Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The concept of form has been the subject of innumerable reflections and interpretations by various authors at least since classical Aristotelian philosophy. However, form acquired a new aesthetic dimension when Humboldt gave it a privileged role in the context of his linguistic idealism. For the German scholar, languages were not reduced to a set of grammatically articulated sound or phonetic materials, but such materials were in turn to be put at the service of expressing various ideal or spiritual conceptions specific to the group of speakers. Humboldt called this concept the “inner form of language” (“innere Sprachform”). Humboldt’s formulation was later taken up by literary critics and historians such as Francesco de Sanctis, who in his “Storia della letteratura italiana” explored the origins of the “sense of form” in 14th-century Florentine humanism. Benedetto Croce was interested in these ideas when he formulated his aesthetics of expression, which would later be used by German critics such as Vossler and Spitzer in order to lay the foundations of the so-called genetic or idealistic stylistics. In this way, literary form is identified with style, i.e. with the personal and individual stamp that the writer puts on the common language of his works. Finally, the idealist concept of literary form would culminate in the constitution of the Spanish School of Stylistics, which was led by Dámaso Alonso and Amado Alonso, among others.