Page 176 - Costellazioni 5

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

cerning Spenser’s Britomart, who, more than Bradamante or Clorinda,
quests for a personal identity that she as a character creates from her own
imagination, experience, and memory. In this case, as in many others, co-
herence is achieved in discrete episodes occurring within and across texts.
Reading the Faerie Queene, like reading other long, complex narratives,
prompts readers to reimagine, recall, and retain coherent networks of em-
bodied noetic and affective experiences as textual memories.
Thanks to the combined efforts of narratology and literary
study, the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and philosophy, we have
new tools that allow us to identify and understand the operation of
memory during the dynamic experience of reading narratives, but we
are only at the threshold of understanding how short- and long-term
memory interact in these processes and are even less certain how these
experiences produce effects within individual readers and in groups.
Among the many questions to be considered are the following: in ad-
dition to frequency and emotional valence and arousal, are there other
variables that contribute to the duration of textual memories? What
correlations exist between readers’ autobiographical experiences when
reading a narrative storyworld and those carried over from lived ex-
perience? How can we map intertextual memory as an embodied ex-
perience that is distinct from questions of surface influence and allu-
sions? How can we study through a cognitive approach the experience
of textual memories across texts and cultures? Comprehension of tex-
tual memory in The Faerie Queene or other complex texts can be linked
to existing findings about the salience of fictional emotions, repeti-
tions, and arousal, but future studies offer the promise of grounding
literary theories about readers’ reception of texts, advanced in the
1980s and 1990s, with evidence derived from neuroscience and cog-
nitive research. Cognitive research being conducted now across many
disciplines offers the prospect of expanding the range of literary study
by joining textual analysis to emerging research about how we read
and co-create with authors the storyworlds their texts shape and ini-
tiate, and it offers the prospect of allowing us to understand the mech-
anisms that cue readers’ cognitive experiences in the moment and
across time and cultures. Experiences, like textual memories, expose
a “deep continuity of life and mind” within texts, across texts and cul-
tures, and over time.

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