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This book presents a commentary on and an analysis of P. Leiden I 344 recto, which contains the poem variously called The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All or The Admonitions (Mahnworte), from the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt. The first part of the book comprises an analysis of several literary aspects of the poem, including its unity, compositional date, reception, possible setting, genre, literary style and meaning. It also offers a literary reading of the poem within the context of the cultural and intellectual milieu that produced it. The second part of the book provides a detailed translation, commentary to, and literary reading of, the poem, subdivided into sections that largely follow the divisions within the manuscript. A metrical transliteration is given, broadly following the prosodic principles of Gerhard Fecht, which provide a pragmatic formal mode of analysis. The degree to which these are relevant to the compositional structure of the poem is discussed.

This chapter considers the connection between physical feeling and literary experience, captured in the term sensation. Some experiences of literary reading can feature actual physical responses, such as laughter, chuckling, smiling, smirking, or shivering, hairs-prickling, catching of breath, or heart-racing and quickness of breathing, or bodily shying away, moving the book to arm's length, arousal, a lump in the throat, or crying and so on. These are all clear physical manifestations of emotions and feelings that are immediate and direct. Texture is treated here as the point at which physical and conceptual sensations become identical. Sensation is also connected to readerly empathy and sympathy. Where sensation in literary reading can be understood as a ‘feeling of…’, sympathy is an extension of sensation along a cline of projection towards a ‘feeling for…’, and empathy is a final shift along the cline to a ‘feeling with…’. In spite of these differences, the fundamental premise of the chapter is that all three affective responses are basically the same aspect of the embodiment principle to varying degrees of projected abstraction.

This chapter surveys some of the key issues in the study of embodiment in literary reading. Recent research in psycholinguistics has called attention to the role of motor resonance and experiential models in understanding language—two psychological mechanisms often brought together under the heading of “embodied simulation.” How does literary reading, and particularly reading literary narrative, leverage these embodied phenomena? Does embodiment always matter in reading or only in specific circumstances? Building on linguist David Ritchie’s scalar account of embodied simulation, and using Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho as a case study, this chapter distinguishes among various types of embodied involvement and shows how they shape the experience of reading Ellis’s novel. It also draws attention to the question of consciousness, calling for empirical research on the interplay between unconscious processes and lived experience (mental imagery, bodily feelings, etc.) in engaging with literary narrative.

Feedback structures are crucial to the act of reading. This is especially clear in contexts for reading where the cognitive stakes are higher, for example, where psychopathology plays a role. Using disordered eating as a test case, this chapter shows how an understanding of the principles of feedback and stability—and in particular the distinction between positive and negative feedback—gives new insights into the psychiatrically relevant causes, experiences, and effects of reading. The evidence comes from existing theoretical and empirical work, and from a pilot study recently conducted in collaboration with the eating disorders charity Beat. By offering a framework for unifying diverse findings on the mechanisms of reading in general and on the cognitive components of specifically literary reading, the chapter makes the case for linking cognitive literary studies, the medical humanities, psychology, and psychiatry with systems and control theory, to theoretical and potentially therapeutic benefit.

This chapter features three readings of Momaday’s brief poem “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” originally published in 1992, the year of the Columbus quincentenary. Each reading is based in a distinct worldview and system of aesthetics: Kiowa, with which Momaday identifies personally and genealogically and with which the specific content and overt themes of the poem can be aligned; Navajo, with which Momaday has extensive personal and professional experience; and Māori, with which Momaday has no personal or professional experience and in which he has no particular stake. The three readings move outward from a tribally specific approach to Indigenous literary reading and interpretation toward an intertribal or international approach and toward the possibility of a more global, trans-Indigenous approach.

This chapter presents the process of recovery/interpretation by situating the 1965 special issue of the Midcontinent American Studies Journal (MASJ), within multiple configurations of relevant companion texts. It organizes its multiple sets of juxtapositions first synchronically and globally (related texts from similar times but different places) and then nationally and diachronically (related texts from similar places but different times) in order to demonstrate the degree to which distinct contexts and analytical situations affect literary reading, analysis, and interpretation. The juxtapositions help defamiliarize and refocus the all-too-familiar story of non-Indigenous researchers, scholars, writers, and editors dominating the production of authoritative nonfiction discourses about the contemporary status and aspirations of American Indians, whether in the mid-1960s or across the country.