivity. He does so not only thematically, by having a character ask his persona to stop avoiding eye contact (or simply contact), but also by crafting a text which involves readers into the intersubjective act of “mindreading kinesis,” for instance when they process the reference to a hare-track- ing Chaucer.
I coin the phrase ‘mindreading kinesis’ to second Terence Cave’s com- ments in his 2016 book Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism: “kinesis should be understood as playing a fundamental role in mind-reading, in the broadest sense of the term. It can even be ar- gued that kinesis and mind-reading are different aspects of the same process” (29). Terence Cave adds that
mind-reading and motor resonance are not two separate areas (‘mind’
and ‘body’) but twin aspects of the incessant efforts we make to pene- trate the intentionality of others and make plain our own. Readers of
27 On sociality in Chaucer, see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer(Cambridge, Mas- sachuses: Harvard University Press, 1989).
28 Cf. Alaric Hall, “Elves on the Brain: Chaucer, Old English, and Elvish,” An- glia—Zeitschrift für englische Philologie124, no. 2 (2006): 225-43.
fiction and theatre audiences are observers of these effects in single or multiple others; they continuously mind-read authors and characters, drawing inferences from what they say and responding to the motor resonances communicated by their words and (especially in visual media) their bodies. (112)
As Cave argues, “[i]f motor resonance and mind-reading, considered as a single suite of responses, are what affords empathy, then we can hardly speak of the way literature works for us without bringing those responses back to the reflective surface” (30). In full agreement with Cave’s perspective, I hope to have provided examples of the many complex and powerful ways in which literary texts prompt kinesic simulations as a central aspect of our readerly engagement with them.
That my chosen examples do so, not as grand-standing effects that draw every reader’s eye, but in subtle, nuanced ways embodied in po- tentially any line might also imply the fundamental importance of such motor responses to our encounters with literature and to our crit- ical relation to it.
Bibliography
Armstrong, Paul B. How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Benson, C. David. “Their Telling Difference: Chaucer the Pilgrim and His Two Contrasting Tales.” The Chaucer Review18, no. 1 (1983): 61-76.
Bolens, Guillemee. “Cognition et sensorimotricité, humour et timing chez Cervantès, Sterne et Proust.” In L’interprétation liéraire et les sciences cog- nitives, edited by Françoise Lavocat, 33-55. Paris: Éditions Hermann.
hps://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:84248.
—. “Kinesthetic Empathy in Charlie Chaplin’s Silent Films.” InKinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, edited by Dee Reynolds and Mahew Reason, 143-56. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012.
hp://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:23589.
—. “La narration des émotions et la réactivité du destinataire dans Les Contes de Canterbury de Geoffrey Chaucer.” Médiévales 61 (2011): 97-118.
hps://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:19337.
—. “Les simulations perceptives dans la relation aux œuvres d’art liéraires.”
In Corps en scènes, edited by Mireille Besson, Catherine Courtet, Françoise Lavocat, and Alain Viala, 115-25. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 2015.
hp://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:76393.
—. “Les simulations perceptives et l’analyse kinésique dans le dessin et dans l’image poétique.” Textimage: Revue d’étude du dialogue texte-image4, 2014.
hp://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:74799.
—.Le style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit liéraire. Preface by Alain Berthoz. Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, 2008. English translation: The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. hp://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:96439.
—.L’humour et le savoir des corps: Don Quichoe, Tristram Shandy et le rire du lecteur. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016. Introduction:
hps://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:88506.
Brown, Peter. Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales, online edition. Texts and translations prepared and maintained by Larry D. Benson, available at hp://
www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer. Last modified April 8, 2008. Last accessed June 11, 2017). Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Middle English text is from Larry Benson, Gen. ed., The River- side Chaucer, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 2008.
Cave, Terence. “Situated Cognition: The Literary Archive.” Poetics Today38, no. 2 (June 2017): 235-53.
—.Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism. Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2016.
Cave, Terence and Deirdre Wilson, eds. Reading Beyond the Code: Literature and Relevance Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha I & II. Edited by Manuel F. Nieto. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2006.
—The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. Translated by John Ruther- ford. London: Penguin Books, (2000, 2001) 2003.
Charbonneau, Joanne. “Sir Thopas.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales. Edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, vol. 2., 649-714. Suf- folk: Boydell & Brewer, 2005.
Crane, Mary Thomas. “‘Cabin’d, Cribb’ed, Confin’d’: Images of Thwarted Mo- tion in ‘Macbeth.’” In Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence.Edited by Kathryn Banks and Tim Chesters. Basingstoke: Pal- grave Macmillan, 2018.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Gallese, Viorio. “Bodily Selves in Relation: Embodied Simulation as Second- person Perspective on Intersubjectivity.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal SocietyB 369: 20130177, 2014. hp://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0177.
Gallese,Viorio and Valentina Cucio. “The Paradigmatic Body—Embodied Simulation, Intersubjectivity, the Bodily Self, and Language.” In Open MIND 14 (T). Edited by T. Meinger and J.M. Windt, 1-23. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group, 2015. doi:10.15502/9783958570269
Haggard, Patrick, Yves Rossei and Mitsuo Kawato. Sensorimotor Foundations of Higher Cognition. Aention and Performance XXII. Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2008.
Hall, Alaric. “Elves on the Brain: Chaucer, Old English, and Elvish.” Anglia—
Zeitschrift für englische Philologie124, no. 2 (2006): 225-43.
Hawkins, Sherman. “Chaucer’s Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise.” The Jour- nal of English and Germanic Philology63, no. 4 (1964): 599-624.
Hodges, Laura F. Chaucer and Array: Paerns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and Other Works. Chaucer Studies 42. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2014.
Hosteer, Autumn B. and Rebecca Boncoddo. “Gestures Highlight Percep- tual-motor Representations in Thinking.” In Why Gesture? How the Hands Function in Speaking, Thinking and Communicating.Edited by R. Breckin- ridge Church, Martha W. Alibali, and Spencer D. Kelly, 155-74. Amster- dam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017.
Marino, Barbara F.M., Viorio Gallese, Giovanni Buccino, Lucia Riggio. “Lan- guage Sensorimotor Specificity Modulates the Motor System.” Cortex48, no. 7 (2012): 849-56.
Markman, Keith D., William M.P. Klein, and Julie A. Suhr, eds. Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2009.
Ostarek, Markus and Gabriella Vigliocco. “Reading ‘Sky’ and Seeing a Cloud:
On the Relevance of Events for Perceptual Simulation.” Journal of Experi- mental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition43, no. 3 (2017): 579-90.
Pezzulo, Giovanni, Maeo Candidi, Haris Dindo, and Laura Barca. “Action Simulation in the Human Brain: Twelve Questions.” New Ideas in Psychol- ogy31 (2013): 270-90.
Robbins, Philip and Murat Aydede. The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cog- nition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Shakespeare, William. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed.
1986. Edited by John Jowe, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stan- ley Wells. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005.
Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance, Communication and Cognition. Ox- ford, Malden (MA), Victoria (Australia): Blackwell Publishing, (1986) 1995.
Strohm, Paul. Social Chaucer. Cambridge, Massachuses: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Wojciehowski, Hannah and Viorio Gallese. “How Stories Make Us Feel: To- ward an Embodied Narratology.” California Italian Studies2, no. 1 (2011), hp://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jg726c2.
Wood, Chauncey. “Chaucer and ‘Sir Thopas’: Irony and Concupiscence.”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language14, no. 3 (1972): 389-403.
Zwaan, Rolf A. & Michael Kaschak. “Language in the Brain, Body, and World.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, edited by Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede, 368-81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
