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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

have tried to show in this article, a biocultural account of literary nar-
rative should develop a sensitivity to both cognitive-level involvement
and to the broader interpretive and even ideological stakes of that in-
volvement: in Salopek’s and Golding’s writings, thick embodied sim-
ulations become bound up with a renegotiation of the evolutionary
history of our species. Problematic notions of Homo sapiens excep-
tionalism are questioned, and with them culturally entrenched con-
ceptions of what constitutes a ‘normal’ human embodied mind. This
narrative probing of our biocultural identity through the deep history
of evolution is exemplified by Salopek and Golding, but it is not—of
40
course—limited to them. In fact, it falls into a broader tendency in
contemporary narrative to unse le the divide, entrenched in Western
culture, between humanity and the material world, human and non-
human animals. Thus, this article should be seen as part of a wave of
narratological approaches that seek to move narrative theory beyond
its anthropocentric comfort zone. 41

40 See also convergent arguments and close readings in Marco Caracciolo,
“Bones in Outer Space: Narrative and the Cosmos in 2001: A Space Odyssey
and Its Remediations,” Image & Narrative 16, no. 3 (2015): 73-89; “Posthuman
Narration as a Test Bed for Experientiality: The Case of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galá-
pagos,” Partial Answers 16, no. 2 (2018). In press.
41
See David Herman, “Narratology beyond the Human,” DIEGESIS 3, no. 2
(2014), h ps://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/
view/165; Alexa Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and
Environmental Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017).

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