The rhetoric of media and literary forms: Antonio Delfini

Abstract

The present paper aimed at showing the cognitive impact of the conceptual and perceptual organization of media on literary forms.
On the one hand, McLuhan stated that the medium is a metaphor, as long as it shifts information across different conceptual domains. On the other hand, cognitive theories argued that the metaphor is a strategy of conceptualization of the experience. Mediology, cognitive poetics and literary criticism can cooperate in order to describe the conceptual metaphors conveyed by the media, and the way they interact with the literature in the deeply interconnected semiotic context of the XXth Century.
Antonio Delfini’s writings and composition strategies reveal the hybridization produced by the contact between the rhetoric and the conceptual organization of literary texts, and the formal organization of the media. In Delfini’s work, the process of hybridization is realized by reusing textual fragments produced by media. Such an hybridization also consists in a wider phenomenon of exchange between the cognitive schemas produced by media, and the very idea of literature practiced by the author. Delfini, indeed, conceives the structures of newspapers and journals as a conceptual model for making sense of reality.