Presence in the Text: Whose, for Whom, How

Abstract

This article explores growing interest in the concept of presence in the humanities today. Technological innovations are argued to have facilitated advancement of a “digital” imagination, fostering a compelling sensory immersion into virtual words and creating the illusion of unmediated contact. This propelled dialogue about materiality and polymodality as implicit characteristics of literary texts, “enactivism” as evoking the “materialities of communication” (H.U. Gumbrecht) growing increasingly influential in literary cognitive studies. In this context the concept of epiphany thus acquired currency  in modern theory and artistic practice (from Romanticism to Postmodernism), epiphanic writing prioritizing the co-production of aesthetic experience and advocating closer attention to inferential dynamics and the mimetic, deictic or gestural potential of literary discourse in general. Finally, M. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of style is examined to demonstrate the central object of enactivist literary studies to be the author’s style, studied as an interactive experience, and not as an objectified form.