Theorizing from the Body: Rethinking Feminist Narratology Through the Concept of Embodiment.

For many years, the humanities have regarded the body as "a vehicle or object that houses the mind or the soul" (Hillman, Maude 2015, 1). The lack of critical attention to the body can be explained by the popularity of dualisms, which assume a division between mind and body, nature and culture, reason and emotions. These themes have been a constant presence in Western thought, from the reflections of Plato and Aristotle to the works of Descartes, the author of the famous dictum "Cogito, ergo sum." (Williams, Bendelow 1998, 1) However, in recent decades, the situation has been changing, primarily due to the development of cognitive sciences, which promote the idea that the connection between body and mind is much closer than previously assumed and that “they interacted with each other in complex ways to, only
together, give substance and form to ‘what and how we think, feel, and act’” (Sathi 2023, 1625). One of the results of these changes is growing attention to concept of embodiment. Human body, according to Mark Johnson, encompasses five dimensions of embodiment (biological, ecological, phenomenological, social, and cultural) which must be considered holistically (Johnson 2008, 164-165). Thus, embodiment is not simply “a rephrasing of ‘body’ but rather a term that indicates the … framework in which the physical is always situated” (Hartung 2018,
9). By using embodiment instead of body as an analytical and epistemological category, it becomes possible to emphasize “the remarkable extent to which the mind relies upon the body to process its environment” (Sathi 2023, 1625-16).