Tutto in un punto. Io estroflesso ed esperienzialità

Through textual analyses of Joyce, Carver, Roth, Celati, Siti, and Carbé, this essay identifies and compares two modes of representing the interior world which arose after the early-twentieth-century inward turn. The first one, developed by Modernists, represents the subject as fragmented, thus requiring the reader to cooperate in reconstructing the whole I of the character. The second one, more recently emerged, shows a well-defined, although still changing, interiority. Both these modalities could focalize internally or externally. The first modality is seen in this essay as coherent with the second-generation cognitivist narrative theories: these theories see as the central device of narrative texts the vicarious experientiality and the embodied cognition felt by the reader. The second one, on the other hand, seems to be a reaction to the dominant rhetorics of experience which are typical of late capitalism. The everted representation of the I, common in the second modality of representation, also suggests that the basic premises of cognitivist narratology, i.e. the emphasis of the processes of empathization and hot cognition, should be reassessed.