Aemulation

Aemulatio (Latin for emulation) describes the competitive imitation and surpassing of a role model in literature and art.

According to the ancient view, the aemulatio is not in contradiction to the originality (cf. Horace , De arte poetica 119 ff.). Rather, every reference to a literary model implies a competitive examination of it. In this sense, Quintilian “does not want the paraphrase to provide only a translation, but rather that there should be competition and competition (aemulatio) for the same ideas ." (Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae liber X, 5, 5)

In the romantic tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, the term plays a decisive role. Authors have always tried to orient themselves on previous texts and to measure themselves against them. Compare, for example, the development of the educational novel : Goethe tried to expand the educational novel with his own variant, and his Wilhelm Meister thus not only competes with Wieland's story of the Agathon , but also tries to surpass it. - Up to the modern age, surpassing the fore-and-aft is crucial. Only after postmodernism do novels no longer attempt this.

literature

• Barbara Bauer: Aemulation. In: Historical dictionary of rhetoric . Edited by Gert Ueding . Vol. 1. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1992, ISBN 3-484-68101-2 , Sp. 141-187.
• Siegmar Döpp : Aemulation. Literary competition with the Greeks on documents from the first to fifth centuries. Duehrkohp and Radicke, Göttingen 2001 (=  supplements to the Göttingen Forum for Classical Studies , 7), ISBN 3-89744-148-9 .
• Jan-Dirk Müller , Ulrich Pfisterer , Anna Kathrin Bleuler , Fabian Jonietz (eds.): Aemulatio. Cultures of competition in text and images (1450–1620) . De Gruyter, Berlin 2011 (=  pluralization & authority, 27), ISBN 978-3-11-026230-8 .