Publications

A hierarchical model of human societiesU+2019 relations with the natural world is at the root of todayU+2019s climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology. Drawing inspiration from Timothy MortonU+2019s concept of the "mesh" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the ...

How can providing less textual information about a fictional character make his or her mind more transparent and accessible to the reader? This is the question that emerges from an empirical study of reader response conducted by Kotovych et al. Taking my cue from this study, I discuss the role of implied information in readersU+2019 interactions with characters in prose fiction. This is the textual strategy I call U+2018character-centered ...

In dialogue with groundbreaking technologies and scientific models, twentieth century fiction presents readers with a vast mosaic of perspectives on the cosmos. The literary imagination of the world beyond the human scale, however, faces a fundamental difficulty: if, as researchers in both cognitive science and narrative theory argue, fiction is a practice geared toward the human embodied mind, how can it cope with scientific theories and ...

The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a full-fledged form of collective cognition. Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective ...

The language of U+201CimmersionU+201D in a fictional text lends itself to a dualistic reading that is, at best, unwelcome when attempting to think about narrative experiences ecologically. In this article, I argue for a model of narrative-audience interactions that privileges immersion as affective and temporal entanglement in stories over the containment model. I use Le quattro volte, a 2010 film by Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino, to ...