[…] be communicated in anything other than the cognitive language of the concept” and that “the way to the sublime is intellegible via thinking, that is to say, via the prosaic language of critical philosophy itself”. The dialectic relies on the relationship between intelligibility and communicability and while the concept itself with all its energy and potentialities has its own sublimity, the sublime cannot do without the “prosaic demands of the concept itself”. Such process – a metamorphosis of the aesthetic into the conceptual, of the unintelligible into the communicable – occurs, as Miller argues, through an act of linguistic becalming in Wordsworth’s
Essays upon Epitaphs insofar as the epitaph -closer to the philosophic aphorism than to the lyric poem – is described as making “distinct” that “image” that was initially a “tender haze” and “curse[s] the poet with the recognition that with all its apparent resources, imagination will always be defeated by the concept” . The attention of Beatriz Gonzales Moreno and of myself is centred on the Sublime, in its Longinian as well as in its Burkean meaning. Gonzales Moreno is mainly concerned with the Romantics’ aesthetic experience of one of the epitomes of sublimity, that is Mont Blanc, and the sense of annihilation which catches the subject before the unseizable, as a matter of fact before an ‘absent presence’. As a result Romantic landscape becomes grounded on an aesthetic misrepresentation that results in the non-existence of sublime nature outside human referentiality and resolved in an illusion induced through the aesthetic categorisation of the world by means of verbal force. My contribution investigates through two recognizable ‘romantic’ terms ‘sublimity’ and ‘fragmentariness’, the diverse domains to which they belong, that is philosophy and literature analysed here in their reciprocity. Two canonical texts of the Sublime are highlighted – Longinus’s
On the Sublime and Burke’s
Enquiry – in their resistence to any definite area of belonging. Here Longinus’s work proves to be, more than merely rhetorical, centred upon questions of subjective feelings and emotive force thus fulfilling a complementary relationship between the philosophy of rhetoric and literature. The
Enquiry, instead, preliminary confirming even in its paratextual elements its structural foreignness to literary canon shows in the description of the transport of the reader’s mind out of itself – in the reader’s very sense of being scattered as one thing with the image presented – and together with the poet, the resistence of the literary to the purely philosophical. Moreover, ‘fragmentariness’ is considered here as homologous to ‘sublimity’ since both of them are audience-oriented and sharing an iconic quality, which is the
visible, and a hidden core, which is the invisible. On the border line, the languages of sublimity and of creativity coincide. David Duff’s contribution pertains to one of the fundamental issues of the Romantic era, that is, its re-working of genres as a praxis to which even the unfinished poems or voluntary or fake fragments can be ascribed. The focus is mainly on what the author defines “the metalanguage of the form”, that critique of the poetic configuration – an integral part of their poetics – the Romantics achieved questioning their own material and distancing themselves from it. It is no coincidence that most of them, directly or indirectly, tackled this issue. In his 1798
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Lyrical Ballads, when theorizing about the enlargement of poetic materials, Wordsworth wrote that “the evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves”. Wordsworth’s 1815
Preface, the “unloved text” in which the author grouped his shorter poems into “subjective, psychological categories” is the subject of Duff’s lucid analysis, where he explores a century (18th) of theoretical experimentation with the categories and critical discourses lying behind it. Tomaso Kemeny’s study presented here is the work of a poet as well as of a literary critic. Conscious of the fact that, as Shelley stated, “All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially”, he links the extreme modernism of Surrealism to Romanticism back to the Metaphysical Poets and to the Elizabethans, making Romanticism central in the exchange of poetic imagery and themes over the stream of time, and as a matter of fact the first international vanguard movement. Electing as his refined reading-key the scrutiny of minimal changes on the plan of expression, the author analyses a network of antinomies “according to a textual typology based on the opposition between the categories of ‘difference’ and ‘conciliation'”. Thus he acutely shows how the poetic discourse more than being a “moyen d’expression” is one with spiritual energy, which binds together the languages of Romanticism and of Surrealism. The ideological core of the volume is constituted by the contributions of Jane Hodson, Giuseppe Martella and Mauro Pala. “Ruins of Awareness” is the tide of Pala’s resourceful study on the phenomenology of fragmentation and the iconology of ruins as they are activated to perform social, political and aesthetic functions. The diverse ideological emphasis generates, in the poets under consideration, a nuanced language, indeed a shared code where Foscolo associates to ruins and tombs, a radical critique of Italy’s contemporary situation, urging her to action, “while Byron and Leopardi converge in a radically pessimistic view that leads both of them to consider ruins […] as an escape from present reality to a superior consciousness of the limits of mundane existence”. The eighteenth century speculation on the origin of language and on the language of origins as expressed by Giambattista Vico in his
Scienza Nuova is at the basis of Martella’s sound treatment of the Neapolitan rhetorician’s pervasive lesson, covering “a middle ground between the two extremes of idealism and empiricism”, as the author argues, in the European intellectual milieu, Vico’s main concern being “the transition from metaphysics to historiography”. A possible reading of the Vichian influence on Wordsworth’s theory of poetic language is here superseded by a more sophisticated rendering of that transition in ‘generic’ terms, that is in an autobiographical perspective and from a wider standpoint in “an analogical projection of the autobiographical narrative onto a collective horizon”. From here the re-reading of Coleridge’s
Biographia Literaria — already considered as a sort of eighteenth-century opus mainly concerned with establishing prescriptive principles, in contrast with the vital urge underlying Romantic poetics and theorized in
Biographia itself – in terms of the dissonance of its discourse genres. The author finds in dialogism the reading-key of a work which indeed “stages a dialogue between texts: texts evoked, used and even plagiarised”, thus perpetuating an ideal of eternal history. Martella explores on the verge of a subtle intuition what was to occur in 1824 when an exiled Italian patriot, Gioacchino de’ Preti, lent Coleridge a Milanese edition of Vico’s
Scienza Nuova, whose introduction was in fact the rhetorician’s
Autobiografia. Jane Hodson’s contribution highlights William Godwin’s
theory of language as well as
his practice of language to discover, through a lucid examination of the philosopher’s works, namely his essay “On English Style”, the
Enquiry concerning Political Justice and
Caleb Williams, that the potential transparency of language theorized in the essay is also a key to his political philosophy. In fact – as the author maintains – “Godwin’s belief in the perfectibility of mankind […] hinges on the proposition that ‘sound reasoning and truth can be adequately communicated'” and that “the continuing improvement of English evidently reflects Godwin’s belief in the continuing improvement of humankind”. The investigation proposed so far aims, moreover, at showing how the opaque language used in
Caleb Williams rests on the direct inversion of Godwin’s prescriptions in “On English Style”. The prismatic feature of this issue of
La Questione Romantica mirrors the very nature of the problems at stake, since aesthetics, philosophy and politics constitute the facets of a complex intellectual reality, not reducible to a unity which would be very distant from Romanticism’s true essence.
Questo numero de La Questione Romantica è stato curato da Annamaria Sportelli
