The Ecology of the Sword Bridge through the Manuscript Textual Tradition of the Chevalier de la Charrette

Major theorical studies approached the crucial subject of mimesis focusing on the relationship between literature and reality, maintaining that novels imitate reality through language, translate facts and events into semiotic acts or they establish consistent fictional worlds intersecting the so called actual or ‘real’ one. The present account maintains a different point of view, introducing an ecological theory of narrative reference. According with Gibson’s Theory of Affordances and recent findings in the field of neuroscience, namely mirror neuron, stories, and novels in particular, are addressed as being understood on the basis of individual action-related knowledge. A detailed study on one of the most renowned episodes in medieval romance tradition, Chrétien de Troyes' Chevalier de la Charrette, will show how novels do textually encode actions and how narrative events referring to sensory experiences and interoceptive responses as emotions, feelings, thoughts, deductions or decisions are tightly connected, and to some extent dependent on action-related ones. A new assessment of novels as ecological niches will be taken into account, aside implications of an ecological theory of narrative reference for philological investigation of novels in the general framework of comparative literatures.