ABSTRACT
There are three basic questions dealing with the paradigm of the modern literary work of art: How can a literary work of art be perceived as modern? How can such a modern literary artwork take advantage of common language? How can an artwork so defined along the 20th-century face the challenges of the present one? I propose to answer these questions with the help of writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Fernando Pessoa, Hugo Ball, Hugo von Hofmannsthal as theoreticians on modernity as well as Wilhelm Dilthey and Walter Benjamin with the purpose of highlighting the relationship between literature and human existence having in sight the main goals literature should attain: creating a language-through-silence focusing on author and a literary speech and reader interaction so that art should stage man’s vital problems of existence problematizing the approved mainstream goals of civilization whilst keeping itself distant from the average language use. F. Nietzsche and G. Agamben theories on the meaning and practice of the contradictory use of such a medium to translate and create «real» life will also help to understand such a literary strategy; Marquard’s and Rancière’s writings will help in turn to comment on the role of a literary artwork which will not give up from being a form-of-fracture to become as real as mankind ’s «story»: likewise both full of facts and arguments.
