The study of literature and arts in general has been recently enriched by the changes in the heuristic paradigms regarding the very essence of the cognitive processes implied by the artistic experience. In the frame of the epistemological changes occurred in the past decades, since the so-called "neuro-turn" and the definition of an "epistemology based on the brain" (see Edelman, 2007), the linkage of humanities, cognitive studies and neuroscience has put at stake the need of inquiring about arts and literature in a transdisciplinary perspective, in order to get new insights into how our mindbrain fulfils the mysterious process of imagining a fictional world, constructing new meanings out of this experience, and to develop a methodology to newly interpret arts and the literary text.In this perspective, the main focus of literature is human nature and the involved relationship among the human mind, the cognitive processes of the brain and the world. As Turner (1996) claimed years ago, literary criticism needs to take into account new results in the field of cognitive science and neurosciences, since only through the intertwining of art and cognitive neuroscientific research it will be possible to acquire innovative perspectives in the study of the human mind and arts. Narration -particularly literary narration -is the oldest and one of the most sophisticated products of the human mind; it therefore mirrors many of its more relevant processes. The brain processes that normally underlie the interaction of the human being with the world are reflected forcefully and in condensed manner especially in art and literature. Cognitive acts make use of narrative and creative processes, as reaffirmed in the past decades by several scholars, among them by Gibbs (1994), overcoming the classical distinction between usual thought, referred to action in the world, and the narrative literary one, referred to counterfactual worlds (Turner, 1996). Therefore, it seems inadequate to deal with a specific aesthetic phenomenon without considering the complexity in which it is rooted, that is to say the connection between the brain and its activity, and what such activity has produced and is nourished by -body, environment, GESTALT THEORY,

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence.

During the 18th century, debates about what constituted the sublime flourished in Europe, and particularly in Germany. These debates were nourished by two different visions: The Kantian concept supposed that the sublime is supra-sensible and rooted in reason (Logos) rather than in the object, thus provoking a mental state of tension between nature and art; Edmund Burke's concept, on the other hand, conceived of the sublime as a bodily immersive experience, which we here define as "sensitive" sublime. In summary, Burke's view of the sublime is rooted in the senses and not in the power of reason, unlike Kant's. This was to disrupt the mainstream ideas of that time, unconsciously anticipating some of the recent neuroaesthetic acquisitions regarding the central role played by the sensory apparatus in the experience of beauty and of the sublime.

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