Abstract
In Books with Bodies: Experientiality in post-1980s Multimodal Print Literature , I examine contemporary British and North American authors' use of books as platforms for multimodal narration. "Multimodality" refers to the concurrent use of several semiotic systems (such as writing, maps, charts) for communication. The pointed juxtaposition of different semiotic systems in a literary text requires a combination of perception processes on the reader's part. My dissertation charts the ways in which multimodal literary books published in response to the proliferation of electronic reading and writing interfaces from the 1980s onward prompt metacognitive awareness about "reading" as an experience that is grounded in bodily interactions and sensory contact with the modes and the platforms that mediate literature. I term this metacognitive awareness about the readers' embodied engagement with the text's material form "presence," by revising Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's notion of "presence-effect."
The theoretical framework for this dissertation comes from three fields: I combine approaches to multimodality that originated in the study of social semiotics, insights from the cognitive sciences--the "second-generation" models of cognition--and twentieth century philosophies of experience, particularly those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Serres, and Gumbrecht. By analyzing multimodal fictions, poetry, and lyrical essays such as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005), Anne Carson's Nox (2010), Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes (2010), and Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams's S. (2013), among other texts, Books with Bodies subverts the distinction between higher-order mental abilities (such as language processing) and lower-order perceptions (like touch) which underlies prior scholarship on the cognitive impact of literature. Indeed, I argue that the tendency to unpack the literary experience primarily in terms of how the mind processes language persists due to the equation of cognition with computation in first-generation artificial intelligence (AI) researches that influenced cognitive literary studies. Drawing on insights from queer and disability studies, I show that when we take cognition as analogous to information processing, we pathologize behavioral or cognitive differences. Thus, at a time when AI researches are finally moving beyond language processing to consider embodiment, my dissertation demonstrates the manner in which contemporary literature can contribute to the understanding of embodied, enactive intelligence.