Abstract

The article presents some knowledge models underlying narrative constructions. The starting assumption is that the identity of poetry has oscillated between different cognitive options: from a model of rationality, measure and harmony originally embodied in the Aristotelian concept of mythos, to the gnoseological scepticism of the second Modernity in its various declinations. Between these two opposing options lies a third cognitive modality: the circumstantial paradigm that valorises the particular, the detail, the minute empiricism, assigning to them the function of key to access a universal sense. This epistemic model governed the hermeneutics of early German romanticism and was active in the Bildungsroman as the key to a life. With the advance of Modernity, the Aristotelian paradigm of the mythos and the hermeneutic and circumstantial paradigm came into crisis. In Musil, for example, the certainty of the real and its meanings is replaced by the certainty of the possible. The world becomes a plural entity that renounces its claim to uniqueness and loses its transcendental roof that guaranteed a victorious exit from the labyrinth of life. Finally, the last cognitive model examined is Sebald’s, which is based on the idea, which was already W. Benjamin’s, of history as an immense ruin. The narration thus acquires the value of a salvation from oblivion, the lives saved by the narrator are relics floating on the sea of oblivion. Sebald’s narratives represent the point of rupture of the projects of meaning that the narrative paradigms on which the traditions of classicist inspiration and those of the various phases of Modernity were based.