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

Queene not only as encountering disruptions but also as retaining and
remembering networks of more-or-less similar but non-contingent
and discontinuous embodied narrative experiences — experiences that
draw on what Caracciolo calls “memories of bodily movement (expe-
riential traces) as part of the process of co-constructing fictional
14
worlds” in narratives. The salience of such networked, embodied
memories results in part from textual cues that can prompt a range of
responses and act as literary affordances. These may be noetic (that
15
is, related to an intentional process of consciousness), subliminally af-
fective, or both at once. Intratextual memories form networks prompt-
ed within a work like the Faerie Queene, while intertextual memories
may be prompted across texts. Cues derived from other works, such
as, for example, Orlando Furioso, may reappear in the Faerie Queene not
just as allusions but as related textual experiences, more or less similar
and resonant as a unified complex of thought, feeling, and kinetic re-
sponse, and they may signal a collective, distributed cultural memory
that may be embedded within a text.
Narratives that generate textual memories produce what Moni-
ka Fludernick and Caracciolo have called “experientiality,” wherein
a text mimetically evokes an active, embodied response that may be
expressed in a variety of cognitive and affective registers. A reader
may recall series of responses in texts that produce memorial experi-
ences, and these, if articulated, can be shared enactively with others,
creating a discourse of distributed and extended textual remember-
16
ing. Of course, autobiographical memories of each reader, the range
and types of prior reading, and specific contexts of a reading yield dif-

14 Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative, 160.
15 On affordances in relation to reading and cognition, see Terence Cave,
Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2016), 42-62.
16 See Giovanna Colombe i, The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enac-
tive Mind (Cambridge, Massachuse s: MIT Press, 2014), especially 190-201,
and Monika Fludernik, “Collective Minds in Fact and Fiction: Intermental
Thought and Group Consciousness in Early Modern Narrative,” Poetics Today
35, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 690-730.

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