«In permanenter Not». Sulla punteggiatura in Stefan George e Karl Kraus

The article starts by illustrating the growing importance of punctuation in poetry during the 19th century. Particularly in the German-speaking world, this phenomenon came into conflict with the progressive imposition of rules that abandoned the traditional prosodic functions of punctuation and instead followed syntactic-grammatical criteria, leaving little room for authorial choice. This was the starting point for a confrontation with punctuation at the turn of the century in Germany, which appears particularly intense in authors such as Stefan George and Karl Kraus. The central part of the essay examines the ways in which the two authors engaged with the problems of punctuation in theory and practice. Despite striking differences in their understanding and use of punctuation – in one case a blatant rejection of convention, in the other a rigorous critical reflection on the most widespread uses – their treatments of punctuation reveal a similar tension, aimed at affirming their authorship and, above all, at exploring the gap between the written and the spoken word.