Imagining the I-You Through Embodied Writing

Deep understanding resides in our bodies. To understand is to draw on the sensations on your skin, in your bones, and in the pit of your stomach. It is to feel the pain and suffering of others, as if it is experienced by your own body. In times of social unrest and division, embodied understanding, rather than logical rationalization, becomes paramount. Embodied understanding minimizes divisiveness and demolishes the borders that create a sense of otherness. As academic writers, we are responsible for cultivating embodied ways of knowing by writing reflexively about our practices and depicting them in rich sensorial ways.

Haywood: Shaping a Fictional Language of Embodiment

This chapter traces how the eighteenth-century novel develops a language of emotional involvement and embodied intensity through the works of Eliza Haywood. It discusses Haywood’s early works in amatory fiction, her later reflections on the mid-century novel, and her translations from the French. Haywood’s works are related to the integration of letters in novel writing and to the context of the theatre, as this chapter works towards an account of embodied style that is embedded in contemporary media ecologies. In more general terms, models of embodiment in fiction are specified through the way in which these media differences give rise to stances in embodied writing and modulations of joint attention between readers and narrators that make the literary language of embodiment go beyond the mere simulation of bodily states.

I lost my baby today: Embodied writing and learning in organizations

This article focuses on miscarriage and the sharing of intimate experiences as an example of alternative writing that can be used to challenge and resist dominant masculine discourse in academia. It steps back from patriarchal forms of writing organizations and contributes in three ways: in terms of methodology through the use of multi-voice autoethnography that embraces evocative language; with regard to the subject matter, by sharing a narrative that focuses on the bodily and dirty in day-to-day organizing; and in style, by going beyond traditional structures to foster personal, fragile and reflexive narratives that can enhance the understanding of lived experiences in organizations. More specifically, the first author’s autoethnographic account of perinatal loss in the context of contemporary academia is used as an example of resistance to patriarchal norms of organizing.

Excessive Writing and Filipina Time

Chapter One examines Nick Joaquin’s novella, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (which was published before the longer novel version with the same title) and two short stories from Mia Alvar’s In the Country in order to consider the critical role that writing plays in navigating the diasporic maternal. Joaquin’s novella mourns the failure of the Philippine revolution, which becomes metaphorized through a discussion about language. Alvar’s stories address both the prospects and limits of writing: “In the Country” depicts the lives of journalists working against the Marcos regime and the deleterious effects of subversive, embodied writing on the family. In “A Contract Overseas,” Alvar challenges us to think about what it means to imagine and creatively write about life abroad.

»Auch die Wörter werden zu Körpern« Body, Sexuality and Carnavalesque Writing in Emine S. Özdamar’s Stories Mutterzunge and Großvaterzunge

Based on the analysis of Mutterzunge and Großvaterzunge, this article demonstrates that Özdamar’s mode of dealing with the body and sexuality corresponds to Bakhtin’s concept of the »grotesque body« and that body and language are strongly interwoven. It argues that Özdamar’s »embodied writing« is emancipatory and that it subverts not only patriarchal discourses, but also bourgeois concepts of body, sexuality, and literature. Writing is not only a mental but also a corporeal activity that goes through the body and gives voice to it.