Reading »Against the Grain«: For a Neurohermeneutics of Suspicion

Within the heuristic frame of the »Biocultural Turn«, this paper aims to propose a new transdisciplinary approach: the Neurohermeneutics of Suspicion. Its purpose is to investigate the literary text as a unique cognitive dynamic device with multilayered meanings and a metaphorical undercurrent, both responsive to the functioning system of the human mind. This implies considering the literary text as an anthropological device, which cognitively guides the imaginative, emotional and experiential responses of the reader by means of the author’s linguistic, stylistic and rhetoric choices, mirroring cognitive, emotional, and imaginative human processes. We suggest that particularly Ricoeur’s idea of a ›suspicious stance‹ opens a new way to hermeneutics, allowing to refigure the process of reading as a creative and ›playful‹ act, and to restore the value of subjectivity in the process of deciphering fictional worlds conveying ever new meanings to texts.