Le emozioni nella letteratura Ricerca attuale e radici retoriche – con un’appendice: la gioia di Eichendorff

Abstract

Since the last decades of the Twentieth Century the research on emotions has very much improved, and today (under the name of Emotionsforschung o Affective Sciences) it is progressively engaging the humanities, from psychology to sociology, anthropology and ethology, from political, economic and legal sciences to linguistic, cultural and literary disciplines. The humanities, involved in this research turn, are also discovering the possibility of working with natural sciences such as neurology and technologies concerning artificial intelligence. Emotions should always be considered even as cognitive abilities. Ancient rhetoric not only knew this, but also started a teaching on how to bring awareness to the constitution of the affects and the linguistic and gestural ways to provoke them, in order to use them to increase the effectiveness of speech. In literature, all textual elements contribute to the evocation of emotion. In the literary model of reality the figuration of emotions cannot be considered the figuration of emotions as a result of the addition of textual elements but rather as a result of their combination, the interweaving of all textual factors. In any case, the totality of determinations of all the elements of the textual artifact, which presents itself to the reader as a result of his own imagination, justifies the poetic perception of reality as “magical”, as space, time and action that are never without signification and emotional evaluation. The literary studies that deal with the emotional power of texts can be divided up into three groups: the first analyses the textual representation of individual emotions (which, of course, recalls the of traditional Motivforschung, but often these new studies are opened to a context of interdisciplinary investigations); the second group investigates the textual strategies for emotional evocation in individual works or in the oeuvre of a single author; and finally, the third group tries to (re)construct a general emotional code typical of a particular cultural-historical period. The interdisciplinary approach is to be considered the first general positive result of the new Emotionsforschung; equally positive is without doubt the “rediscovery” of the rhetoric tradition. Furthermore, the interest in the evocation of emotion has added a new element to the study of the reception of literature: since the late 1980s, English-speaking scholars have been investigating generalizable trends of readers’ emotional involvement in reading with empirical methods, always starting from the premises of an interaction between the text and the reader.