Estetica della distanza. Geometrie nel teatro di Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz

The history of the well-articulated reception of J.M.R. Lenz has produced a literary discourse that has dwelt little on the specificity of his intellectual contribution in the context of the late German Enlightenment. The essay highlights how Lenz’s peculiarity, at a time when theatre was searching for canons, also resides in the proposal of a new dramaturgy based on ‘distance’. To illustrate this dramaturgy, the contribution focuses on Lenz’s theoretical writings, and in particular on the Anmerkungen übers Theater, and then analyses the play Der neue Menoza. The ‘aesthetics of distance’ emerges as a productive interpretation key which, even beyond the Genieästhetik, brings out new poetological geometries in Lenz’s theatre. It is also thanks to these geometries that the author stands out as an original interpreter of his time and as a great forerunner of the experiments of twentieth-century theatre.