PER UNA POETICA DELLE EMOZIONI. UNA RILETTURA DELL'ANTROPOLOGIA STÜRMERIANA ATTRAVERSO LE NEUROSCIENZE

According to the neuroscientific theory of 4E Cognitive Science, emotions are defined as complex phenomena involving mind and body, guiding, and influencing all human actions. Therefore, in order to study them and investigate their diverse and numerous facets, it is necessary to adopt a transdisciplinary perspective combining different theoretical and methodological approaches, systematically and productively interweaving the humanities with the hard sciences. Situated within the framework of the most recent Neurohumanities, the main aim of this doctoral thesis is to bring literature into dialogue with neuroscience in order to help investigate the complexity of emotional phenomena. The roots of today’s neuroscientific theories on emotions, indeed, can be traced already in the anthropological idea of the ganzer Mensch and more specifically in the poetics that emerges from the analysis of autobiographical prose writing from the Sturm und Drang period, which can be delineated as a true "Gefühlspoetik". This poetics of emotions is traced by means of an original category of analysis, the "Gefühlstextualität", which represents the connecting point between the different aspects of the thesis and the key to the entire research. Indeed, through this category it is brought to light how emotions play a fundamental role both in literary expression, thus in the perspective of the "Textimmanenz", and in the experience of text reception, measurable in the Reader-response, which involves the possibility of a continuation of the research in an experimental direction. The theme of the emotions thus represents fertile ground for bringing together science and art, words and thought, body and mind, author and reader, past and present, while opening future research perspectives on the most intimate and unexplored depths of the human being, inhabited by fascinating creative and cognitive processes. In this sense, then, literature presents itself as a precious and powerful anthropological device.