Slow reading on the wing: Entangling enactive literary criticism, the energia of early modern imagining, and artistic research

Abstract

This essay explores possibilities for enactive imagining and criticism. It observes how recent enactive accounts of cognition see no divide between imagination and everyday perception, and forego representationalism. It examines somatosensory responses and effortless vivacity for some animal-related imagery in Terence Cave’s cognitive literary criticism Thinking with Literature (2016). Next, it finds that today’s enactive criticism resonates with Francis Junius’s early modern notion of energia, a loose blend of vividness (enargeia) and vivacity (energeia), and concludes that, with its emphasis on energeia’s ‘life force’, energia goes beyond the viewer’s participation in an image’s pictorialist illusion. Pictorialist-style imagining, the essay claims, aligns with a pre-enactive representationalist understanding of cognition. To better explore enactive imagining, the essay entangles discursive writing and artistic work, animated by bird wings.