Intricately woven masterpieces of craft, mournful for their human cries in defiance of our sometimes less than human surroundings, Nettel's stories and novels are dazzlingly enjoyable to read for their deep interest in human foibles.
Following on the critical successes. After the Winter. What's more, in this novel, she has impeccable syntactic control, and her ear is sharper than ever before". Mexican Literature in Theory. Mexican Literature in Theory is the first book in any language to engage post-independence Mexican literature from the perspective of current debates in literary and cultural theory. Before I read this book, I had read some reviews which had me wondering if this one would be something I'd like, reviews from people whose opinions I trust.
Short overview about this book : Siamese fighting fish, cockroaches, cats, a snake, and a strange fungus all serve here as mirrors that reflect the unconfessable aspects of human nature buried within us. The traits and fates of these animals illuminate such deeply natural, human experiences as the cruelty born of cohabitation, the desire to reproduce and the impulse not to, and the inexplicable connection that can bind, eerily, two beings together. By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies.
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Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Isabelle Wentworth. A short summary of this paper. Embodiment and the Animal in Guadalupe Nettel's 'El matrimonio de los peces rojos'. Gazzola et al. This can be read as a literary representation of a neurophysiological phenomenon — embodied simulation, an internal mimicry, either perceptible or imperceptible, performed when watching others completing certain tasks, movements or expressions Gazzola et al.
A cognitive critical approach to the mirroring between animals and humans in the stories reveals the particular intersection between new paradigms in cognitive science, animal studies, and posthumanism that the anthology develops, each of its narratives intertwining mind, body and nonhuman other in a non- hierarchical network.
Keywords Embodied simulation, cognition, animals, posthumanism, Guadalupe Nettel. The plot of each of the stories turn on its animals: the fish, the cockroaches, the fungus, the cats, the snake. Yet taking their relationship to be metaphorical reinstates the separation between animal and human, a move antithetical to the project of the novel. In contrast, I argue that Natural Histories explores a particular intersection between cognitive science, animal studies and posthumanism, as each of its narratives intertwine mind, body and nonhuman other in a non-hierarchical assemblage.
Embodied simulation, discovered both in humans and other primates, is an internal mimicry, either perceptible or imperceptible, performed when watching others completing certain tasks, movements or expressions Gazzola et al. In exploring this simulation, Natural Histories represents models emerging in cognitive science of a mind embodied and embedded in the world, destabilising the discrete and autonomous Humanist subject.
The narrator forms a close relationship with the fish, watching them with obsessive fascination. Over the course of the narrative, her own emotional states and behaviours begin to simulate those she perceives in the fish. A growing number of cognitive literary critics have brought the insights of second generation cognitive science to bear on literature e.
Easterlin; Kukkonen. Though this is a feature of human social interaction, it is not limited to intra-human interactions. In fact, the mirror neurons which are theorised to underpin these imitation mechanisms were initially found in cross-species interactions between humans and animals P. Ferrari et al. Human-nonhuman embodied simulation and its posthumanist implications have previously been examined in fictional engagement with animals: for example, in a recent article in PMLA, Marco Caracciolo identifies embodied responses to nonhuman assemblages, exposing how verbal patterns encode embodied experience Natural Histories depicts a human-nonhuman embodied resonance that moves between linguistic, narratological and characterological levels, demonstrating how what is variously called kinesthetic empathy, embodied simulation or embodied resonance can be encoded in fictional narrative.
This reading brings the field of cognitive literary doi Embodiment and animals in cognitive literary criticism Rather than a specific theoretical model, cognitive literary criticism consists of a constellation of approaches to texts which engage with contemporary neuroscience and psychology. This diverse range of research is unified by an analytical animus: to discover what the cognitive sciences can teach us about art, and what art can teach us about cognition Richardson.
Embodied simulation has been at the forefront of several developments in cognitive literary criticism, due to its possible role in relations between characters and readers, as well as between characters Gallese and Wojciehowski; Cuccio; Hogan. In comparison to this focus on the Early Modern period, contemporary Spanish novels have been relatively neglected within the cognitive turn.
