Leggere Goethe al tempo delle neuroscienze: l'immaginazione e la sua metarappresentazione poetica

Grazia Pulvirenti and Renata Gambino. 2015. Leggere Goethe al tempo delle neuroscienze: l'immaginazione e la sua metarappresentazione poetica. Cultura tedesca: 161:191 E184040 - issn: 1720-514XIn this study we argue that some artistic works meta-represent the human imaginative faculty, like many works by the German author Wolfgang Goethe. These texts show inner features of the whole process of the imagination, that are still not thoroughly explained by scientific theories. Therefore artistic representation becomes a privileged field to get deeper insights into complex processes of the human mind. We also point out that the effectiveness of the process of imagination relies on its dynamic character, which is at the core of human survival in the world, enhancing action, proprioception and empathy. Imagination is physiologically based on motion, is solicited by motion, generates motion. In fact one of the most frequently recurring elements of this kind of artistic representation is the use of metamorphic, anamorphic or blurred images, which explicitly refer to movement on which this process fundamentally relies. We first infer a neurohermeneutic model of interpretation, differing from other cross-disciplinary attempt of explaining aesthetics and literature. We apply this model to the exegetically controversial scene of the Mothers in the second part of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s masterpiece Faust. Finally we interpret this scene as the meta-representation of the process of the imagination.