| The concept of the "individual character" of national languages expressing the "unique soul" of a particular people has been dismissed by most contemporary linguists as pure myth, and yet we know how powerful and resilient that myth has been. It constitutes the core of linguistic nationalism, the movement that identifies political borders with the area of a particular language, and it is, in contrast to other forms of nationalism, an eminently literary creation.;Taking my cue from the Anglo-American discussion of theories of nationalism (E. Gellner, B. Anderson, L. Greenfield, A. D. Smith, and others), I explore the European literary debate from which the language myth of nations originally emerged at the end of the seventeenth century. In contrast to an inherited consensus which ascribes pioneering ideas to J. G. Herder, I show that many of Herder's arguments were anticipated by a series of exchanges between Italian and French intellectuals (e.g., the Muratori-Bouhours controversy), at least one generation before him.;I concentrate on a number of Italian writers and philosophers (Muratori, Vico, Cesarotti, Leopardi) who analyzed the accepted notions as well as the rhetorical strategies linking the ideas of "genius of language" and "genius of nation." I consider issues of syntax and etymology, explanations of language diversity, and images of nationality (Bouhours and Muratori, chapter 1; Vico chapter 2); the translatability of Volksdichtung, or the poetry of the people (Macpherson and Cesarotti, chapter 3); and a philosophical critique of the term character and its nationalist use (Leopardi, chapter 4). The reflections of these Italian authors reveal a clash between the deeply ingrained humanist idea of the universality of culture and a keen perception of the geographical and historical relativity encoded in language. In defiance of the nationalist trends of their own time, they suggested a constructivist perspective that defined both languages and nations as transient and yet powerful artifacts rather than as inevitable and spontaneous manifestations of the innate characters of communities. |
