ABSTRACT
The peculiar experience of sharing other lives through literature is supported by processes of embodied simulation that are ubiquitous in everyday cognition and language understanding. Simulations are both like and not-like the original experience whose neural traces they reactivate, and the not-like is as generative as the like. This difference makes possible aesthetic recreations of experience, as if we were living another life and sharing another’s experience. This chapter analyzes how different literary techniques deploy the as-if of simulation in order to set in motion collaborative interactions between writers and readers. Texts from the eighteenth century to the modern period by Samuel Richardson, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf provide examples of how the as-if of aesthetic artifice should be understood not as an inert, object-like form but as a potentiality for interaction based on the power of the unlike to produce dynamic relationships.
