Inhabiting Beckett’s storyworld: how a text allows its readers to occupy a fictional space and navigate it through mental simulation Presenter: Hung Nguyen-Vu (injhabit Conference University of Toronto, April 25, 2023, Literature is about working with mental spaces. The writer imagines and elaborates a space, which is meticulously designed and controlled by his or her use of linguistic and literary characteristics. Characters appear, ive, and sometimes die in this space. Readers, during their reading experience, reconstruct a space more or less similar to that of the author, based on the features of the text and thelr own real-life experiences. Some recent Beckettian scholars have contributed to qualify the space in Beckett's texts. Others have Used the close reading method to discuss how Beckett's characters describe their physical and internal worids. Surprisingly, little effort has been made to learn how his textual cues as well as his cognitive parametersallow the reader's brain to inhabit this space. Yet, to make sense of a narrative universe, readers have no choice but to inhabitand experienceit. Accordingto recent empirical iterary findings, readers do not make sense ofa storyworldin an abstract manner, but their brains actively construct a concrete, phenomenologicaland social world. Theysee it, feelit, hearthe sounds in it, interact with it and navigate it. Drawing on recent understanding of mentalsimulation in reading acts and bringing ‘the Beckettian fictional corpus into its analytic view, this paper reads Beckett's texts as a design of cognitive mechanisms which has a significant impact on the restoration of the storyworld by its readers, offering the latter a unique experience of inhabiting and navigating a fictional space.