Francesco Giusti | Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (original) (raw)

Books by Francesco Giusti

A free expression of powerful feelings, or an unconscious product of divine possession? Between ... more A free expression of powerful feelings, or an unconscious product of divine possession? Between these traditional opposite extremes, this book searches for possible motivations that might urge an I to voice the object of his or her desire along with the desire itself. By looking at selected examples from the European lyric tradition in which a speaker articulates the birth of poetry in the self, the book aims to answer a question: going beyond issues of inspiration, innate talent and acquired technique, it asks how personal experience becomes a fundamental motivation for speech and a sufficient guarantor of the autonomy and authority of the voice. The ancient discursive practice of lyric turns out to be the performance, before the reader’s eyes, of an affective and cognitive process driven by a desire for comprehension and representation. Such a process takes place within the relationship between a singular subjectivity that experiences the world and an object to which a peculiar attention is paid. Poetry, therefore, is no longer the expression of prior experiences, feelings, or truths, but rather the embodiment of a desire at work, the very making of subjectivity, a way of knowing as letting the self be known.

Libera espressione di potenti sensazioni o prodotto incosciente della possessione divina? Fra questi due estremi tradizionali si cercano le motivazioni che spingono un 'io' a prender voce per dire l’oggetto del proprio desiderio e il desiderio stesso. Attraverso alcuni momenti della tradizione lirica europea, in cui il soggetto ci parla dell’arrivo della poesia in se stesso, il libro vuol dare risposta a una domanda: al di là dell’ispirazione, del talento innato e della tecnica acquisita, in che modo l’esperienza personale viene ad assumere un ruolo fondamentale per motivare la parola e inizia a essere sufficiente per garantire l’autonomia e l’autorità della voce? La millenaria pratica discorsiva della lirica diventa allora la performance, davanti agli occhi del lettore, di un processo affettivo e cognitivo mosso dal desiderio di comprensione e di rappresentazione, all’interno della relazione che si istituisce tra una soggettività singolare che fa esperienza nel mondo e un oggetto a cui si rivolge una particolare 'attenzione'. Poesia, quindi, non più come espressione di esperienze, sensazioni o verità già conseguite, bensì come incarnazione di un desiderio al lavoro, come il farsi stesso di una soggettività, un conoscere come farsi conoscere.

Cosa c’è nella voce di Orfeo? Dov’è Euridice? Esiste un genere o sottogenere della poesia moderna... more Cosa c’è nella voce di Orfeo? Dov’è Euridice? Esiste un genere o sottogenere della poesia moderna in cui il soggetto in lutto tenta di ricostruire un ordine inserendo i suoi frammenti di memoria all’interno di una struttura organizzata: sono i "canzonieri in morte", serie di poesie composte per la persona amata e tragicamente perduta. Il volume indaga come il linguaggio della lirica si confronta con il buco del senso spalancato nell’io dalla morte del tu e con l’assenza di un (s)oggetto del desiderio che, prima di farsi contenuto del discorso, è un essere umano appartenente alla sfera del reale e della vita privata del poeta. Al momento di essere tradotto nella poesia quel corpo manca già ai sensi, si dà già come immagine di sé nella memoria, e l’opera è quindi chiamata a gestire un lutto che la precede. Quale sarà il "fare" del soggetto in questa e con questa deprivazione? Come potrà praticarsi ancora la sua stessa soggettività? Troverà davvero nell’opera una qualche compensazione per la sua perdita? La parola può ancora (ri)costruire l’intimità di un dialogo o si può solo fermare alla pura invocazione disperata del nome? Cosa spinge il soggetto a voltarsi a (ri)guardare quel che lo (ri)guarda? E il lettore, che non ha condiviso tale amore e adesso può essere solo un destinatario esterno della parola che lo dice, come trova posto al suo interno? Orfeo ed Euridice, la mitica coppia di tragici amanti, fanno da guida in un percorso che dai celebri archetipi di Dante e Petrarca si muove verso le diverse voci di sette poeti contemporanei: Eugenio Montale, Milo De Angelis, Ted Hughes, Mark Doty, Douglas Dunn, Gabriela Mistral e Patrizia Valduga, cercando di far emergere un modello di discorso che possa ospitare le tracce di quel che è stato perduto e una possibile relazione poetica ed etica con la singolarità ormai assente.

