Human Body - Reading texts

1994

Reading with the Body and the Bodies of Books, 2020

This essay starts from the proviso that the best writers are also the most passionate readers, thus engaging their readers’ minds, souls and bodies in the most complex and compelling ways. In many cases, they do so through their characters, which become the embodiments and prototypes of our own reading selves. In The Vegetal Memory, Umberto Eco argued that ’the rhythm of reading follows that of the body, the rhythm of the body follows that of reading. We read not only with the brain, we read with our whole body and that is why, when we read a book, we cry or we laugh or, when we read thrillers, they make our hair stand on end’ (Eco 2008, 26). Emily Dickinson’s unsettling account that ’If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry’ (The Norton anthology of American literature 1985, 2482) may serve as a reinforcement of the essentially somatic nature of our engagement in reading. We will speak about the experiences of reading codex as narrated or described by writers and common readers, be those our own or described by others, and we will argue that those are ultimately physical. Key words: reading, body, (tactile) experience

Language Learning in Higher Education, 2016

This article presents the findings of a field experiment in medical English with first-year medical students at the University of Pavia, Northern Italy. Working in groups of 8–10, the students were asked to produce a corpus of medical texts in English demonstrating how the human body is itself a meaningful text (

The article focuses on the research of the impact of social factors on human body through the prism literary texts of modernist period. The material of the analysis is the corpus of literary prose by Virginia Woolf. By means of linguistic (semantic and conceptual) analysis of the literary text the vision of corporality characteristic of the modernist period is revealed as well as specific features of interaction of human being and society that found bodily reflection in the imagery space of V. Woolf's prose.

Communication studies identifies bodies as both objects of communication and producers (or sites) of communication. Communication about bodies—for example, gendered bodies, disabled bodies, obese bodies, and surgically modified bodies—influences bodies at the physical, material level by determining how they are treated in social interactions, in medical settings, and in public institutions. Communication about bodies also forges cultural consensus about what types of bodies fit in particular roles and settings. In addition to analyzing the stakes of communication about bodies, communication studies identifies bodies as communicating forces that cannot be accounted for by standards of reason, meaning, and decorum. Bodies are physical, material, affective beings that communicate because of, not in spite of, their messy, ineffable status. Moreover, communication is an embodied process that involves a range of material supports, including human bodies, technological bodies, and other nonhuman physical and biological bodies. Investigating bodies as communicating forces compels an understanding of communication that is not exclusively rational, meaning-oriented, and nonviolent. All communication studies scholarship deals with bodies, even if only implicitly, because communication is an embodied practice. Scenes featuring the impassioned exhortations of a fiery orator rousing an audience to action or romantic partners sharing their most intimate thoughts clearly require bodies to act as producers and receivers of communication; in fact, bodies are essential in all communication practices, even when

Frontiers in Psychology, 2022

Digital texts have for decades been a challenge for reading research, creating a range of questions about reading and a need for new theories and concepts. In this paper, we focus on materialities of texts and suggest an embodied, enacted, and extended approach to the research on digital reading. We refer to findings showing that cognitive activities in reading are grounded in bodily and social experiences, and we explore the cognitive role of the body in reading, claiming that-influenced by tacit knowledge and the task at hand-textual meaning is enacted through a mental and physical engagement with text. Further, applying the concept of affordances, we examine how digital technologies have induced new ways of physically handling and mentally interpreting text, indicating that brain, body, text, and technologies are integrated parts of an extended process of reading. The aim of the paper is to encourage empirical research on the interplay between body (including brain), text, and text materialities, a focus we argue will deepen our understand of the current transformation of reading.

This article deals with spatial aspects of traditional writing technologies, from inscriptions in stone to the printed page. It is argued that writing technologies, by their potential of connecting texts as artifacts and human bodies in space, have an interpersonal, disciplining function that tends to be overlooked by research. Readers are bodily placed in relation to written texts quite differently than are interacting speakers. This argument is elaborated using two examples technological innovations in writing: the rune stone and the classroom. The analysis draws on the contextual theory of social semiotics. It is proposed that, in order to better understand the connections between text, body and space, written texts should be seen as potential participants in interpersonal relations.