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HANNAH CHAPELLE WOJCIEHOWSKI, VITTORIO GALLESE, Introduction

stories. For Hustvedt, stories are not purely linguistic phenomena;
rather, they derive from and inevitably entail embodied experiences,
whether for writers or for readers.
In a 1926 le er to Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf noted the
importance of rhythm in her own writing, which seemed to go “far
deeper than words.” Using Woolf’s insight as her starting point,
Hustvedt traces the origins of the narrative drive to the rhythmicity
of our prenatal experiences within our mother’s body, such as the
beating of the heart or the timing of her footsteps and other physical
movements. Drawing on neuroscientific accounts of the brain-body
interface as it develops from earliest life, and on psychological and
psychoanalytic theories of a achment between mother and child,
Hustvedt re-theorizes the ways in which our earliest experiences of
rhythmic entrainment with the body and consciousness of another —
first and foremost, of our mothers — provide the scaffolding for the
narrative and poetic drive that later emerges in each of us. In her essay
Hustvedt offers a erudite synthesis of twentieth- and twenty-first-cen-
tury debates in the sciences of mind and brain, out of which her own
original biocultural theory of narrative emerges.

The distinguished literary theorist Patrick Colm Hogan contributes
the second essay of this collection: “Affective Space and Emotional
Time: Learning from Lǐ Bái ( ) and Lǐ Qīngzhào ( 照).” In this
essay, Hogan, another pioneer of cognitive cultural studies, applies
recent discoveries regarding the neuroscience of space and time per-
ception to two famous poems of the Chinese literary canon, which
Hogan presents in his own translations. The first is “Changgan Bal-
lad,” penned by Tang Dynasty poet Lǐ Bái (701-762 C.E.); and the sec-
ond, “Sound after Sound, Lingering,” by Lǐ Qīngzhào (1084-1151), a
poet of the Song Dynasty.
Hogan argues that literature can teach us many things about
our affective experiences of space and time. Literature may illus-
trate concepts from neuroscience, yet it also represents aspects of
human experiences of time and space that are not visible in the sci-
ence alone. Through his virtuosic close readings of these poems,
Hogan opens up new insights into these canonical Chinese poems,
and specifically into the affective dimensions of spatial orientation,

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