Mannerism used to be considered as an expression of decadence in long periods of literary history. Its aestheticism, declension from the phenomena of trivial experience, self-complacent game with its own potential and accentuation of rhetoric were understood as an expression of a sophistical attitude. The value of mannerism is really situated in the auto-reflective gesture, in conscious shaping of processes of its own conception. Positive re-interpretation of this mannerist auto-referential is connected with the changes within the perspectives of literary scholarship, which in the position of post-structuralism shows increased sensitiveness to similar phenomena. In German environment, deconstruction and system theory are those that intensely approximate to these problems. In this optics it is just needed to subject to post-structuralistic analysis the poetics of one of the most remarkable representatives of Italian mannerism, Giovanni Battista Marino. The aim of this analysis is to detect the meaning of auto-reflection as a constitutive principle yet, before the start of 'modernity'. Particularly this analysis will refer to 'Narcissus- and echo-poems' (Narziss- und Echo-Gedichte) of Marino's 'La Galeria'. Here, according to my thesis, the problem of auto-reflection, culminates in a special way. One of the reasons of this is Marino's reference of shaping the Narcissus' myth in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'. It will manifest in which way the myth as a rhetorical-topological meta-myth was accepted in a imaginative lyrical poetry and made functional regarding to the elaborated auto-poetic concept. Recourse to Horace's statement 'ut picture poiesis' is important which is specifically modified by Marino. His Narcissus poems in relation of the image and poem show the mimetic function of literature which became problematic in the inter-textual concept of 'memoria'.
The cause of concentration of the auto-referential model of literature can be theoretically proved on disappearing referentiality. It can be proved also by the means of the insight into the work of La Pittura that mannerism is far more (post) modern than it could have appeared prima facie. The theoretical and methodological data are to be verified on the particular interpretations so that they do not lose their legitimacy. This pays chiefly on 'newer theories', particularly on the system theory and deconstruction, which are only about to achieve their reputation in the interpretation practice and to prove their potential for working with literary texts. Irritation caused by both positions mentioned is obvious since they radically refuse the target principle of hermeneutics i. e. complete decipherment of the meaning of the text. Despite of this, both theories offer a notion inventory, which enables describing some phenomena of the literary texts not possible to seize by the means of the traditional hermeneutic instruments. A meaningful interconnection of these two theories can even multiply this potential. The problem of the paradoxical 'autopoesy' had been defined already in Goedel's proof of equivocation, which shows the impossibility of applying formalized systems on one's self. The ideas of auto-reflection and deconstruction of the onto-theological ideology of presence, however, are not new, as is proved also by our interpretation of Ovid and Marino. But, in the context of modernism and postmodernism they become more visible. Despite that, such tendencies can be observed also in the different periods in which these problems were discussed with the similar intensity, e. g. the silver period of the Roman literature or baroque. It is therefore needed and purposeful to modify the existing post-structuralist data so that they enable adequate seizing of the 'pre-modern' auto-reflective literary models.
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