[We must tell the end and speak of the Romantic Age]
(2006) Romantisme : littératures - arts - sciences - histoire — n° 132, p. 97-+ (2006)
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- As far as culture and literature (which govern the thought of History itself) are concerned, it is now necessary to speak of Romantic Age (of 1778 to 1989) and to abandon the concept of Contemporary Period. This does take nothing away from the specific character of the European Romanticisms nor does not deny the originality of the subsequent aesthetics having affirmed, in the very move of the new established conscience, their symphonic differences. That is what an examination of the conception of the means of expressing the sense through verbal language during the 19(th) and 20(th) centuries indicates. The essence and the aim of the Romantic Age would not be separated, among others, from the very necessity for the verbal language artistically performed of taking a new position facing the theoretical evidences and the practical performances of the sciences and the techniques, both full of the importance of rationality, and facing their progressive conquest of the ((human sciences)). Thus the field of literature saw itself increasingly condemned to the alternative of double confinement: on the one hand, the sacred order without transcendence, i.e. the decorum of the doxa; on the other side, the order of the worlds of imagination and fiction, i.e. the universe of leisure. Lacking, against the effectivity of the technoscientific discourses, convincing - in terms of reality - steadfast arguments, and having exhausted the initial resources of its aesthetic revolution (to consider genius as the source both of the rationality of the world and of the absolute of man), the literature of the Romantic Age is, today, reduced to a material for social sciences or condemned to maintain to be, in spite of any norm, the last claim for the freedom of speech (to say all, anything, to keep silent anyhow). However, the Phoenix of the expression rose again from the ashes of the Romantic Age gradually establishing a new system of sense and of rhetoric, founded on an attentive analysis of the speeches and on modest use of the language. This reform presents remarkable analogies with that of 151 century, where Lorenzo Valla, more than all other, probably, understood that any art of saying, of knowing and of teaching is based on the adequacy of tongue to the real such as it can directly be known.
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Polet, J.-C. (2006). [We must tell the end and speak of the Romantic Age]. Romantisme : littératures - arts - sciences - histoire, 132, 97-+. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/42361 (Original work published 2006)