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Fiddler on the Roof? I believe that, because of the orgiastic energy with which the scene (the staircase with its incongruous population) is presented, even the most naive spectator may grasp the symphonic turbulence of this Brueghel-like kermis. Even the most ingenuous among the spectators "feels" a rhythm, an invention, and cannot help but fix his attention on the way it is put together. |
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At the extreme other end of the pole of the aesthetic interest I would like to mention a work whose equivalent I have not succeeded in finding in the contemporary mass media. It is not only a masterpiece of intertextuality but also a paramount example of narrative metalanguage, which speaks of its own formation and of the rules of the narrative genre: I refer to Tristram Shandy. |
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It is impossible to read and enjoy Sterne's antinovel without realizing that it is treating the novel form ironically. Tristram Shandy is so aware of its nature that it is impossible to find there a single ironic statement that does not make evident its own quotation marks. It brings to a high artistic resolution the rhetorical device called pronuntiatio (that is, the way of imperceptibly stressing the irony). |
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I believe that I have singled out a typology of "quotation marking" that must in some way be relevant to the ends of a phenomenology of aesthetic value, and of the pleasure that follows from it. I believe further that the strategies for matching surprise and novelty with repetition, even if they are semiotic devices, in themselves aesthetically neutral, can give place to different results on the aesthetic level. |
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Each of the types of repetition that we have examined is not limited to the mass media but belongs by right to the entire history of artistic creativity; plagiarism, quotation, parody, the ironic retake are typical of the entire artistic-literary tradition. |
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Much art has been and is repetitive. The concept of absolute originality is a contemporary one, born with Romanticism; classical art was in vast measure serial, and the "modern" avant-garde (at the beginning of this century) challenged the romantic idea of "creation from nothingness," with its techniques of collage, mustachios on the Mona Lisa, art about art, and so on. |
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The same type of repetitive procedure can produce either excellence or banality; it can put the addressees into conflict with themselves and with the intertextual tradition as a whole; thus it can provide them with easy consolations, projections, identifications. It can establish an agreement with the naive addressee, exclusively, or exclusively with the smart one, or with both at different levels and along a continuum of solutions which cannot be reduced to a rudimentary typology. |
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