Beyond Linguistic Sign

Beyond Linguistic Sign

Embodiment and the Recovery of Resonance

by Agata Walek (Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic)

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Blending phonosemantics, cognitive theory, and phenomenology, the monograph daringly and inventively pushes the linguistic boundaries to open new vistas into how sound and conceptual metaphor generate emotions and meanings in the intricate works of Mark Z. Danielewski and David Abram.

Prof. Michal Peprník
Department of English and American Studies
Faculty of Arts
Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic

Agata Walek seems to have written her book “Beyond Linguistic Sign: Embodiment and the Recovery of Resonance” out of an inner persuasion that goes far beyond any “academic professionalism”. Rather, it seems to be a product of an inner experience and persuasion that art “matters” (e.g. is primarily “material”) and touches us as readers (hence the embodiment). It can also be noted that she engages with theoretical works in a similar fashion, i.e. uses them as generators of thoughts and reactions rather than rigid methodological tools. [...]
Stressing the melic, musical qualities of language, as Walek does, brings us back to the way humans are grounded in the world / language. It is the experience that can probably be most intensively relived in a live music concert. But as Walek comprehensively shows, there are literary works that can make use of these qualities as well or to offer models of exactly this lived world experience.
And that is probably the second-strongest aspect of the book by Walek. She is capable of listening to how the artistic texts can think about themselves, their role and place in the world. And that they do it exclusively non-conceptually, using sounds or metaphors, stressing their own materiality or worldliness. By touching a book, for Walek, we are touching the world. And the world is touching us.

Dr. Miroslav Kotásek
Department of Czech Literature
Masaryk University, Czech Republic

This monograph examines ‘Only Revolutions’ (2006) by Mark Z. Danielewski and ‘Becoming Animal‘ (2010) by David Abram to ask whether contemporary literature can articulate a viable alternative to the radical pluralism and fragmentation associated with postmodern aesthetics. What was once described as the postmodern condition—decentred subjectivity, proliferating interpretations, the dispersal of grand narratives—has intensified in the twenty-first century into algorithmic hyperreality, digital abstraction, and ecological disconnection. Within this landscape, reading and thinking risk dissolving into endless circulation without orientation. Positioned at the intersection of post-structuralism, phenomenology, and embodied cognition, the study proposes not a return to unity but a re-materialization of experience through resonance. It develops an interdisciplinary framework drawing on phonosemantics, conceptual metaphor theory, and sound studies in order to foreground dimensions often marginal in literary criticism: rhythm, vibration, and embodied perception. Language is approached not as a merely representational system but as materially expressive and affectively generative. In a final chapter, the memoir of David Goggins is read alongside these literary and philosophical analyses to explore how discipline, pain, and self-formation enact a comparable structure of re-attunement. Across literary experimentation, ecological phenomenology, and embodied practice, the book argues that meaning does not simply signify—it resounds. By reconceptualizing language as resonant and ontologically expressive, the study offers a constructive response to postmodern fragmentation and contributes to debates in contemporary literary theory, continental philosophy, and embodied cognition. It will be of interest to researchers in literary and cultural studies, philosophy of language, affect theory, and ecophenomenology, and may serve as a methodological resource for interdisciplinary work on materiality, sound, and subjectivity.

List of Figures
Framing The Study: Grounding Language and Embodiment
Chapter 1
Introduction: Body as the Point to Which All Objects Turn Their Side
Chapter 2
Encircled in Circles? Only Revolutions as a Means of Liberating Ourselves from Language, Text, and Fragments
Chapter 3
Becoming Animal (2010) by David Abram: Nature as Becoming is Different from Nature as an Object
Chapter 4
Never Finished: The Music of Becoming
Chapter 5
Conclusion: Attunement Beyond Fragmentation
Works Cited
Author’s Bio
Index

Agata Walek holds a PhD in English and American Literature. Her research explores the post-postmodern condition in contemporary American literature, with particular attention to the reconstruction of subjectivity beyond linguistic fragmentation. Her work adopts a multidisciplinary framework, integrating literary theory, phenomenology, embodied cognition, conceptual metaphor theory, and phonosemantics. She engages closely with developments in sound studies and non-representational approaches to language, examining how resonance, embodiment, and material expressivity reshape our understanding of meaning and selfhood. She is a lecturer at the Department of Languages at Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Phonosemantics, Phenomenology, Sound Studies, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Embodied Ontology, Ontology of Resonance, Embodied Cognition, Relational Subject Formation, Endurance Discourse and Self-Discipline, Resonant Selfhood, Re-attunement, Material Expressivity of Language, Coherence beyond Fragmentation, Non-representational Language, Performative Language