Le Muse, le Maschere E Il Sublime Nella "Scienza Nuova" di G. B. Vico

Dissertation, Yale University (1992)
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Abstract

Nowadays there is a trend among scholars to emphasize the role of rhetoric and aesthetics in the experience of truth. This new and modern appreciation of rhetoric has an important point of departure in the homo rhetoricus of the Baroque period and was developed in philosophy particularly by Friedrich Nietzsche. There is an entire tradition of rhetoric starting with antiquity in which many scholars in recent criticism have inserted Vico. This tradition departs from the pre-socratics and develops through Aristotle, Cicero, Roman jurisprudence, civic humanism and political thought of the Renaissance. This reading of Vico is a kind of reaction to the idealistic interpretation which undervalued rhetoric and stressed the autonomous nature of poetry and of aesthetic experience and, in this perspective, pointed to Vico as a precursor of these ideas. ;In my dissertation I consider and then dispute both these trends in criticism, the idealistic one and the rhetorical one, as expressions of a symmetrical dissociation of modern theorists which is only partially present in Vico's philosophy. The question which is at the core of my dissertation is the relationship between rhetoric and poetics in Vico's thought. In contrast to the ages of gods and heroes, in which myth was the original and common language of poetry, rhetoric, theology, science and technology, Vico thinks that in the age of men and women the respective languages specialize and separate themselves one from another. I argue that Vico's point of view in dealing with mythology is based upon a twofold and contradictory movement. On the one hand, he finds in myths the ground of what he calls "storia ideale eterna," and in this respect he elaborates his own hermeneutics of myths which is in fact a kind of de-mythicization: an attempt to write the language of myth in the language of history and of human beings. On the other hand, for Vico, in modern times, poetry holds a central and peculiar role in the process of knowledge not as an expression of an autonomous stage in the life of the Spirit, but as the language of essential human needs. This is why for Vico poetry, particularly what he calls sublime poetry, keeps the remembrance of ancient myths

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