Gambino Renata, Pulvirenti Grazia
Department of Human Studies, University of Catania, Catania, Italy.
NewHums - Interdipartimental Center for Neurocognitive and Human Studies, Catania, Italy.
Front Integr Neurosci. 2021 Jan 29;14:618605. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2020.618605. eCollection 2020.
According to ancient texts on poetics, the concept of representation is deeply bound to that of "mimesis;" this last was intended in two main ways: as "imitation" and as "world construction." In Aristotle's , mimesis is theorized as the main form of "world simulation," giving rise to the complex universe of fiction. The concept of simulation plays a pivotal role in the neurocognitive theories on the embodied mind: within this frame, embodied simulation is intended as a functional prelinguistic activation of the human sensorimotor mechanism. This happens not only with regard to intercorporeality and intersubjectivity in the real world but also in relation to the process of imagination giving rise to literary imagery and to the reader's reception of the fictional world, since human beings share a common sensorimotor apparatus. Imagination is a central concept in the recent neurocognitive studies since it plays a core role in human life and in artistic production and reception. Imagination has been considered as a complex emergent cognitive faculty deeply intertwined with perception, memory, and consciousness, shaping human life and transforming the limited horizon of our perceptual affective understanding, being, and acting. Although there is an immense bulk of literature on this topic, imagination is still an elusive concept: its definition and understanding change according to different heuristic frames-mainly the philosophical, aesthetic, poetic, and cognitive ones-giving rise to debates about its modalities and effects, particularly in relation to the construction of aesthetic and symbolic constraints. In this paper, we claim that scientific research may take advantage from the literary representation of the imaginative faculties, which occurs in specific tests characterized by dynamic images and motion. In such meta-representation of the imagination, we witness the phenomenological emergence of endogenous dynamic processes involving a cluster of cognitive faculties, activated by triggering the reader's embodied simulation. One of the main German poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the second part of his masterwork , intuitively represents the very process of the imagination and its responding to embodied simulation with regard both to the author's creative act and to its reception by the reader. At the crossway between literary and neurocognitive, this study aims to highlight the advantage offered to future transdisciplinary inquiries by the literary representation showing features and dynamics of the still mysterious phenomenon of the imagination.
根据古代诗学文本,表征概念与“模仿”概念紧密相连;“模仿”主要有两种理解方式:作为“模仿”和作为“世界构建”。在亚里士多德的理论中,模仿被理论化为“世界模拟”的主要形式,从而产生了复杂的虚构世界。模拟概念在关于具身认知的神经认知理论中起着关键作用:在此框架内,具身模拟被视为人类感觉运动机制的一种功能性前语言激活。这不仅发生在现实世界中的身体间性和主体间性方面,也与产生文学意象的想象过程以及读者对虚构世界的接受有关,因为人类共享一个共同的感觉运动器官。想象是近期神经认知研究中的一个核心概念,因为它在人类生活以及艺术创作和接受中都起着核心作用。想象被认为是一种复杂的新兴认知能力,与感知、记忆和意识紧密交织,塑造着人类生活并改变我们有限的感知情感理解、存在和行动视野。尽管关于这个主题有大量的文献,但想象仍然是一个难以捉摸的概念:它的定义和理解会根据不同的启发式框架——主要是哲学、美学、诗学和认知框架——而变化,这引发了关于其方式和效果的争论,特别是在与审美和符号约束的构建相关方面。在本文中,我们认为科学研究可以从想象能力的文学表征中受益,这种表征出现在以动态图像和运动为特征的特定测试中。在这种想象能力的元表征中,我们见证了涉及一系列认知能力的内源性动态过程的现象学出现,这些过程是通过触发读者的具身模拟而被激活的。德国主要诗人之一约翰·沃尔夫冈·冯·歌德在其杰作的第二部分中,直观地展现了想象的过程以及它在作者创作行为和读者接受方面对具身模拟的回应。在文学与神经认知的交叉点上,本研究旨在强调文学表征为未来跨学科探究提供的优势,这种表征展现了仍然神秘的想象现象的特征和动态。