1 Blind Reading: Toward an Enactivist Theory of the Reader‘s Imagination Marco Caracciolo (University of Bologna) To appear in Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative, edited by Lars Bernaerts, Dirk De Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck, University of Nebraska Press. Introduction In front of a class of about three hundred students, professor F. K. Stanzel invited the listeners to imagine a man running across a square. He then asked if the man wore a coat and a hat, but no one knew how to answer. The students had imagined the man without deciding whether the man had a coat and a hat or not. 1 At least, this story confirms the widespread view that mental images are indeterminate—a view espoused, among others, by Wolfgang Iser (1978, 137-139). This essay attempts to explain why the students thought that the man may have worn a coat and a hat only after Stanzel‘s question, and why they did not fill in the gap beforehand. More generally, I will put forward an enactivist account of the imagination, which I will define as the active exploration of a nonexistent environment. Although I will have to examine the workings of the imagination across the board, my focus will be, of course, on the reader‘s imaginative engagement with narrative texts. This essay has two parts. In the first, I advance the main theses of the enactivist approach to perception and experience. Moreover, embracing Alvin Goldman‘s (2006a; 2006b, 149-151) concept of ―enactment imagination,‖ I argue that the imagination works by simulating (or enacting) a hypothetical perceptual experience, and that this accounts for its experiential quality. In the second part, I develop an enactivist model of the reader‘s imagination, suggesting that narrative texts are sets of instructions for the enactment of a