Reading with the Body and the Bodies of Books
Reading with the Body and the Bodies of Books

Summary/Abstract: 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.

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