David Foster Wallace’s challenge as a writer was to try and square the circle of conjugating the legacy of (what was still vital about) postmodernism with the necessity to achieve truthfulness. What narratological shape does this post-ironist challenge take? Drawing on specific examples from his works, such as the jumbled chronology and the consistent employment of the present tense in “Little Expressionless Animals,” the utilization of what I call “figural sliding” in Infinite Jest, the double internal focalization in “Think,” the reorganization of deictic centers due to the metaleptic transgression in “Good Old Neon” and “PopQuiz #9,” this chapter shows how traditional narratological items were reinvented by Wallace to serve his thematic postindustrial concerns and to honor his ever-present need to connect with his readers. Unnatural narratology comes immediately to mind, and yet his pervasive attention to the reader invites us to employ an enactivist lens, thus focusing on the situated and embodied dimensions of the reading activity.

Wallace tends to put his readers in interpretive positions that baffle easy solutions: Narrators are simultaneously omniscient and limited, both “down here quivering in the mud of the trench” and Olympically coordinating “the whole campaign”; focalizing perspectives are fluid and overlapping; the distinction between story and discourse becomes permeable, and so forth. This contribution aims at mapping the (sometimes unnatural) trajectories of Wallace’s narratological reinterpretations while showing how readers negotiate (or fail to negotiate) textual clues starting from their experiential background and their embodied and situated positioning.

How do cultural artifacts influence the ways we experience and act? In this chapter I propose that cognition is cultural tout court and that habits provide a central link between human organisms and the sociocultural environment. I will defend an enactive account of habits that sees them as expansive in the temporal (they relate us to a history of sociocultural interactions) and spatial sense (they are co-constituted by our brains, bodies, and cultural artifacts). This account is based on Dewey's pragmatist–organicist concept of habits that rigorously anchors experience in culture. I will trace cultural factors in Dewey's philosophy and 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognitive science with a focus on pervasive artifacts – such as architecture, pictures, and moving images. Such artifacts have become part of our habits of perceiving. I finally situate artifactual habits within recent predictive processing theories that claim to provide the corresponding neuroscientific theory to our cultural minds.

Habits are fundamental for embodied action. In order to contribute to an embodied account of habit formation, we will bring together the ontological approaches of William James (1842–1910), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). James treats habits as key to the mind, placing them at the center of his ontology. James argues that the laws of nature characterize immutable habits of matter, and that living things are “bundles of habits.” Likewise, habits play a central role in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The “lived body,” which Merleau-Ponty often refers to as the “habit body,” determines the character of experience. Nishida argues, following James, that habits structure human behavior and exemplify the continuity of reality. Nishida's nondualism fuses the embodied subject and the ontological world using habits. This has important implications for an embodied theory of habits, and thus for embodied cognitive science. We conclude by exploring ways that Nishida's work Enactivism, and ecological psychology mutually benefit when explored together.

Three fundamental anthropologic dimensions are severely disturbed in anorexia nervosa: corporeality, spatiality and temporality. These dimensions constitute an existential form of anorexia which actualizes a disembodied subject in a purely physical world exhibiting rationalistic thoughts. We will not separate corporeality and spatiality, but indeed temporality. In the chapter we describe the most prominent characteristics.

In this introductory chapter, we outline some conceptual building blocks for an ecosocial view of the co-construction of mind, brain, and culture. The brain is the organ of culture; mind and experience are processes located in loops of active engagement of brain and body with the social world. This engagement occurs on multiple time scales, from evolution and co-evolutionary adaptation to humanly designed niches, through the cultural history of populations and communities, to individual developmental trajectories, narratives of the self, and moment-to-moment engagements with social contexts. We are born biologically equipped to acquire culture and, across our lifespan, we become attuned to particular social and cultural environments. The niches we inhabit are cooperatively constructed and presented to us as cultural affordances that enable our cognitive capacities, sense of self, adaptive skills, and meaning-making capacity. The rewiring of brain circuits, synaptic plasticity, and underlying changes in gene regulation only make sense in relation to the particular resources, affordances, and adaptive tasks presented to us by specific cultural environments. Answering the question of what makes us human then turns out to involve not just an evolutionary story in deep time, but also cultural and individual stories in historical, developmental, and biographical time.

This chapter examines some conceptual problems that arise when we apply new embodied theories of mind in literary analysis. Critics have used affordance theory and models of predictive processing to reflect on narrative and genre, the literary devices and codes that shape our expectations about how a text will unfold. Instead of reinforcing the functionalist assumptions that guide cognitive scientists, including the effort to treat reading literature as just another cognitive task that is directed toward problem solving, this chapter proposes to view it instead as an emotionally engaging or ethically challenging way of reconstructing the ecology in which we think. This approach helps theorists honor the conceptual resources that the 4Es offer by giving more heed to individualized and culturally specific encounters with literary texts. I end by examining a poem that demands that we alter prevailing interpretive practices, thus exposing the way literature reorganizes emotional responses and value schemes.