Immaginazione

The most recent discoveries deriving from the exchanges between aesthetics and neuroscience – especially those stressing the importance of the sensory-motor system in both scientific and aesthetic experience – have raised a particular attention on the subjectivity of mental processes, especially those related to the knowledge processes, and on the role of imagination. These results have, still nowadays, influence and confirmation in literature, which many scholars interested in a cognitivistic approach consider as related, if not just the same, to the ability of mankind to make tools and, thus, to make sense. An example of this reciprocal influence of neuroscience and literature is without a doubt the work of Siri Hustvedt, a writer who constantly tests her scientific studies by means of literature. Siri Hustvedt’s way of writing is very close to that of the 17th century writer and natural philosopher, Margaret Cavendish, not only because of the use of literature as a form of scientific investigation, but also because of the very style of writing, constantly enriched by autobiographical and metaliterary inventions, and of a deep conceiving of the corporeal, embodied form of literature. Thus, there seems to be a bridge linking Hustvedt’s experimental aesthetics and Cavendish’s experimental philosophy.