Style of Gestures

Guillemette Bolens is a professor of English literature at the University of Geneva and author of the award-winning La Logique du corps articulaire: Les articulations du corps humain dans la litterature occidentale.

• Foreword by Alain BerthozAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Body in Literature2. Kinesic Tropes and Action Verbs3. Verecundia and Social Wounding in the Legend of Lucrece4. Face-work and Ambiguous Feats in Sir Gawain and the Green KnightConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

What is remarkable about The Style of Gestures... is that it combines a precisely grounded model from neuroscience with persuasive readings of texts across a wide historical range, from medieval works such as Gawain and the Green Knight via Shakespeare and Milton to Joyce and Proust. Guillemette Bolens is a medievalist and a comparatist, and she is always sensitive to the cultural constraints within which her readings must operate: no one could accuse her of reductive universalism or anachronism. Her work thus provides a powerful and persuasive example of what a cognitive literary criticism can achieve. -- Terence Cave Times Literary Supplement This book successfully translates its analytic tools and interpretative frameworks beyond the page into the reader's next reading experience and, perhaps, social encounter. As Bolens writes, 'literature is powerful because, more than any other type of discourse, it triggers the activation of unpredicted sensorimotor configurations and surprises the mind with its own imaginative and cognitive possibilities.' -- Rebecca Dobson MAKE: A Literary Magazine The Style of Gestures brings interdisciplinary research from the field of embodied cognition to medieval textual criticism, and the results are remarkable... Bolens's work demonstrates the clear advantages of embracing the shift towards embodied cognition. -- Melissa Raine Parergon