Immaginazione come poetica della cognizione. Faust nel regno delle Madri

The attempt of linking methods from human and hard sciences in order to interrogate literary texts by linking the hermeneutic method with scientific research may offer, in our opinion, new insights in how our mindbrain fulfils the mysterious process of imagining a counterfactual world, allowing the human being to construct meaning. This work is the first attempt of interpreting a literary text taking into account this epistemological innovation. This methodological hypothesis resonates of many years of trans-disciplinary study, of the work done by linking an international research community around similar topics in the research network www.neurohumanitiestudies.eu and in the interdisciplinary research Centre NewHums at the University of Catania. We thank great scientists like Semir Zeki, Anjan Chatterjee, Mark Turner and Arthur Jacobs for sharing, through inspiring conversations, the issues of their research on the neural underpinnings of the response to the aesthetic experience, so fundamental to elaborate our hypothesis.We think that to change the way to interrogate literature may contribute to gaining knowledge about the imagination as well as enrich the possible interpretation of a literary text and better understand the processes of response to the aesthetic experience.The hypothesis put forward in this study is a contribution to the actual debate about how to bridge neurocognitive issues with literary studies interrogating the mindbrain’s construction of the world in and around us. By applying cross-disciplinary methods and principles, we try to bind the phenomenological description of structural and formal “surface” features of the literary text with the hermeneutic inquiry and with related issues of recent neuroscientific research about the aesthetic response to art. The literary text, intended as a dynamic “device” created by the embodied imagination of the author, interacts with the cognitive network in which it is situated, and activates metaphorical and symbolical patterns by triggering the imaginative processes of the reader during the embodied act of reception of the text. We consider this last as a processes due to both the act of reading and of priming mental images, thus triggering the embodied simulation of the reader and activating a kind of “guided imagination act.”. In this case we will try to point out the allegorical function of the scene dedicated to the descent to the «Mothers’ Kingdom», in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust II. The cross-disciplinary analysis put forward in this study reveals this very controversial scene of the drama to contain a powerful poetical meta-reflection on imagination, human cognition and poetics itself.

Il presente lavoro prede il via dall'ipotesi che l'uso di determinati processi metoforico-simbolici della mente umana si rispecchino nella produzione poetico-letteraria e che alcuni testi costituiscano una riflessione poietica su alcuni processi mentali. In tal senso si cercherà di esaminare il passaggio del celebre testo ddel Dramma Faust, parte seconda di J. W. Goethe in cui il protagonista affronta la sua discesa nel misterioso mondo delle Madri come una allegoria del processo immaginativo e della sua dinamica emergente.