Rhetorics of Anxiety and Compassion. Buds of 2021: theatre, cinema, essay, narrative, poetry

Abstract

The article identifies recent trends in artistic texts from 2021 and articulates them using a transversal hermeneutic hypothesis: the centrality of a — prevailing — Rhetoric of anxiety, counterbalanced by a — dialectical — Rhetoric of anxiety and compassion, which places these two pre-linguistic attitudes in discursive tension. Moreover, it sets out the hypothesis in five possible sub-rhetorics: Irrelevance, Lack of power, Existential intensity, Impossibility of knowing, and Affective detachment.