Guest lecture by Guillemette Bolens (University of Geneva)
Guillemette Bolens is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva. Her research focuses on the history of the body, kinesic intelligence, gestures, and embodied cognition in visual and verbal arts. She is the author of La Logique du corps articulaire (2000); The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (2008/2012), and L’Humour et le savoir des corps: Don Quichotte, Tristram Shandy et le rire du lecteur (2016).
https://www.unige.ch/lettres/angle/en/collaborateurs/medieval/bolens/
Here is a brief abstract about her presentation.
Literature activates and often challenges our cognitive faculties. A desire to better understand its impact goes with an enhanced attention to the potentials of our embodied minds, and the ways in which literature is a manifestation of both situated cognition and imaginary experiences. A reflective focus on the cognitive acts of perceptual simulations, in relation to the historical background of a text, can produce a type of analysis that bridges the gap between literary studies and cognitive science via the study of narrated gestures, sensorimotor events, and their dynamic cognitive force in the act of reading.