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HANNAH CHAPELLE WOJCIEHOWSKI, VITTORIO GALLESE, Introduction

In his adventurous essay “A Walk Through Deep History: Narrative,
Embodied Strategies, and Human Evolution,” cognitive literary the-
orist Marco Caracciolo explores two narratives that foreground the
“deep history” of human evolution. The first, entitled “Out of Eden,”
is a decade-long experiment in “slow journalism” conducted by the
Puli er Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek. In 2013 Salopek began
a 21,000-mile walk that retraces the pathways of the first humans as
they migrated out of Africa to five other continents during the Stone
Age. Salopek’s words, photographs, videos and audio-recordings,
which are posted and curated on a National Geographic website,
form quite literally a meandering narrative that aims to connect the
remote past to the present, and to enable readers across the globe to
follow and participate in the trek as it progresses.
Caracciolo pairs Salopek’s ongoing “Out of Eden” project with
William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors. A work of prehistoric fic-
tion, as the genre is known, Golding’s novel imagines the lives, ritual
practices, and worldview of a band of Neanderthals, and particularly
that of the protagonist Lok. Life is precarious and complicated for
Golding’s non-violent Neanderthals, no more so than when they come
in contact with another strange group of creatures, recognizable to
readers as our Homo sapiens ancestors.
Caracciolo analyzes these two works and readers’ engagements
with them by applying empirically grounded concepts from the fields
of embodied cognition and cognitive narratology. He also introduces
a theoretical formulation of his own — the concept of “thick embodied
simulation” — as a means of describing how, in different ways, Sa-
lopek and Golding make it possible for their audiences to imagine and
vicariously experience certain aspects of early human/hominid histo-
ry. Caracciolo frames his own project as “part of a wave of narrato-
logical approaches that seek to move narrative theory beyond its an-
thropocentric comfort zone.”

In “Textual Memory and the Problem of Coherence in Edmund
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,” cognitive literary historian Daniel
Lochman asks how it is possible that we are able to remember ex-
tremely complex works of fiction such as Spenser’s 35,000-line ro-
mance. Spenser’s verse narrative is episodic, though not particularly

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