Vom Klagen der Stimme und dem Schweigen der Schrift

Abstract

Renaissance poetics tend to promote the illusion of oral proximity over the distance of written or even printed texts. Orality evokes a notion of communicative closeness that results in a direct transfer of affects between a lyrical speaker and his/her addressee. In Maurice Scève’s Délie (1544), the lyrical persona employs orality in order to amplify his emotionally charged rhetorics of lamentation and thus to elicit the addressee’s compassion. In contrast, all references towards writing appear to be deeply intertwined with the notions of absence, silence and distance. In the light of the emerging practice of letterpress printing in the city of Lyon, Scève’s poems reflect their own status as a material artefact, while they interrogate in the same time their potential to forge a bond with a spatially distant but emotionally close reading public.