Towards a Somatic Narratology: Enactivism and its Implications for Literary Studies in Max Blecher’s Modernist Legacy

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Within Romanian prose of the first half of the twentieth century, Max Blecher literature occupies a singular position in the narration of the body, representing corporeality as prior to any determinate form of thought. In his prose, embodied memory and perception as a mode of knowledge intersect to configure a body that actively generates its own cognitive processes. Drawing on the explanatory model of 4E cognition, articulated in terms of embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended cognition, and following the methodology of enactivism, a postcognitivist approach, this study employs a somatic framework to analyze Max Blecher’s modernist prose. In the first part, I analyse the enactivist methodology in relation to literary studies and propose the concept of somatic narratology. In the second part, starting from the enactivist hypothesis that perception is a bodily activity, I explore Blecher’s perspectivism through the relationship it constructs with the body and the environment.