The Rhetoric and Poetics of Deconstruction

The modernity of Enlightenment and Romanticism deeply unsettled the centuries-old legacy of rhetoric, labelling it as an ancient teaching. Starting in the 19th century, rhetoric was therefore progressively replaced by historicism and philology. However, there were relevant exceptions to the widespread condemnation of rhetoric, notably in the articulations sought by Romantic poetics between rhetoric, poetry and philosophy. Gradually, the importance of "rhetoricity" in language and in literary language achieved increasing importance, with the poetics of Symbolism, Modernism and the Vanguards. Today, we are witnessing a reborn rhetoric especially in theoretical areas such as psychoanalysis, textual linguistics, cognitive linguistics, hermeneutics and modern literary theory, in particular in the theory of deconstruction.