Le emozioni nella lettaratura. Ricerca attuale e radici retoriche - con un'appendice: la goia di Eichendorff

Emotions in Literature. Recent Research and Rhetorical Roots. Since the last decades of the Twenties Century the research interested in emotions has very much increased, and today (under the terms of Emotionsforschung o Affective Sciences) it’s involving all of the humanities disciplines, from psychology to sociology, anthropology, ethology, political science, economic and legal, linguistic and cultural and literary sciences: all fields of humanities are now involved in this research turn discovering also the possibility of working with the natural sciences as Neurology and technologies concerning artificial intelligence. Emotions should always be even cognitive abilities. The ancient rhetoric not only already knew this, but had started a teaching on how to bring awareness to the constitution of the affections, their operation and the linguistic and gestural ways to provoke them, in order to use them to increase the effectiveness of the speech. In literature. all textual elements contribute to the evocation of emotion. In the literary model of reality one cannot consider the figuration of emotions as a result of the addition of textual elements but of their combination, the interweaving of all textual factors. In any case, the totality of determination of all 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 never without emotional evaluation. The studies in history of literature, that research on the emotion power of texts, can be divided into three groups: the first dedicated to study the textual representation individual emotions (which, of course, remembers 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, studies that try to (re-)construct a general emotional code typical for a particular cultural-historical period. The interdisciplinary approach is to consider the first general positive result of the new Emotionsforschung, equally positive is without doubt her "rediscovery" of the rhetoric tradition. Further on, the interest for the evocation of emotion has added a new element to the study on the reception of literature: from the late 1980s, the Anglo-Saxon research investigates with empirical methods generalizable trends on readers' emotional involvement in reading, always starting from the thesis of an interaction between text and reader.