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Project

From Rhetoric to Interdiscursivity: Reception of a Cultural Paradigm Shift in German Literature After 1800

Between 1500 and 1800, rhetoric held a dominant position in European culture. Not only did it serve as a set of formal rules, but it also represented a system of human virtues and a mode of cultural thinking. As such, it was closely tied to absolutist monarchies and Christianity. It played a central role in education until well into the 19th century. However, after 1800 rhetoric lost its social function as an all-encompassing cultural system. What remained was a specialised discipline that only provided practical rules for persuasion. Important factors in this major transition were the Industrial Revolution and the political awakening of the bourgeoisie, which both proved problematic in Germany. Both processes of modernisation were intensified by the emergence of new fields of society, which had their own knowledge, norms and forms of language (called discourses). This growth in discourses increasingly led to their combination into so-called interdiscourses. Literary writers proved to be most adept at interdiscursive language use. This project argues that interdiscourses replaced rhetoric as the dominant system of communication in a society dealing with increasing specialisation. Instead of completely disappearing, practical rhetorical figures such as tropes could still be found in German literature, but writers increasingly used them in an interdiscursive way. Both progressive and conservative authors, for example, used inventions such as the train as symbols in their works

Date:1 Oct 2019 →  30 Sep 2022
Keywords:rhetoric, interdiscursivity, paradigm shift, German literature, 1800, functional differentiation, technological progress, tropes, battle of ideas
Disciplines:Discourse studies, Literatures in German, Rhetoric, Stylistics and textual analysis, Sociology of literary texts