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E-book The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms
This fourth volume of papers emerging from the 21st World Congress of the Inter-national Comparative Literature Association (Vienna, 21–27 July 2016) comprises articles focusing on what are provisionally called “topics” and “forms” in the book title.1 Thus, this volume promises to join two aspects that have often been viewed as a dichotomy: the level of literary content and the level of literary form – questions concerning the “aboutness” of a text and the contextual or world ele-ments contributing to it on the one hand, and questions related to the intrinsic, aesthetic qualities of a literary work on the other hand. Studying a text’s motifs, themes, topics/topoi, clichés, Stoffe, myths, symbols, images, or discourses is typically seen as part of the former area of investigation, whereas the latter is linked to questions of style, structure, language, form, tropes, rhetorical devices, and so on. In literary scholarship, influential claims over the priority of intrinsic, formal approaches over content-oriented, contextual ones were made by repre-sentatives of literary schools such as formalism, new criticism, and structuralism, who typically accused thematically oriented fields of literary research for having a focus on the sources and influences of particular literary themes that was too sim-plistic and positivistic, and that necessarily missed the “momento creativo, che è quello che davvero interessa la storia letteraria ed artistica” [the creative moment, which is that which truly interests literary and artistic history] (Croce 1903, 78; my translation, emphasis in original). The defences of the criticized fields, however, often involve two lines of argument. On the one hand, it is argued that any act of reading literature is, by nature, thematic, and that the consideration of thematic aspects does justice to the experiences of “common” readers. Variations of this argument (with differences in emphasis and intention) can, for example, be found in a volume on new approaches to literary thematics from the 1990s, in a now- canonical essay by Edward Said, and in one of the most recent introductions to the discipline of comparative literature:Literary study cannot afford to ignore the theme. It is that through which we read and it is that around which one writes, the locus of artistic creation in its effort to balance tradi-tion against originality, the point of intersection between fictional and nonfictional worlds. (Bremond et al. 1995, 1)Texts incorporate discourse, sometimes violently. [...] Words and texts are so much of the world that their effectiveness, in some cases even their use, are matters having to do with ownership, authority, power, and the imposition of force. (Said 2009 [1983], 275–276)Identifying the theme is our primary rapport with a work of literature. We ask: “What’s that book about?” We say that Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is about the adventures of a naïve, self-centered young man in a chaotic time – and that Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drink-ard is about the same thing. (Of course it is never exactly the same thing – but close enough for purposes of comparison.) (Domínguez et al. 2015, 68; emphasis in original).
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