What is in Orpheus’ voice? Where is Eurydice? There is a genre or subgenre of modern lyric poetry in which the mourning subject attempts to reconstruct order out of his/her scattered memory fragments by arranging them into an organized structure: the “canzonieri in morte”, collections of poems devoted to the poet’s beloved and tragically lost partner. The study investigates how the language of the lyric copes with the hole in meaning opened up in the ‘I’ by the death of the ‘you’ and with the absence of an object of desire that, before becoming discursive content, is a real human being that is part of the poet’s private life. When he/she is translated into poetry, the poet’s senses already miss that body; he/she is already an image in memory. The “work” has thus to deal with a grief that precedes it. What will the subject “make” of and with this bereavement? How can his/her subjectivity still be “practiced”? Could the literary work restore a unity and compensate for the suffered loss? Can words (re)create the intimacy of a dialogue or can they just keep invoking the name? What kind of urge drives the subject to look back and regard (in the double sense of Derrida’s “regarder”) the one who regards him/her? How can the reader, who has not shared that love and is only an external recipient of the utterance, find his/her place within the discourse? Orpheus and Eurydice, the mythic couple of tragic lovers, lead us along a path which starts with Dante’s and Petrarch’s archetypes and reaches the different voices of seven contemporary poets: Eugenio Montale, Milo De Angelis, Ted Hughes, Mark Doty, Douglas Dunn, Gabriela Mistral, and Patrizia Valduga. The inquiry aims to outline a discursive modality which could host the traces of the one who has been lost and a potential poetic and ethical relationship with the now absent singularity.

Edited volumes & Special issues by Francesco Giusti

In contemporary Western societies, lyric poetry is often considered an elitist or solipsistic lit... more In contemporary Western societies, lyric poetry is often considered an elitist or solipsistic literary genre. Yet a closer look at its history reveals that lyric has always been intertwined with the politics of community formation, from the imagining of national and transnational discursive communities, to the use of poetry in episodes of collective action, protest, and social resistance. Poetic forms have circulated between languages and traditions from around the world and across time. But how does lyric poetry address or even create communities — and of what kinds? This volume takes a global perspective to investigate poetic communities in dialogue with recent developments in lyric theory and concepts of community. In doing so, it explores both the political potentialities and the perils of lyric poetry.

The volume includes essays by Jonathan Culler, Sabine I. Gölz, Francesco Giusti, Peter D. McDonald, Philip Ross Bullock, Laura Scuriatti, Derek Attridge, Wendy Lotterman, Toby Altman, Hal Coase, and a conversation between the editors and Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo.

The volume is available in both open access and print version at https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-30

Status Quaestionis , 2024

This monographic section of "Status Quaestionis" aims to explore today's uses of theory in the co... more This monographic section of "Status Quaestionis" aims to explore today's uses of theory in the context of literary studies. In particular, this collection of essays stems from the idea of verifying which theories from the twentieth-century period are still present in the dominant perspectives of current literary research, and to what extent. The sixteen contributions hosted in this issue range from Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Translation and Transnational Studies to contemporary Narratology and Lyric Theory. In addition to the articles, the reader will also find inside five interviews, with which the editors have decided to propose in-depth studies on specific themes - Mediterranean Studies, Sociology of Literature, Translation Theory, Manipulation Theory, Lyric Theory - through a dialogue with scholars working abroad and, therefore, able to broaden the collective reflection.

open access: https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/status_quaestionis/issue/view/1676

Poetry has always maintained a particular relationship with mourning and its rituals, but what is... more Poetry has always maintained a particular relationship with mourning and its rituals, but what is it that lyric discourse has to offer in coping with death, grief, and bereavement? On the other hand, how does mourning become a central creative force in lyric poetry? How does this affect the nature of its discourse and the desires it performs? Focusing on poems by Giacomo Leopardi, Guido Gozzano, Giorgio Caproni, Giorgio Bassani, Amelia Rosselli, Antonella Anedda, and Vivian Lamarque, the essays collected in this volume explore how poetry dwells on the boundaries between high lyric and vernacular forms, the personal and the political, the local and the national, the individual and the collective, one’s own story and public history, the masculine and the feminine, individual expression and shared language. The Italian poetic tradition finds two crucial milestones in two collections of poems devoted to the lost beloved, Dante’s Vita Nova and Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and its modern and contemporary ramifications have much to offer for reflection on the ethics and poetics of mourning.

