Seneca the Elder: on the Genre of the Controuersia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23808/rel.v21i21.92718Keywords:
Seneca the Elder; declamatio; controuersia; genre; intertextualityAbstract
In his work Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Diuisiones et Colores, Seneca the Elder provides a considerable amount of information about his understanding of the genre of the controuersia. An analysis of Contr. 1 praef. 12 and other passages allows us to appreciate the importance of pragmatic features for the definition of this genre, beyond the features that operate on a textual level. This outlook answers to a generic logic situated on the auctorial level. However, Seneca performs in his work an operation of
decontextualization and recontextualization of the extracts he has selected, establishing new relations among them that are unconnected to their original enunciative situation. The result is a shift of the relevance of the pragmatic level in favour of intertextual relations, understood in the current sense, as a phenomenon in the scope of reception and not in intentional allusion. This circumstance places the work as a recreation of the genre of controuersia in which Seneca, through different strategies related with the practice of declamation, assumes a major role as responsible for this conception.
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