Two Wings of Art Writing

The article examines the correlation between aesthetic and rhetorical aspects of artistic writing in a historical perspective. Before the “aesthetic revolution” of the 18th century, which was marked with the publication of Baumgarten’s Aestheticism, written language, while possessing an essentially creative potential, was conceived purely rhetorically, not as the creation of conditional holistic worlds, but as a textforming craft of a special kind. The discovery of the creative nature of art served as a powerful impulse for its development and shaped classical European artistry. A mental crisis of artistic culture at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in an imbalance between the aesthetic and rhetorical vectors of artistic writing. Avant-garde provocation, political engagement, and consumer fiction depreciated the aesthetic component of art from various angles. The critical discord between de-aestheticization of artistic writing and the rehabilitation of its aesthetic value was embedded in the formation of a theory of literature as a science, which took place in the polemic between “aesthetics of verbal creativity” by M.M. Bakhtin and purely rhetorical poetics of the formal school. This confrontation, which gave rise, in particular, to the phenomenon of “postmodernism,” continues to this day. It is in this confrontation that the fate of literature as an art of the word is decided.