CONTENTS:

Introduction: Why Mourning in Poetry?
ADELE BARDAZZI, FRANCESCO GIUSTI, EMANUELA TANDELLO

1. The Loss of Poetry: Leopardi’s ‘Coro di morti’
EMANUELA TANDELLO

2. Carlotta’s Ghost
FABIO CAMILLETTI

3. Mourning Over Her Image: The Re-enactment of Lyric Gestures in Giorgio Caproni’s ‘Versi livornesi’
FRANCESCO GIUSTI

4. Giorgio Bassani, The Poet-Ghost, and the Memorial Duty of the Survivor
MARTINA PIPERNO

5. The Space of Mourning: Elettra’s mise en abyme
MARZIA D’AMICO

6. Mourning in Translation: The Sardinian Poetry of Antonella Anedda
ADELE BARDAZZI

7. Madre d’inverno by Vivian Lamarque
VILMA DE GASPERIN

More info can be found at this link:
http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/ip-54

The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This... more The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.

Essays by:
Derek Attridge on the work of translation
Lorna Burns on world literature and postcolonialism
Francesco Giusti on gestural community
Benjamin Lewis Robinson on the world without literature
Rashmi Varma on extractivism and indigeneity
Dirk Wiemann on a literary ethics of commitment
Jarad Zimbler on world literary criticism
With an afterword by Emily Apter on reparative translation

The volume is available in both open access and print version
at https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-19

Quale rapporto si è instaurato, fin dagli anni Cinquanta del Novecento, fra un genere letterario ... more Quale rapporto si è instaurato, fin dagli anni Cinquanta del Novecento, fra un genere letterario millenario e i mezzi di comunicazione di cui ci siamo circondati? Possono i nuovi media mettere davvero a repentaglio la nostra idea di poesia, magari anche solo separando il suo destino da quello del libro cartaceo? Attraverso i quattordici saggi che lo compongono, il presente volume prende in considerazione le potenzialità e gli esiti dell’incontro della poesia con internet e il mondo digitale, ma anche – facendo un passo indietro – con il cinema e la televisione. Si delinea così un quadro articolato, in cui la scrittura poetica affronta ambiti tematici prima inesplorati e nuovi universi di riferimento. I componimenti si aprono a supporti materiali diversi e a nuove soluzioni tecniche, oppure – viceversa – testimoniano una strenua resistenza del codice. I testi trovano ulteriori modalità di produzione, diffusione e ricezione. Con uno sguardo rivolto a esperienze letterarie italiane e internazionali, e collegando le tracce di un percorso diacronico, "Poesia e nuovi media" riflette su alcune questioni centrali per il discorso poetico e non solo, come la relazione fra autore e testo, le forme della soggettività e la costruzione dell’io lirico, i fondamenti su cui si basa il patto con il lettore.

Il volume raccoglie Interventi di Damiano Frasca, Christine Ott, Caroline Lüderssen, Paolo Zublena, Gian Luca Picconi, Paolo Giovannetti, Alessandro Scarsella, Lena Schönwälder, Emanuele La Rosa, Elisa Unkroth, Bettina Thiers, Katarina Rempe, Katiuscia Darici e Martina Daraio. Il saggio introduttivo è di Francesco Giusti.

Book Chapters by Francesco Giusti

Rethinking Lyric Communities, 2024

Memorability, shareability, and repeatability are interrelated characteristics often ascribed to ... more Memorability, shareability, and repeatability are interrelated characteristics often ascribed to lyric poetry in current theory, sometimes with an emphasis on the transnational potential of its circulation. This article approaches this question of shareability not in terms of diction or form, as is usually the case, but of "gesture". Drawing on Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, gesture is defined as both historically situated and transferable to different contexts, but whether or not to re-enact a particular gesture in one’s own context is a political decision. After examining how a sonnet by Andrea Zanzotto addresses the lyric gesture of exhortation offered by a Petrarch sonnet, the article goes on to explore the potentiality opened up for the formation of "gestural communities" by the suspension of action in the lyric.

This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bri... more This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.

