In the first paper (“Bodily Feelings and Transomatization”), Ellen Esrock will first review scholarship on how readers’ inner bodily feelings—termed interoceptions—structure literary forms and shape cognitive judgments and empathies. Esrock will propose an alternative approach through the concept of transomatization. Mindful of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” she will characterize transomatization as a willing reinterpretation of feeling, in which interoceptive states stand in for something they are not. This is a feeling-into the work, akin to empathy and embodied simulation, but less naturalistically modeled and operating at a different phenomenological and neural register. Transomatization develops through attentiveness to bodily feelings, influenced by the cultural milieu. Two modes of transomatization will be explored: one involving the all-over sense of one’s inner body—the bodily landscape—and another centered on breathing. Esrock will focus particularly on how these modulate across memory and anticipation. Examples are drawn from works by Anne Dillard, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf.

Victoria Elizabeth Stevans’s paper (“Erotic Embodiment in Mina Loy’s Poetry”) will continue the panel’s exploration of modernism, a movement that—highly concerned with subjectivity’s reality and limits—has often been accused of aesthetic impersonality. This is seen by some as a (white and masculine) desire to transcend the “personal,” and by others as an expression of our own ultimate psychological unknowability. The literary output of modernist poet, painter, and actress, Mina Loy has been ensnared in this debate. Her enigmatic free verse poetry is both distant and sarcastic as it dips into the highly autobiographical, blurring the boundaries of personal and impersonal. Stevans’s work aims to untangle the relationship of Loy’s poetry to the self and its possible transcendence. To do so, Stevans will look at the erotic, embodied elements of Loy’s writing through Audre Lorde’s and Anne Carson’s theories of the erotic, which both ruminate on the self-affirming and negating elements of erotism, while also applying affect theory’s interrogation of love, desire, and ambiguity to Loy’s painful, sumptuous word choice. By focusing on Loy’s poetic relationship to erotic Selfhood, we can understand the pleasures and pitfalls of singularity. How does it form us? How does it keep us apart? How do we, as readers, affectively and erotically involve ourselves in poetry and the poet’s “personality”? And, most importantly, what does this all feel like?

The last paper shifts the focus from the landscapes of subjectivity to material spaces. Ana Ugarte’s paper (“Under the Skin of the Landscape: Toxicity and Interoception in Contemporary Latin American Works”) will examine interoception as a literary and cinematic response to environmental toxicity in the Americas. Focusing on Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream, 2015) and Glorimar Marrero Sánchez’s film La Pecera (The Fishbowl, 2023), Ugarte will argue that these works construct an interoceptive poetics of toxicity in which bodily sensations—disorientation, respiratory distress, pain, and maternal hypervigilance—register invisible ecological threats that exceed ordinary perception, from pesticide exposure in rural Argentina to cancer linked to military contamination in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Rather than treating metaphors of contamination, invasion, and permeability as purely symbolic, the paper proposes that they function as embodied cognitive strategies through which characters interpret diffuse environmental danger when causal chains remain uncertain, such as unexplained childhood illness or tumors emerging long after exposure. Colonial and capitalist violence are thus experienced as disturbances within the body itself. Interoception thereby translates structural toxicity into bodily knowledge, allowing narrative and film to mediate between sensation and interpretation. In this sense, interoception politicizes metaphor from within: it is through the body’s ambiguous sensations that environmental injustice becomes thinkable.