The challenge of corporeity: fictionalising the emotional body.

Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1380) writes emotions as corporeal events unfolding as specific sensorimotor, cognitive actions, which, in particular cases, may develop pathological offshoots. This paper explores the unstable, organic quality of the emotional phenomenon, and its fluid formal potential. Indeed, while emotion resists definitive categorical and conceptual containment, it must be named, made sense of, thus signalling the power of corporeity to shape language and thought. Crucially, this allows us to measure the importance of cognitive and epistemological modes we activate with the purpose of grasping emotion as irreducible aspect of the human. In this sense, poetic expression emerges as a necessity: through continuous actualisation of its formal plasticity, literature enables the provisory encoding and circulation of emotional phenomena, by exploring the interface between a perceiving body and its phenomenal environment, while allowing for the emergence of new modes of thinking. I proceed to a transepistemic examination of the text in question, by means of historically-informed conceptual tools, beyond the inappropriate categorical dissonances between body and mind, affect and intellect, philosophy, literature, and science.