From opening books to read them, through the continuous effort at opening one's heart to God, to ... more From opening books to read them, through the continuous effort at opening one's heart to God, to the eventual disclosure of God's mysteries to human beings, Augustine seems to trace an implicit conceptualization of openness in his 'Confessions'. The words of Matthew 7. 7-8 underlie Augustine's engagement with openness up to the very last sentence of the book, which ends with a sequence of verbs in the passive voice that culminates with the desired manifestation of the divine. The entire endeavour of opening oneself up undertaken in the 'Confessions' aims at this final passive openness, which is (always) yet to come as much as human opera are (always) yet to come to completion.

What if one thinks not in terms of shared meanings or contents, but rather in terms of iterable "... more What if one thinks not in terms of shared meanings or contents, but rather in terms of iterable "gestures" available for re-enactment in different times and places in order to conceive of a cross-cultural world of literature? This essay sets out to explore, within the discursive mode of the lyric, whether the notion of gesture could be more helpful than meaning-based translation to account for the transferability of literary texts and for envisioning a form of community based on the shareability of certain gestures. To do so, it will look at how the "act-event" of reading described by Derek Attridge is processed in two cases in which poems are transferred from an earlier authoritative tradition into a new one.

Full book available here: http://hdl.handle.net/11572/284451

What is the time of the lyric? For Augustine, the recitation of a hymn illustrates the workings o... more What is the time of the lyric? For Augustine, the recitation of a hymn illustrates the workings of time in the human mind; for Giorgio Agamben, the poem itself exemplifies the structure of what he defines as ‘messianic time’. By focusing on Dante’s sonnet ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’ and looking at the double act of the recitation of the poem and the re-citation of prior gestures, the temporality of both the single poem and lyric discourse will come into focus.

Full text available here: https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-15/giusti_recitation.html

Is a 'history' of the lyric even conceivable? What would a 'lyric' temporality look like? With a ... more Is a 'history' of the lyric even conceivable? What would a 'lyric' temporality look like? With a focus on Rainer Maria Rilke’s decision not to translate, but rather to rewrite Dante’s 'Vita nova' (1293–1295) in the first of his 'Duineser Elegien' (1912), the essay deploys 'reversion' (as turning back, return, coming around again), alongside 're-citation', as a keyword that can unlock the transhistorical operations of the lyric as the re-enactment of selected gestures under different circumstances.
Full text available here: https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-15/giusti_reversion.html

"Costruzioni e decostruzioni dell’io lirico nella poesia italiana da Soffici a Sanguineti", a cura di D. Frasca, C. Lüderssen, C. Ott

The Good Place. Comparative Perspectives on Utopia, Mussgnug, Florian / Reza, Matthew (eds), 2014

Utopian literature provides a compelling vision of epistemological and moral clarity: a dream of ... more Utopian literature provides a compelling vision of epistemological and moral clarity: a dream of harmony and justice. But in an age of surveillance, utopia is also the nightmare of a perfectly controlled, sealed and monitored world that leaves no room for ambivalence or discretion. In The Good Place, leading scholars of comparative literature explore this tension and examine the richness and diversity of utopian writing, from the genre's earliest manifestations to the present. Utopia is seen as a tenacious force of the human imagination: a desire for renewal that manifests itself in the tension between social reality and the virtual worlds of unlived possibility. Notable for its engagement with a wide range of texts from different periods and national traditions, this book invites the reader to rethink 'the good place' from the specific perspective of literary studies and suggests that utopia, in the realm of fiction, is more than just a philosophical abstraction. Mediated by the experience of authors, characters and readers, utopian literature offers a transient but genuine experience of perfection, beyond the horizon of everyday lived experience.

Papers by Francesco Giusti

The Italianist, 2024

Leopardi’s philosophical questions are often approached in straightforwardly ontological terms, t... more Leopardi’s philosophical questions are often approached in straightforwardly ontological terms, thus detracting from the distinctiveness of his theoretical struggle. This article argues instead that Leopardi’s adherence to empirical reasoning and eighteenth-century French epistemology generates a productive tension in their development at an ontological level. Although certain concepts (illusion, pain, matter) show an ontological aspect early on, Leopardi continues to approach them from an epistemological perspective throughout his life. To explore this tension, the article examines Leopardi’s engagement with the notion of error: from 'errore' as distance, an epistemological
mistake to be rectified by reason, to 'errare' as difference, the ontological condition to which all living beings are destined. Paying attention to how Leopardi thinks, the article also aims to shed light on the function ascribed to poetry in ‘La ginestra’, in which he resorts to an epistemological corrective in order to move from subjective perception to ontological evidence.

