Das Gespräch in seiner Inszenierung und Darstellung. Emotionales Sprechen im Briefroman zwischen rhetorischer und poetischer Praxis

Abstract

AbstractWith regard to the historical »quarrel« between rhetoric and poetic concepts, this essay, firstly, reports the linguistic, literary and social innovations in letter-writing during the 18th-century. The letter writer’s fictitious role-play between the addressee and himself leads to a detailed description of body language as to further emotionalizing strategies. Thus, literary concepts linked to the letter are in demand which bring the epistolary novel into play. In a comparison of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787) and Ugo Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1817) it will be shown that the staged conversation between letter writer and addressee and the represented conversation between the letter writer and another character follow the same conversational attitude for each novel: either the principle of sympathy or the principle of divergence. This can be partly explained by a different historical development of aesthetic concepts in Germany and Italy. Besides, the different way of communicating emotions can be also attributed to the epistemic presuppositions: a mimesis which refers to naturalness is in opposition with an autonomous mimesis that breaks with the former tradition.