Towards a Somatic Narratology: Enactivism and its Implications for Literary Studies in Max Blecher’s Modernist Legacy
Caietele Echinox June 30, 2026 Amalia Cotoi
Max Blecher's early-20th-century Romanian prose presents the body as prior to thought, with embodied memory and perception actively generating cognitive processes. Using 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) and enactivist methodology, this study develops a somatic narratology to analyze Blecher's modernist work. The first part examines enactivist methodology in literary studies and proposes the concept of somatic narratology. The second part explores Blecher's perspectivism through the relationship between body and environment, based on the enactivist hypothesis that perception is a bodily activity.