Open Access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02614340.2024.2342633

Italica, 2022

While the transmedia reception of Dante’s "Commedia" in a globalizing world is immediately visibl... more While the transmedia reception of Dante’s "Commedia" in a globalizing world is immediately visible, his lyric poetry might at first seem unsuited to the digital age. This article explores Lamberto Pignotti’s 2016 re-creation of Dante’s "Vita Nova" in his "New Vita Nova," focusing on how, by engaging with Dante’s "libello" in both verbal and visual terms, the Florentine artist and poet, one of the fathers of visual poetry, emphasizes three aspects which are latent in the medieval text: its nature as a language game, the fusion of traditionally separate aesthetic domains, and the “virtuality” of lyric gestures. Digital technology, in fact, seems to allow for the full realization of the “virtualissimo amore” that Pignotti sees enacted in the "libello," and Pignotti’s verbo-visual re-creation prompts reflection on how lyric gestures can move through different media.

The volume is available in both open access and print version at https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-30

Status Quaestionis , 2024

open access: https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/status_quaestionis/issue/view/1676

CONTENTS:

Introduction: Why Mourning in Poetry?
ADELE BARDAZZI, FRANCESCO GIUSTI, EMANUELA TANDELLO

1. The Loss of Poetry: Leopardi’s ‘Coro di morti’
EMANUELA TANDELLO

2. Carlotta’s Ghost
FABIO CAMILLETTI

3. Mourning Over Her Image: The Re-enactment of Lyric Gestures in Giorgio Caproni’s ‘Versi livornesi’
FRANCESCO GIUSTI

4. Giorgio Bassani, The Poet-Ghost, and the Memorial Duty of the Survivor
MARTINA PIPERNO

5. The Space of Mourning: Elettra’s mise en abyme
MARZIA D’AMICO

6. Mourning in Translation: The Sardinian Poetry of Antonella Anedda
ADELE BARDAZZI

7. Madre d’inverno by Vivian Lamarque
VILMA DE GASPERIN

More info can be found at this link:
http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/ip-54

The volume is available in both open access and print version
at https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-19

Rethinking Lyric Communities, 2024

Full book available here: http://hdl.handle.net/11572/284451

Full text available here: https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-15/giusti_recitation.html

"Costruzioni e decostruzioni dell’io lirico nella poesia italiana da Soffici a Sanguineti", a cura di D. Frasca, C. Lüderssen, C. Ott

The Good Place. Comparative Perspectives on Utopia, Mussgnug, Florian / Reza, Matthew (eds), 2014

The Italianist, 2024

Open Access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02614340.2024.2342633

Italica, 2022

Rivista di letteratura italiana, 2021

Negli anni ’60 del Novecento si apre anche in Italia un periodo di contestazione della poesia lir... more Negli anni ’60 del Novecento si apre anche in Italia un periodo di contestazione della poesia lirica e talvolta la polemica ha visto coinvolta proprio l’eredità dantesca. Il contributo esplora dapprima la critica mossa da Bertolt Brecht al "gesto" lirico dantesco della lode dell’amata nel suo sonetto del 1934 “Über die Gedichte des Dante auf die Beatrice”, per poi indagare, alla luce del modello critico offerto da Brecht, due poesie italiane che ripetono quel gesto canonico in forme aggiornate: lo xenion I, 5 di Eugenio Montale, composto nel 1964, e il sesto testo della serie "L’ultima passeggiata. Omaggio a Pascoli" (1982) di Edoardo Sanguineti. L’indagine conduce infine ad alcune osservazioni su come “dantismi” diversi (Auerbach e Contini) risuonano con approcci diversi alla cosiddetta "anti-lirica".

