Back in the 1980s, Jane Gallop, following Adrienne Rich’s injunction towards ‘thinking through the body’, recalled how reading Rousseau’s Julie as a graduate had made her cry; reading the Marquis de Sade, she continued, made her masturbate. How does literature, she pondered, produce different bodily fluids? Gallop is only one – for me, still the funniest and sharpest – of a string of feminist theorists who strove to understand literary jouissance – the bodily, engaged experience of writing and reading. Moving, powerful, engaged criticism. When Experience, Narrative and Criticism in Ancient Greece claims novelty, 40 years later, because it brings to the fore ‘the embodied aspects of the recipient’s experience’ (4), based on the insight that ‘accounts of simple bodily movements seem to trigger our sensorimotor system with particular strength’ (5), it is dispiriting that it is impossible to find a single reference to this hugely influential tradition of feminist work on the reader’s bodily experience. Indeed, the very idea of erotics is largely absent, for all the references to ‘ecstasy’ taken from Stephen Halliwell’s important study of ancient criticism (Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus (Oxford 2011)). We get instead studies of asyndeton. (Only [dis]connect …) It is not merely erotics that is signally lacking here. The single most obvious occasion when an audience loses its self in the ‘literary experience’ is the overwhelming burst of laughter. It is reported that neither Plato nor Jesus ever laughed precisely because this disruptive loss of control was so alien to their respective ideals. It is the clearest physical experience of literature humans have, individually and, of equal importance, collectively: the collapse into tears of uncontrollable laughter. There is not a single discussion of comedy here. Nor is there adequate discussion of what difference it makes to be in an audience of more than one person. There is no rage, no politics, no resistance, no disgust (though plenty of asyndeton). The model of experience is … stony-faced, singular, masculine.

The volume consists of an introduction and 13 chapters by an international cast of senior and early career scholars (including four women). The essays are put together from two conferences run under the intellectual leadership of Jonas Grethlein, as part of his ERC project ‘Experience and Teleology in Ancient Narrative’. The book is the first of a new series called Cognitive Classics, edited by the dream team of Felix Budelmann and Ineke Sluiter. The series and the book are aimed at exploring whether the turn to cognitive science in literary criticism opens new avenues for Classics. The first section is organized around the idea of ‘immersion’ – the sense of losing yourself in a story-world; the second on ‘ancient criticism’ and its vocabulary; the third, a rather ragbag assortment of pieces under the title ‘Media and Context’ – including a resistant theoretical reflection on ‘lived aesthetics’ by Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, which could well have tracked back to Jane Gallop. There is some fine work in the collection (Alex Purves is characteristically revelatory on haptic terminology in Dionysius’ criticism of Homer). There is good cross-referencing between chapters, and a sense of a team trying to struggle with shared issues does emerge. The section on ancient literary criticism is, to my mind, by far the most productive.

But there are some real problems, too. The chapter on ‘immersion’, written by Rutger Allan, is taken as paradigmatic by several chapters. It begins, ‘A good story is like life’ (15). Well, no. Of course, verisimilitude and ‘real-life experiences’ have long been part of critical discourse, but, not least at the end, life and stories are very different. Jonas Grethlein himself is much more cautious about how hard it is, for example, to separate reflection and immersion. For Allan, immersion must exclude such affordances as self-consciousness, reflection, generic markers: so if you are angry at my breaking generic protocols in this review, you are not immersed, it seems, however emotional. You can see why comedy is excluded. There is an ideology at work in the definition of ‘immersion’ – what counts in and as literary experience – that goes insufficiently contested. Equally tellingly, we are told by Aldo Tagliabue that ‘distancing’ in the Shepherd of Hermas ‘can lead the reader to experience the timelessness of the divine’ (108). This is theologically unacceptable (as Augustine explains) – how can a human experience God’s timelessness? – and in literary terms no better: literary narrative messes with time, for sure, but timelessness is the very opposite of narrative. His argument is not helped by suggesting we should ‘experience the divine timelessness of the Church’. Tagliabue is not alone in using experience in such a fuzzy and unhelpful way. Alessandro Vatri’s study of asyndeton in Greek prose could have appeared at any point in the last hundred years, and the paragraph trying to link it to the book’s theme looks tacked on at best. ‘Experience’ is a great topic: but needs far more critical incisiveness and self-awareness than is provided here.