Volume 33, Issue 1

In order to convince someone, you need to get their attention first. In Rhetorics, that usually ought to happen right at the beginning of a speech, as already Aristotle suggested. But that notion changed in the 18th century. With the onset of Aesthetics, attention, or attentiveness, became even more important. The focus shifted to a continuing attentiveness of the speaking and writing subject. Originally, Baumgarten established his theory of Aesthetics as the science of sensual cognition (scientia cognitionis sensitivae). His main objective was the intensity (intensio) or effort (»Anstrengung«) of attention, referencing Quintilian’s idea of fierce attentiveness (acris intentio). Baumgarten also mentions other variations, such as its extent (extensio) and its duration (protensio). But it was his disciple Meier who made the concept more comprehensible translating it from Latin into German. About 1770 the now famous notion of suspense (»Spannung«) was introduced as a by-product of attentiveness. Other aesthetic ideas connected to a heightened sense of attention are: the interesting, strength, and enthusiasm.

The following contribution will examine the form and content of school rhetoric in the Latin schools of early modern Sweden. After an introduction to the schools, an outline of their curricular heritage will be given, situating school rhetoric in the classical trivium. Three components of rhetorical education are identified: the theoretical teaching, the reading of exemplary texts, and the exercises, all three components displaying a striking traditionalism and stability during the eighteenth century. Furthermore, it will be shown that rhetorical education also served as a means of instilling virtue in pupils and that rhetoric was an essential component in the reproduction of a representative learned culture and in the formation of virtuous character and erudite identity.

The rhetorical figure gradatio (or gr. climax) is generally understood as climactic or cumulative figure of speech. On the contrary, early usages lack this semantics of augmentation (or diminution in the case of an anti-climax). This article investigates the transformations of the figure which can not only be traced back to a semantic change but also to a general systematic change within the rhetorical system. A comparable transformation can be observed in music. The introduction of the crescendo-technique into 18th-century symphonic music is strikingly similar in terms of its dynamics, impact and effect and can be regarded as a ›transgression‹ of the musical-rhetorical figure of gradatio as it expresses the idea of climax with non-verbal means.

Towards the end of Ueber die neuere Deutsche Litteratur (1767), Johann Gottfried Herder publicly makes the call that homiletics is in need of a »completely different kind of eloquence«. Ciceronian eloquene in Germany did not have any public space except from the pulpit, and the eloquence from the pulpit made the public passive, because the preacher pronounced sentences like a judge in a court. Herder turned instead to the Bible as a book that is in need of interpretation, to literature as a public arena where different opinions could meet, to the reader as a detective, and to the story of creation as the secret model by which to create an all-embracing perspective from a diversity of viewpoints. Herder took a series of isolated judgments (fragments) from leading journals of his day and shaped these broken pieces into a puzzle pieces (fragments in a new sense) which can be put together as an image of German literature. Although it challenged the division between painting and poetry of Laokoon, Lessing adopted this form of presentation in his new work Zur Geschichte und Litteratur (1773-1777), but retorted on a grander scale by presenting puzzle pieces from manuscripts of the Herzog August Library. At this time, Herder, Goethe and Lessing could be seen as an avant-garde bound together by a similar form of presentation.

The following contribution will demonstrate the differences between Löwen’s theory in his Kurzgefaste Grundsatze von der Beredsamkeit des Leibes and the satirical Fragment eines Schreibens uber den Ton in den Schriften einiger teutschen Gelehrten und Schongeister by August Friedrich Cranz. Löwen’s Kurzgefaste Grundsatze is concerned with the art of physical expression on the stage, provides also information on facets of the contemporary image of the body. These facets should be traced in Fragment eines Schreibens, which became known as Bockiade. August Friedrich Cranz, only ten years younger than Löwen, was an representative of the Berlin Enlightenment. He commented on the social and cultural developments in the last three decades of the 18th century. His satire not only mentioned the great minds of the time. He commented the feud between the Berlin publisher, bookseller and author Friedrich Nicolai and the poet, translator and editor Christoph Martin Wieland in Weimar in his satirical writing.

With 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.

The following contribution will show how Goethe’s play Iphigenie auf Tauris, being deeply rooted in rhetoric and discourse, is differing from its Euripidean predecessor as well as from the prevailing opinion of literary scholars. Firstly, by looking at Iphigenie’s struggle for autonomy, the text will show that Iphigenie’s ›devilish humanity‹ stems from herself being a rhetorical person, and that her weaknesses let her turn to communicative and rhetorical means. Secondly, by analyzing the communicative strategies used by the main personnel of the drama, namely Iphigenie, Thoas and Pylades, I will show that Goethe embedded a rhetorical typology into his work. All three of them embody different rhetorical strategies and only by using them thoughtfully, a communicative rather than a violent denouement is possible. With the consequence that even Orestes’ healing can be seen as a therapeutic rhetorical act. Thus Iphigenie can be seen as a mediation upon the possibilities and limitations of rhetoric and communication.

In acknowledgement of both the intellectual aspirations and the poetical style of Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, the following article will re-interpret a passage in the 22nd letter that can be designated as a ›Poetics in nuce‹. Initially, it will be pointed out that Schiller’s theory of human perception as well as his semiotic model focus on the problem of commerce between matter and mind or sign and meaning. Subsequently, it will be shown that the terms Form and Stoff establish a connection between anthropology and poetics by shaping both theories according to the model of metabolism, which is a common metaphor employed to describe the res / verba relation in classical rhetoric. Consequently, I will demonstrate that the epistemological discourse in the letters 24 to 27, in stressing the senses of sight and hearing, leads to a theory of aesthetic communication that integrates rhetorical techniques of creating appearance (»Schein«) by adapting these strategies to the requirements of written communication in print cultures.