Since the body is a part of our nar

Since the body is a part of our narratives and our narratologies, we have two different paths of inquiry that cross and double back throughout this study. First, we can ask how the body is used as a component of stories, and can do so using traditional narrative elements like plot, character, and setting. A corporeal narratology pursued in this direction enriches these traditional terms for speaking about narrative, and provides practical analytic tools for categorizing stories and analyzing their effects. A corporeal narratology in this sense helps us to see the body at work in elements of the story where we may not have recognized it otherwise. Likewise, since different cultures and periods think about the body in different ways, we can see how these different conceptions of the body lead writers to construct plot or setting, for example, differently. Second, a corporeal narratology can ask how the body contributes to our ways of speaking about and analyzing narrative. Birkerts’s description of reading in terms of the suspension of the body makes clear that the body is useful not just for telling stories, but for talking about why stories matter and for describing the experience of reading. A corporeal narratology in this sense moves naturally from an analysis of narrative terms to a theory of narrative hermeneutics—how stories become meaningful to readers. Most interesting, it seems to me, is the point where the historical comparisons occasioned by the different ways of imagining the body in different cultures and periods prompts us to think about the historical condition of our own narrative hermeneutics. In other words, although we tend to think that reading a story is a matter of stepping outside of our historical and social moment, it may well be that this way of thinking about reading itself is historically conditioned by, among other things, a conception of the human body. And if our terms for studying narrative have been developed by critics from the perspective of a particular historical moment—let us say, twentieth-century European and American culture—our most basic narratological terms and assumptions may bear the imprint of a particular way of thinking about corporeality.