Gefühlstextualität and Reader’s Emotions : Designing an Experimental Research between (German) Literature and Neuroscience

Within the framework of 5E Cognition, emotions play a fundamental role also in the field of literature, with particular reference to the creative process enacted by the author and the receptive process enacted by the reader. This paper aims to present an original category of analysis, the "Gefühlstextualität", with which to trace the author’s emotions through the elements of the text, which in turn act as triggers eliciting new emotional reactions in the reader. More specifically, taking inspiration from the most recent transdisciplinary dialogues between literature and neuroscience, the main aim is to show a possible experimental application of Gefühlstextualität in the Reader-response perspective, focusing on the case study of Sophie von La Roche’s epistolary novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771). This paper intends to describe the four phases of a designed experimental research, divided into offline and online tests, to measure the reader’s emotional response at a cognitive, neural, and somatic level. The most innovative aspect lies in phase 3, a laboratory test in which an electroencephalography (EEG) would be performed on participants, along with measurement of physiological parameters, refining then the results by fMRI and eye tracking tests on a smaller sample. The various phases of the research, one complementary to each other, are intended to prove how emotions – conveyed through Gefühlstextualität – play a central role in all aspects of the literary experience.