In , a study by Gazzola et al. These insights from cognitive science help to understand how Natural Histories constructs its posthumanist commentary through representations of an embodied, empathetic simulation between human and animal in the text.
Although understanding the human-animal parallels through a cognitive framework diverges from the accounts of character posed by previous critics of Natural Histories, a strength of cognitive literary criticism is that it is able to exist alongside other forms of criticism Thomas Crane. For example, according to DeVries, the animals operate as a vehicle for the narrative to explore anxieties around love and motherhood.
A cognitive approach can unite these perhaps contradictory conclusions, by restoring human—animal relationships themselves as a key concern of the anthology, and taking the conceit of mirroring beyond mere allegory. My analysis will argue that this cross-species relationship is a concrete aspect of human concern in itself, rather than a symbol of human foibles. By extension, I argue the relationship of the protagonists with the animals is a genuine exploration of human—animal relationships, not just human— human relationships.
The stories demonstrate this from the perspective of embodied simulation, and what evolves in the anthology is a non-hierarchical intersubjectivity based on identification. It begins, Yesterday afternoon Oblomov died, our last red fish. I had seen it coming for several days, in which I barely saw him move inside his round fishbowl.
Neither did he jump as before to receive his food or to chase the rays of sunlight that cheered his enclosure. He seemed the victim of a depression or something similar in his life of a fish in captivity.
This pronoun is without antecedent, leaving deictic ambiguity surrounding the human narrator. Before him, there were two others of the same colour, whom I did observe closely, and about whom I learned with great interest I sat and watched the comings and goings, sometimes slow and rhythmic, sometimes frenetic and frantic, of the red fish.
I learned to distinguish them clearly, not only by the colourings of their scales, but by their attitudes and manner of moving, and of searching for food. As I will explain in more detail in the next section, these events mark the high and low points of the narrative, shaping its emotional pace and tension.
The narrator- protagonist fixates on the fish: watching them, talking about them to her husband, researching them, until she seems more deeply absorbed in their lives than in her own.
Against this interpretation, Nettel may in fact ironize the attempt to reduce animals to emblems of human personalities, or simplified symbols. In both cases, the narrative seems to be criticising the interpretation of animals as mono-dimensional symbols or metaphors for humans. In the stories of Natural Histories, animals are on the one hand unknowable, and yet familiar. This is one way in which embodied identification can occur between two very differently embodied beings.
We identify that the principal characters of each of the stories employ the metaphor of personification and depersonification in order doi In describing the human-animal identification in Natural Histories as a literary device used to construct human identities, both the mimetic cognitive aspect, and the role of the animals themselves, has been downplayed. Yet, as studies on non-living agents such as robots and animated figures have revealed, a degree of anthropomorphisation may be important in the empathetic response of embodied simulation for two reasons.
First, anthropomorphism means that we are able to perceive nonhumans as social peers. Anthropomorphism, though based on self-knowledge, can facilitate an empathetic reaction: an embodied simulation, which gives way to other- knowledge. Other aspects of the phenomenon include hypermentalisation, or the attribution of belief and emotional stances to nonhuman entities, where people see human faces or expressions in random patterns Varella.
Both teleological reasoning and hypermentalisation, as well as other aspects of anthropomorphism, are exhibited by the narrator in the first story towards the two fish. When the fish have to be separated out into individual tanks, the narrator experiences an intuition quite like theory of mind.
Zoomorphism is the converse of this: it is the attribution of animal-like mental states to humans. Or perhaps it was the sensation of familiarity that produced my rejection? Relatedly, the identification between humans and nonhumans in the anthology destabilises the binary concepts used to divide them.
Each story, in its own way, dissolves barriers of intelligence vs instinct, civilised vs primitive, self- aware vs non self-aware, determinism vs free will. Even I had no idea. As I will explain below, simulation between the human narrator and her fish creates bodily and affective resonances which guide her unconscious behaviour and conscious decision making.
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