Academic research over the last two hundred years has increasingly focused on developing an interdisciplinary approach to the human sciences by drawing on such disciplines as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, molecular biology, and the neurosciences, in order to understand how we as neurocognitive beings experience our sensory, motor, and emotive relations to the wider world of which we are a part and articulate them through the creation of and responses to literature and the arts. Primarily drawing from the work of neuroscientists Vittorio Gallese (2016) on embodied simulation and Semir Zeki (1999) on the neural correlates of aesthetic experience, Gambino and Pulvirenti introduce a theory of hermeneutics that explores “literary experience as a phenomenological, bodily, emotional, imaginative, and cognitive endeavor, offering new insights into the mind/brain processes that are engaged in imagining stories, as well as in the aesthetic experience derived from the reading act” (xxvi).Mind the Text! Neurohermeneutics for Suspicious Readers is an ambitious and exemplary attempt to capture the enormous explosion of research initiated by what is generally called the cognitive revolution of the mid-twentieth century, together with its European history from the previous century, and to introduce the concept of neurohermeneutics and Paul Ricœur's theory of “suspicion.” Analyses of case studies apply the authors’ own theoretical and methodological approach to the readings of various art forms based on a synthesis drawn from the previously described research.It is perhaps not surprising that concepts, such as body-mind separation that has had such tenacious hold in centuries of Western thought, should still be presumed by many, in spite of subsequent scientific investigations that have disproved them.1 So how to explain what happened after the cognitive advances of the previous two centuries that it took so long to come around to this point of view, especially in view of the fact that so much hostility still exists? The answer may, at least partially, lie in the many divergent — and sometimes conflicting — approaches in the vast amount of research undertaken during the cognitive revolution.The first three chapters of Mind the Text! focus on what is useful in various researchers’ work, not on what is controversial. In that way, the authors don't become mired in specific details, but rather document and establish research findings that support a critical neurohermeneutics (Calandín 2021). Such documentation emphasizes the evidentiary and empirical evidence of historical and contemporary research that, rather than how, body, mind, and brain are integrated.The next three chapters zero in more specifically on three key concerns. First, they describe the nature of hermeneutics as understood by Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century and Ricœur in the twentieth as a human interpretive science; second, they outline the importance of literature as an ambiguous cognitive device with multiple meanings that readers must interpret through embodied simulation in order to aesthetically experience its meaning and affects; and third, they present their case for the alignment of neurohermeneutics with Ricœur's theory and practice of “suspicion” that informs the authors’ own Feeling of Action Hypothesis (FoA) and Foregrounding Assessment Matrix (FAM 2.0) in reading literary texts.The final four chapters describe the threefold nature of “suspicious” reading: (1) the importance of reading literature slowly at the surface-code and text-based levels in three Shakespearean sonnets (27, 60, 66); (2) the discourse-content level through disruption of an original folk tale into drama, metaphorical manipulation in art, the collision between frames and scripts in a play, and situation models in a text based on art; and (3) the concept of transformative imagination in Goethe's poem Faust. All are rich and insightful readings that explore the so-called “ambiguous problems and stumbling blocks” that readers experience, and interpretive strategies they undertake in order to fully understand and aesthetically appreciate literary texts.This book is a useful guide for those unfamiliar with the theories and methodologies described. It provides important background for students and scholars tracing the complexities of developments in historical and contemporary cognitive approaches to literature. However, it lacks a more comprehensive account of work in embodied cognition in the Anglo-American tradition in several ways.2First, it requires a paradigm shift: embracing a new way of thinking. The authors retain some adherence to “old” notions of aesthetics such as taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts; cognition as purely a mental operation of the brain; and mind as entity, not process. Such incompatible approaches indicate that a paradigm shift is necessary in order to fully explain how the various relations of bodily processes of sensation, motion, and emotive forces; the neurological activities of the brain; and the functioning of minding might be integrated.Second, the use of terminology is a problematic concern that runs as a thread throughout the entire book. Words like empathy, aesthetics, mimesis, or immersion take on very different meanings depending on the theory and context underlying their usage. Translation creates additional difficulty. For English-language speakers, the word suspicion denotes a sense of distrust that something is wrong. It does not carry the same import as the French soupçon that can also mean a hint, or trace of something, which is more likely the meaning underlying Ricœur's use. Dependency on the word suspicion leads to understanding ambiguity in literary texts as “stumbling blocks” or, in German, Stolpersteine. Moreover, not only is the use of “suspicion” problematic, but also the assumption that aesthetics is restricted to the arts and that the purpose of reading literature is to discover and interpret ambiguities in multiple meanings (whether possible or not).Although the authors present insightful readings of the various art forms they discuss, Ricœur's terminology complicates their approach to literary discourse in focusing on interpreting “hidden” meanings. To consider “ambiguity” as a problem and examples as “stumbling blocks” presents a negative view of readers’ approaches to literary texts, rather than invoking the dynamics of curiosity, suspense, and surprise (Sternberg 2012: 438) as prompts to explore in detail the many prosodic, anthropological, and cultural features that constitute them.Finally, some unanswered questions remain. The authors do not explore the neurological aspects of what Calandín (2021: 483) describes as “the ability to detect the brain mechanisms involved in creating stories.” The whole question of embodied cognition belies the notion that aesthetics, in Zeki's approach, is restricted to taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts. What is literature for? Is interpretation simply a question of deriving pleasure, or is it transformative, in the sense of creating insight about oneself and beyond? The authors encompass both possibilities, though much more needs to be explored in terms of the relation of literature and the arts to the cognitive sciences.The purpose of literature and the interpretation of literature — for pleasure, transformation, or insight — is widely debated. In their conclusion, Gambino and Pulvirenti present a succinct summary of the major arguments that attempt to resolve current and conflicting accounts concerning literary textual comprehension. They end with the following memorable statement: “By transcending the boundaries of the self during the act of reading literature or experiencing art, human beings engage in the possibility of overcoming the boundaries of their cognitive potential” (126) in order to experience, in Goethe's words, “Formation, Transformation, / Eternal mind's eternal recreation.”
Margaret H. Freeman (Mon,) studied this question.