Introduction: A ‘Fleshly Dialogue’

This chapter positions the book in the extant scholarship of adaptation and phenomenology. It establishes the book’s argument that in order to ‘make sense’ of adaptations as adaptations, we must first attend to their sensual presence: their look, their sound, their touch, and how they materialize in the embodied imagination. This chapter builds on foundational adaptation scholarship by Robert Stam, Linda Hutcheon, and Christine Geraghty who advance an intertextual approach to studying adaptation. Rather, this chapter employs the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty—and how it has been adapted to film studies by Vivian Sobchack—to propose an intersubjective account of adaptation.

Textures of Imagination

Rejecting any binary thinking that would have reading novels as an act of imagination while films are received through perception, this chapter examines how adaptations are experienced through the embodied imagination. This chapter builds upon approaches to imagination in cognitive aesthetics to argue that imagination is grounded in perception. This chapter draws on two case studies, Wonder (Stephen Chbosky, 2017) and Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry, 2013), both criticized for making tangible their literary sources in a manner than nullifies imaginative engagement. Rather, I argue that spectators feel their way into the worlds and existential feelings of their characters through the embodied imagination. This chapter suggests that perception can lead to a greater imaginative understanding of a work, the world, and others, and how such an imaginative connection might shift our point of view. That is, screen adaptations are equipped to enact a leap from sight to insight.

Making imagination even more embodied: imagination, constraint and epistemic relevance

This paper considers the epistemic role that embodiment plays in imagining. We focus on two aspects of embodied cognition understood in its strong sense: explicit motoric processes related to performance, and neuronal processes rooted in bodily and action processes, and describe their role in imagining. The paper argues that these two aspects of strongly embodied cognition can play distinctive and positive roles in constraining imagining, thereby complementing Amy Kind's argument for the epistemic relevance of imagination "under constraints" and Magdalena Balcerak Jackson's argument for justification by imagination.

Film Phenomenology and Adaptation

Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration argues that in order to make sense of film adaptation, we must first apprehend their sensual form. Across its chapters, this book brings the philosophy and research methodology of phenomenology into contact with adaptation studies, examining how vision, hearing, touch, and the structures of the embodied imagination and memory thicken and make tangible an adaptation's source. In doing so, this book not only conceives adaptation as an intertextual layering of source material and adaptation, but also an intersubjective and textural experience that includes the materiality of the body.

Embodied Imagination and Metaphor Use in Autism Spectrum Disorder

This paper discusses different frameworks for understanding imagination and metaphor in the context of research on the imaginative skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In contrast to a standard linguistic framework, it advances an embodied and enactive account of imagination and metaphor. The paper describes a case study from a systemic therapeutic session with a child with ASD that makes use of metaphors. It concludes by outlining some theoretical insights into the imaginative skills of children with ASD that follow from taking the embodied-enactive perspective and proposes suggestions for interactive interventions to further enhance imaginative skills and metaphor understanding in children with ASD.

Beauty lived towards shalom. The Christian Life as Aesthetic-Ethical Existence

The apparent irrelevance of beauty to questions of justice reflects a problematic schism between aesthetic and ethical existence. While a theological aesthetics focused on the transcendent nature of beauty offers an important contribution, such an understanding of the place of beauty in human existence is incomplete without a complementary understanding of it as this-worldly: beauty as lived, as a relational category impelled by visceral desire and fuelled by the embodied imagination. By rightly ordering the appreciation and cultivation of beauty in everyday life, its relationship to works of justice is immediately apparent, as both modes of relating mutually serve as fitting shalom. In this light, fittingness becomes a measure of not only aesthetic but also ethical excellence, the two modes of existence being inextricably intertwined. Cultivating beauty-and-justice, as an expression of shalom, is a following after Christ’s being-for-the-other. It is a relational commitment, a life of discipleship that founds beauty in love.

Activating Embodied Imagination During COVID-19: A Performative Reflexive Autoethnography

Embodied imagination is a learning theory that reverses the accepted Western “think first, then act” learning sequence though movement improvisation followed by reflection and reflective methods across verbal and nonverbal, including embodied-kinesthetic, modalities. Healing the Cartesian divide might have positive effects on world cultures and people across socioeconomic strata, especially urgent during the COVID-19 pandemic as multiple disruptions to daily life have quickly increased uncertainty and stress, compromising health and well-being, especially of traditionally marginalized excluded People of Color. Expanding the performative reflexive autoethnographic project through embodied imagination broadens and deepens this global, transcultural, transdisciplinary effort through the human body, traditionally not considered human thinking’s locus. Benefits across global societies include greater self-care, the ability to act effectively quickly in response to a world with exponentially increasing complexity, and awareness that creativity is a global communitarian human birthright, not a rarity relegated to exceptional people.