L’embodiment tra letteratura e medicina: Cavalcanti e Dante

Cognitive Poetics can be used as a way to understand the relationship between the text and the reader, but also as a critical approach, through which we can clarify the efficiency of the representation and the meaning construction of a concept. In the first part of the essay I made a comparison between some elements of medieval rhetoric and philosophical culture and the contemporary theories of embodiment and blending, highlighting similarities and differences, with particular attention to the process through which words can produce images in the reader’s imagination, reproducing an experience through fictional representation. I analyse this issue using both the medieval conception and the neuroscientific theories. In the second part of the essay I use Cognitive Poetics to analyse the conceptualization of love through its metaphors in Cavalcanti’s poetry and Dante’s Vita Nuova, trying to clarify both the meaning of erotic experience for the poets and their use of analogy, paying specific attention to the medical metaphors and language.