Das Gespräch in seiner Inszenierung und Darstellung. Emotionales Sprechen im Briefroman zwischen rhetorischer und poetischer Praxis

With regard to the historical »quarrel« between rhetoric and poetic concepts, this essay, firstly, reports the linguistic, literary and social innovations in letter-writing during the 18th-century. The letter writer’s fictitious role-play between the addressee and himself leads to a detailed description of body language as to further emotionalizing strategies. Thus, literary concepts linked to the letter are in demand which bring the epistolary novel into play. In a comparison of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787) and Ugo Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1817) it will be shown that the staged conversation between letter writer and addressee and the represented conversation between the letter writer and another character follow the same conversational attitude for each novel: either the principle of sympathy or the principle of divergence. This can be partly explained by a different historical development of aesthetic concepts in Germany and Italy. Besides, the different way of communicating emotions can be also attributed to the epistemic presuppositions: a mimesis which refers to naturalness is in opposition with an autonomous mimesis that breaks with the former tradition.

Extenics Analysis of Activity Support Element

Activity support is one of eight elements which Hamid Shirvani has generalized. It is also the element which is the most direct with the relationship of people’s activities and the most difficult with operation and description in the eight elements. While Extenics is that we use the formal model to study the possibilities of expansion and the rules and methods of innovation. Extenics can make use of basic-element model to describe everything. So we can do formal analysis on the objects of study, such as activity support element. Based on activity support element, the article is using the concepts of matter-element, affair-element and relation-element in Extenics to analyze activity support element, and using the principle of divergence analysis to do expansion analysis, which can make the activity support element systematically integrate the other urban design elements among the correlative net. There is the methodological significance with scientifically processing the relationship of behavior and environment in the article.