Page 157 - Costellazioni 5

DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

Textual Memory

Cognitive theory and neuroscience offer means to comprehend the
formation of textual memories. Marco Caracciolo writes that “readers’
engagement with stories at the bodily-perceptual level relies on a sim-
ulative mechanism, whereby readers imagine some experience on the
basis of the text and their own experiential background” and retain it
as a memory — an emotional memory that can be perceived and meas-
ured, as psychologists led by Johanna Kissler (2007) have suggested
using electroencephalographic (EEG) event-related potentials (ERPs):
“the impact of emotional content during reading has a physiological
basis that may contribute to the emotions one experiences when read-
ing an absorbing novel” (480). This suggestion is consistent with the
work of Vi orio Gallese and others who have shown neural and mus-
13
cular responses to various visual and auditory stimuli. Given emerg-
ing understanding of reading as an embodied cognitive experience,
one can think of an engaged reader of a long narrative like the Faerie

UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Rebeca Helfer, Spenser’s Ruins
and the Art of Recollection (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). On
memory theatres as instances of extended cognition, see Miranda Anderson,
The Renaissance Extended Mind (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 124-28.
13 Marco Caracciolo, The Experientality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (de
Gruyter, 2014), p. 159; also Monika Fludernik, “Narratology in the Twenty-
First Century: The Cognitive Approach to Narrative,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010):
924-30. On Caracciolo’s “simulative mechanism” derived from reading, see
Vi orio Gallese, “Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal Expe-
rience,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4 (2005): 23-48; see also
Kissler et al., “Buzzwords: Early Cortical Responses to Emotional Words Dur-
ing Reading,” Psychological Science 18, no. 6 (2007): 475-80, esp. 480; Gallese
and Valentia Cuccio, “The Paradigmatic Body: Embodied Simulation, Inter-
subjectivity, the Bodily Self, and Language,” Open MIND 14 (2015): 1-22; and
Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski and Vi oro Gallese, “How Stories Make Us
Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology,” California Italian Studies 2 (2011),
n.p., h p://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jg762c2. For a specific application to vi-
olence and tragedy, see Ellen Spolsky, “The Biology of Failure, the Forms of
Rage, and the Equity of Revenge,” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Studies,
edited by Susan E.F. Chipman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 34-54.

156