L’expérience par procuration : l’hypotypose et la narration historique de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance
The Experience by Proxy: Hypotyposis and Historical Narrative from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Summary/Abstract: As long as history was considered as magistrae uitae, it was necessary to give the readers the impression that they were seeing the recounted events and taking part in them, so that they could live them by proxy and gain from the experience of others. Relative to this pedagogical function of historical narrative, we will investigate the various devices of hypotyposis – the para- taxis, the entering into details and the piling them up, the disappearance of the locutor – as well as its powers of exhibition, emotion and persuasion. In order to identify the founding and problematic bound between the hypotyposis to the experience – which implies both accounting for the lived experience and passing it on – we will go behind the rhetorical definition of “figure of style” to what appears to be the first form of the art of making visible. Our aim is, simultaneously, to help clarify the complex relationship between history and rhetoric from Antiquity to the Renaissance and to offer an analysis of the contradiction attached to the name hypotyposis: a “description given in broad outlines” and a “detailled and evident description”.

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