Exemplaria, 2021

Reading Augustine's "Confessions" after Roland Barthes's "La Chambre claire" ("Camera Lucida") an... more Reading Augustine's "Confessions" after Roland Barthes's "La Chambre claire" ("Camera Lucida") and "Journal de deuil" ("Mourning Diary") helps to delineate an often-overlooked problem in the "Confessions": the reality of the past outside of one's own personal memory. From a theological perspective, the past is grounded in God's eternity. Yet, when it comes to the narration of his own past, Augustine seems to need evidence of its reality. His mother Monica is the hinge that connects the unfolding of his story and the presentness of all time in God. One's own mother, not the figure of the Mother, appears to be the basis of confession and its temporality: she allows the past and the future to intersect the present of Augustine's telling of his story or Barthes's viewing of the photograph. Barthes's mother, in fact, reveals herself as the 'punctum' that opens up what would otherwise be a moment of the past frozen in its image and makes that past operative in the present of the son observer. To explore Barthes's affinities with Augustine, the article also looks at Jacques Derrida's "Circonfession" ("Circumfession") and Jean-François Lyotard's "La Confession d'Augustin" ("The Confession of Augustine"), which show revealing differences from both Augustine and Barthes and, along with Julia Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" and "Le vréel" ("The True-Real"), help to reassess the "mad" proposition of a mysticism of photographic technology offered in "La Chambre claire".

California Italian Studies, 2018

Un approccio trans-storico Se si allarga lo sguardo alla tradizione lirica europea dalla Grecia a... more Un approccio trans-storico Se si allarga lo sguardo alla tradizione lirica europea dalla Grecia arcaica alla contemporaneità e la si osserva da una certa distanza, un fenomeno diventa immediatamente evidente: la poesia tende a ripetere una serie piuttosto limitata di gesti selezionati. Accanto alla ricorrenza di specifiche strutture formali e retoriche, come l'organizzazione fonico-ritmica, l'apostrofe, il triangulated address e la temporalità al presente, per nominare solo quelle su cui si concentra Jonathan Culler nel suo recente Theory of the Lyric, 1 nei testi si può notare una tendenza a presentare la loro enunciazione come una performance di "funzioni" identificabili. Tra queste funzioni, una delle più diffuse nel corso dei secoli-da Saffo ai nostri giorni-è senz'altro la celebrazione della persona amata, dell'individuo eccellente o dell'oggetto desiderato. Un fenomeno altrettanto rilevante, e fondamentale per identificare retrospettivamente un certo tipo di testi come lirici, è la consapevolezza che essi mostrano del regime di ripetizione in cui inscrivono il proprio rinnovato gesto e all'interno del quale possono eventualmente affermare la loro differenza. Un caso storicamente emblematico è il petrarchismo europeo: soltanto nella cosciente ripetizione del gesto e del codice petrarchesco (anche quando non più necessariamente incarnato da Petrarca stesso) nuove poesie possono esibire la loro differenza. Si può però tornare indietro fino alle "origini" della poesia italiana, al celebre canzoniere Vaticano 3793. A proposito della canzone che apre il manoscritto, "Madonna, dir vo voglio" di Giacomo da Lentini-una traduzione o forse una riscrittura di "A vos, midontç" del trovatore Folchetto da Marsiglia-Claudio Giunta osserva giustamente: Tra i siciliani, il legame tra io biografico e io poetico, tra realtà dei sentimenti ed espressione lirica, è tanto debole che il poeta può permettersi di far propri i versi-cioè la vita e le emozioni-di un altro autore senza chiarire che si tratta, appunto, di una citazione. Le biografie, constatiamo, sono intercambiabili. 2 Da un punto di vista trans-storico, 3 l'annosa e spinosa questione dell'identità o non identità tra io lirico (il soggetto dell'enunciazione, chi parla il testo) e io biografico (il poeta) può però essere posta in termini differenti. Più pertinente all'approccio qui seguito, infatti, sarebbe chiedersi se la 1

Revue des études dantesques, 2018

The sonnet “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare” in "Vita Nova" is studied following a performative... more The sonnet “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare” in "Vita Nova" is studied following a performative model rather than a hermeneutic one: lyrical performance is understood as an event repeated at each reading of the poem, as deﬁned by Jonathan Culler, which makes it possible to generate virtue and increase it in the reader. The author also draws on the sonnet “A ciascun’alma presa,” on the personiﬁcation of Love and poetic ethics as deﬁned by Dante in "De vulgari eloquentia".

