RHETORIC IN FRANCO MORETTI: UNFOLDINGS

Abstract

Presentation of the approach to rhetoric found in the work of Franco Moretti; explanation of its affinity with the “rhetoric of argumentation” (proper to politics and the law). His mobilization of rhetoric toward a theoretical and methodological grounding of a “social history of literary forms”, to be observed in some of its presuppositions and unfoldings: 1) literature’s social function as an instrument to “generate consensus”; 2) its conception as a cultural production; 3) the proposition of a “slow literary history” that would be more similar to evolutionism than to a succession of “styles” or to a Hegelian notion of Zeitgeist; 4) the selection of rhetorical analysis as a scientific paradigm for literary critique. Among these discussions, we debate Moretti’s polemics against some dominant values in critique and historiography, in a contribution to the Literary Studies which (from the article’s perspective) remains actual.