The Acting Interpreter: Embodied Stylistics in an Experientialist Perspective.

This book presents a view of the nature of poetry as a dramatic use of language, showing the relevance of Experientialist theories in Cognitive Linguistics to the empirical experience of acting poetry out, on the assumption that an overt and collectively-shared embodiment of meanings, accomplished through the use of drama techniques, can enhance the interpreters’ awareness of the formal and metaphorical characteristics of a poetic text. This entails the interpreters’ rediscovery of the ‘embodied’ nature of their own schemata at the source of their emotional and conceptual responses to poetic language. Interpreters are thus defined as acting interpreters when they act poetry out in a real space of enactment, appropriate it into their own schematic identities as they embody and authenticate its meanings, and then analyze its effects on themselves and on the other acting interpreters inter-acting with them. Embodied stylistics is therefore meant not as the analysis of the text as such but, instead, as the analysis of the acting interpreters’ responses to the poetic patterns of the text. This theoretical argument becomes actualized in the experience of ‘poetic meaning embodiment’ reported by acclaimed actors and directors – Judi Dench, Peter Hall, Derek Jacobi, Richard Olivier, Franca Rame, and Fiona Shaw – as the subjects of a number of case studies that subsequently inspire the embodied-stylistic analysis of the ethnographic data collected during poetic-drama workshops involving groups of acting interpreters.