"Passion": Embodiment, Interpretation, and the Language of Emotions

She had thought that it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what she’d been working toward at all” (Alice Munro, “Passion”). Literary narratives typically deal with passion, feelings, or emotions, and this raises a series of issues that literary theorists and philosophers have long debated: How is the emotional component of the inner world of literary characters—or maybe of their consciousness, or lived experience, or mind—represented? What do narrativity and fictionality entail for the representation of emotions? How are emotions represented in language? And should we really speak about representation at all? But the place of emo-tions in literature is even more controversial if we shift from characters’ emotions to read-ers’ emotions. Today, the philosophical debate started by Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics is enriched by the concept of embodiment. But how can we embed an embodied account of the emotional engagement with literature in a wider vision of literary interpreta-tion? In my communication I will try to make some observations in view of an answer to this question, starting from some passages of Alice Munro’s short story “Passion.