Volume 42, Issue 1

The essay highlights the fundamental importance of internal rhetoric in philosophical romanticism. First, it exposes Schelling’s general thesis that the art of inner conversation (‚innere Unterredungskunst‘) is the archetype of philosophical thinking. Furthermore, Shaftesbury’s background theory in his Soliloquy or, Advice to an Author is discussed, which characterizes the Art of soliloquy by the five basic operations of self-seperation, self-reflection, self-division, self-verbalisation, self-dialogization. Finally – returning to homo rhetorico-philosophicus Schelling – his romantic philosophy of the Ages of the World ( Weltalter ) is interpreted as a product of his internal rhetoric. Schelling’s philosophical Art of inner conversation combines here the invention of speculative history with the empowerment and self-invention of his author.

The article explores the early Romantic theories of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, focusing on their re-conception of urbanity ( urbanitas ) as it relates to the Romantic project of a union of poetry and life. The article argues that Schlegel and Schleiermacher work to establish a new ethos of interaction (indifferent to the medium) that claims validity in the literary and social fields. It reconstructs Schlegel’s theory of the formation of ethos during the Athenäum period, which he applies to the writer as the paradigm of the ‚speaker‘ under new public conditions and the essay as the paradigm of negotiating uncertain knowledge. Schleiermacher’s attempt to develop a theory of social behaviour, which emerged during his time in Berlin, forms the complement to Schlegel’s poetics on the side of social practice. The essay thus shows how rhetorical knowledge is reformulated and connected to practice after the end of the discipline.

Alphonse de Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques (1820) is considered the first manifesto of French Romanticism, a moment of „rupture“ and „unprecedented renewal of the sensibility of an era“ (Aurélie Loiseleur). While not denying the inventiveness of the author who claimed to have given his muse „not a conventional seven-stringed lyre, but the very fibres of the human heart“, the article aims to reconsider the role of rhetoric in Lamartine’s Méditations . Understood as a method of invention and arrangement of poetic material, rhetoric informs many of the poems in the volume, particularly those in which the lyrical subject resorts to the deliberative topics for apologetic purposes. Furthermore, the article argues that Lamartine’s rhetoric owes much to that of the Jesuits from whom the poet received his education.

Kleistʼs text Über die allmählige Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden evokes contemporanean rhetorics already with the term „verfertigen“. But he inverts the regulative subordination of the ars inveniendi and the rhetorical devices under the topic or aim of speech which traditional rhetorics postulates. In analogy to wit which according to Friedrich Schlegel hits like lightning, speaking boldly („dreist“) begins with a „Donnerkeil“ (thunderbolt) without knowing of or for what. In this manner a „new“ „rhetoric of the future“ (Rüdiger Campe) is envisioned – a rhetorics which will institute its own frames instead of performing in already instituted ones. This is what the devices of continuing speaking have to ensure, while the tension between speaking and its product is acted out in felicitous contingencies. This tension is also acted out in Kleistʼs text, which proceeds by examples without resulting in a thesis.

The article reads Bettina von Arnim’s Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde focusing on the written gestures she describes in the remembered and imagined encounters with Goethe. Based on the rhetorical devices of actio and ekphrasis , Bettina von Arnim establishes a rhetoric of bodily interaction, which subverts the restricted gestural codes recommended for women in 18 th /19 th Century etiquette manuals. Thereby she transforms an instrumental actio based on disciplining and controlling the (female) body into a bodily relation to the self and to the word that resonates with female wants.

The importance of philosophical rhetoric for Fichte is well-known, and in particular how it connects to his concept of the public role of the philosopher. This article examines Fichte’s Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1799) – a popular work in a double sense – in the context of Fichte’s philosophical rhetoric, with a focus on the use of persuasio . Much as Die Bestimmung des Menschen was met with substantial criticism upon its initial publication in German, it proved to be one of the central works in Fichte’s English-language reception in the nineteenth century, where Fichte’s philosophy became integrated into Transcendentalism. Fichte’s work was praised for its aesthetic and persuasive qualities, and it is this element of persuasio which can be traced in readers’ use of Die Bestimmung des Menschen .

One of the contributing factors to the Romantic reconceptualization of poetical work and of literary genius is a modernisation of the concept of property in the course of the 18 th century. In the texts of English Romanticism in general and of William Wordsworth in particular, this modernisation inaugurates a new rhetoric of property for which two factors are decisive: firstly, the reversibility of possessors and possessed and, secondly, the proclamation of imaginary possessions that might also be designated as „phantom properties“.

Rhetorical features in a text are integral to its aesthetic and persuasive quality. They prefigure its oral, or indeed oratory, character. However, with their inevitable exaggeration of a discursive point they often run contrary to any claim of truthfulness. This very fact has given ‚rhetoric‘ a negative flair. Around 1800, in the aftermath of the French Revolution and in the course of Napoleon’s occupation of most of Europe, discourses on rhetoric as a liberating, or at least emancipatory force regained a politically charged prominence. Adam Müller, for one, argued that in Germany in particular, a proper culture of the rhetorical would be crucial whilst Heinrich von Kleist examined the emergence of thought from rhetorical situations. This contribution discusses the far-reaching implications of these discourses in terms of their aesthetic and political implications.