For over a decade now, a veritable shift in the field of aesthetics has taken place: the aesthetic-philosophical identification of art has been questioned, while the aesthetic experience has been proposed as the central preoccupation of the discipline. Consequently, research (both theoretic and historiographic) has focused more on the meaning and role that sensitivity and affectivity (in their manifold and changing forms) acquire in a general perspective regarding the formation of the senses.
This shift, together with other factors that have had a remarkable impact on the field of aesthetics (e. g., the decreased boost of hermeneutics, as well as the so-called re-evaluation of rhetoric, both "argumentative" and "figurative") has been accompanied by a diminished interest in those issues related to language that had represented one of the complex questions central to 20th-century philosophical debates. This has caused a rethinking of the meaning of language in aesthetics that starts from the very relationship between language and the aesthetic experience: how can the aesthetic experience be told? How can one testify to what has been experienced?
Finally: what is the relationship between experiencing reality and the articulation of meaning? Such themes represented the central focus of the conference "Telling the Aesthetic Experience: New Perspectives between Aesthetic and Rhetoric", which took place in Parma in November 2006. The present volume, edited by Rita Messori (r.messori@email.it), collects the conference proceedings.