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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

guists call ‘situation models’ or ‘construals’ (schematic representations
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of the situation being verbally referred to). Just like situation models,
embodied simulations are not (or not necessarily) experienced at a con-
scious level. Yet, as Wojciehowski and Gallese’s analysis of Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway goes on to show, not all embodied simulations
triggered by verbal narrative are identical. In fact, the claim advanced
by researchers working on the embodied basis of language is that simu-
lations are implicated in making sense of any concrete linguistic expres-
sion, regardless of discourse context or stylistic qualities. Through the
creative use of language, literary narrative is particularly effective at giv-
ing rise to what I will call thick embodied simulations, where the word
‘thick’ is—after Clifford Geer —a function of the experiential richness
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and semantic complexity of a simulation. Another way to put the same
point is that simulations tend to be unconscious, low-level responses that
rarely lead to a conscious feeling in engaging with everyday language.
By contrast, literary narrative has developed devices that can make read-
ers fully conscious of those simulations—for instance, by conjuring up
vivid mental images or infusing the simulations with emotional, inter-
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pretive, or ethical significance. This stratification of responses is what I

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See Rolf A. Zwaan and Gabriel A. Radvansky, “Situation Models in Lan-
guage Comprehension and Memory,” Psychological Bulletin 123, no. 2 (1998):
162-85; Rolf A. Zwaan, “The Immersed Experiencer: Towards an Embodied
Theory of Language Comprehension,” in The Psychology of Learning and Mo-
tivation, ed. Brian H. Ross (San Diego and London: Elsevier Academic Press,
2004), 35-63.
13 See Geer ’s influential essay, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive
Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York:
Basic Books, 1973), 3-32.
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For more on consciousness and embodied simulations, see Marco Carac-
ciolo, “Embodiment at the Crossroads: Some Open Questions Between Lit-
erary Interpretation and Cognitive Science,” Poetics Today 34, no. 1-2 (2013):
233-53. Both Elaine Scarry and Ellen Esrock have wri en about mental im-
agery in a way that is broadly compatible with the embodied perspective dis-
cussed here; see Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2001); Ellen J. Esrock, “Embodying Art: The Spectator and the
Inner Body,” Poetics Today 31, no. 2 (2010): 217-50.

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