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HANNAH CHAPELLE WOJCIEHOWSKI, VITTORIO GALLESE, Introduction

and horseback riding than were medieval and early modern people
— people like Chaucer, Shakespeare and Cervantes.

In his essay “Poetry and fiction: a necessary, and historically verifi-
able, combination,” Alberto Casadei, comparatist, scholar of Ariosto,
Dante and twentieth-century literature, and a pioneer of cognitive lit-
erary studies in Italy, asks very intriguing questions, such as “is there
a foundational or universal value of the narrative component in
human biology?” and “Are poetry and narrative born together?”
Casadei explores some of the biological and cognitive aspects of texts
that we now consider to be literary, but which originally stood as
magical and sacred. He proposes that the initial drive to tell a story
was the transmission of a sense nucleus, rather than the construction
of a complex plot. Sense nuclei were essential for the preservation
and transmission of culture. By considering jointly early forms of po-
etry and fiction, Casadei reveals that arts and poetry/narrative were
born out of a re-employment of biological-corporeal propensities and
aimed at signaling both the sacred-fantastic and the factual-real, as-
signing the element of obscurity to the former and that of eventfulness
to the la er. Obscurity concerns not only form but also content, as it
postulates the existence of a reality at the same time unknowable and
tangible. Eventfulness, on the other hand, incarnates the drive to rep-
resent the “event’s completeness.” Literature starts off from this orig-
inal material, affirming the relationship between words and things
through stylization.
Casadei identifies in obscurity and eventfulness two limits and at
the same time two generators of the expressible in literary works.
Some specific preliminary analyses are presented in relation to the old-
est epic text we know, the Gilgamesh, in which many rhetorical figures,
such as hyperbole and anaphora, contribute to creating specific effects,
finalizing biological and cognitive propensities through style. The
essay concludes with the anticipation of a research project focused on
the investigation of the historical evolution and the cognitive and bi-
ological preconditions of style, seen as a key ingredient to boost the
appeal and recognizability of sense nuclei.

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