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In “A Stone Woman” (2003), A.S. Byatt centres the story of her protagonist’s fantastic metamorphosis around the continuities between the transformations involving the body and those affecting the mind. In this light, her narrative constitutes a fictional exploration of cognition as embodied and of language as a cognitive tool equally rooted in embodiment. While this focus straightforwardly calls for second-generation cognitive narratology as the most suitable theoretical framework, the article proposes to integrate the cognitive approach with insights from unnatural narratology. This combined perspective arguably allows to appreciate and examine Byatt’s ambivalent use of embodied cognition as both a shared condition that fosters the readers’ capability to relate to the narrated experience, but also as a strategy that interacts with traditional features of the fairy tale (e.g. the lack of psychological introspection) in ways that are defamiliarizing and yet not subversive of the genre., ENTHYMEMA, N. 25 (2020)

Over the past decade, Elsa Morante’s oeuvre has been the object of a robust upsurge of interest, which was significantly fuelled by the study of new archival material acquired by the Fondo Morante ...

This article focuses on Elsa Morante’s last novel, Aracoeli (1982), as an interesting case study of representation of the mind as embodied. The argument begins by considering the ambiguous status of Manuele as narrator and suggests that his inability to distinguish between true and apocryphal memories should be regarded as a cognitive issue rather than a rhetorical one. The next stage of the argument explores the consequences of adopting a cognitive approach, thus foregrounding the embodied mind as one of the main foci of the narrative, both thematically and stylistically. Assuming a cognitive interpretive key, the central part of the article illustrates Morante’s complex portrayal of the dependence of the mind on the body and in particular on sensory perception, providing also a closer examination of the number of ways in which Morante articulates the body-mind nexus. For descriptive and heuristic purposes, these instances have been gathered into three main clusters: Embodied nature of emotions or feelings; Specificities of embodiment; and Embodied memory. Finally, I shall offer some suggestions as to how a cognitive reading of Aracoeli corroborates a non-nihilistic interpretation of the novel as expression of existential or literary defeat.