La nascita della letteratura moderna dalla retorica antica.Appunti su Friedrich Schlegel.

The paper examines the judgment of the young Friedrich Schlegel on ancient rhetoric, as evidenced by its Nachworten to the translations of Lysia’s Epitaph and of Dionysius of Halicarnassus' s Isocrates, published 1796 in the Attisches Museum edited by Wieland. Schlegel sees in the public rhetoric a sign of the decadence of the Greek culture, and an inferior product of the Athenian democracy. Instead he appreciates the 'applied' rhetoric, the Kunsturteil of Dionysius of Halicarnassus: taking inspiration from the method of Dionysius, Schlegel goes beyond the traditional division between prose and poetry, and sees in the ancient prose a model for modern prose. The 'classicism' of Schlegel, therefore, is not static, but expresses the tension between ancient and modern and represents a productive concept for the modern aesthetics.