Between, 2015

L’articolo si concentra sulla celebre poesia La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto (1836) di Giac... more L’articolo si concentra sulla celebre poesia La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto (1836) di Giacomo Leopardi e su quella tradizione critica che ha esplorato la proposta 'politica' contenuta nel testo, a partire dai saggi Leopardi progressivo di Cesare Luporini e La nuova poetica leopardiana di Walter Binni, pubblicati entrambi del 1947. Tale tendenza negli studi – nata in un preciso contesto storico e culturale – ha lavorato a mettere in luce il ‘contenuto’ ideologico del testo. Tuttavia, dopo una rapida ricognizione delle interpretazioni di Luporini e Binni, l’analisi entra invece nella ‘forma’ del testo e, piu specificamente, della pratica del discorso lirico per cogliere le dinamiche etiche piu generali sottese proprio all’uso lirico del linguaggio nella Ginestra : la relazione che si istituisce tra l’io e il fiore del deserto, le possibili aperture dialogiche della voce lirica, i rapporti con il contesto di produzione del testo, la postura etica proposta dall’io e la p...

California Italian Studies 8(1), 2018

Looking at lyric poetry from the perspective of temporality, this paper intends to address a cruc... more Looking at lyric poetry from the perspective of temporality, this paper intends to address a crucial and often overlooked issue for a theoretical approach to the lyric: how the crystallized moment of the single poem encapsulates iteration. One side of this issue is at the centre of Jonathan Culler’s "Theory of the Lyric" (2015): the lyric poem as a script to be actualized as event in the "now" of each act of reading. I want to focus instead on the other side of the issue, namely on the strategies by which the poem itself singularizes what it presents as a recurrent event. This ancient phenomenon can be traced back, for instance, to Sappho’s fragment 31 and its famous translation, Catullus’ carmen 51, but the point of departure here will be a much clearer case: Dante’s sonnet "Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare". Indeed, it is Dante himself who makes these dynamics clear in the narrative prose that precedes the poem and provides its scene of enunciation. Moving to the twentieth century, I will discuss first an evident case of retrieval of Dante’s and Cavalcanti’s poetics by focusing on one of the poems that Giorgio Caproni collects in the section "Versi livornesi" of his 1959 book "Il seme del piangere". Then I will expand the analysis to other poems by poets as different as Montale and Sanguineti. The discussion will address also issues of open referentiality, the re-enactment of lyric gestures, and the trans-historical dimension of the lyric in the context of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of "poetica dell’inoperosità" as a potential critique of teleology.

Riprendendo le riflessioni sulle differenti modalità con cui poesie di epoche diverse marcano la ... more Riprendendo le riflessioni sulle differenti modalità con cui poesie di epoche diverse marcano la loro conclusione indagate da Barbara Herrnstein Smith in "Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End" (1968), sulla circolarità che il testo lirico innesca nell’atto di lettura proposta da Timothy Bahti in "Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry" (1996) e sul carattere queer che l’incompiutezza può assumere rivendicato in "Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry" (2002) di John Emil Vincent, l’articolo vuole indagare, attraverso Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, Louise Glück e John Ashbery, in che modo la poesia contemporanea si faccia carico dell’incompiutezza. L’ipotesi è che, se per secoli questa incompiutezza è stata anche un grande tema della poesia – si pensi soltanto all’incongruenza tra la chiusura formale del testo della poesia medievale e rinascimentale e la ribadita impossibilità di una perfetta rappresentazione dell’oggetto d’amore – dal Modernismo in poi la lirica non rinunci a intraprendere il suo percorso, ma assuma consapevolmente su di sé l’errore facendone il principio strutturante del proprio discorso. Il cerchio che non chiude diventa allora una forma specifica della temporalità per la lirica (e per il lettore) che non insegue il successo del percorso lineare, ma accoglie l’errore insito nel suo sforzo per accettare di praticare un’approssimazione infinita e per maturare coscienza della propria pratica. La non compiutezza della poesia, infine, potrebbe essere proprio quel che assicura la ripetibilità del testo. Partendo dal valore centrale che l’iteratività formale della lirica assume nel recente "Theory of the Lyric" (2015) di Jonathan Culler, nell’ultima parte l’articolo costruisce un’ipotesi sulle ragioni per cui proprio il fatto che la poesia, come artefatto, debba concludersi senza necessariamente compiersi interamente consente al testo lirico di presentarsi come performance ripetibile attraverso i secoli e rinnovabile a ogni atto di lettura.

Psychoanalytic Nachträglichkeit appears to be the temporality that structures the 'canzonieri in ... more Psychoanalytic Nachträglichkeit appears to be the temporality that structures the 'canzonieri in morte,' i.e. collections of poems devoted to the poet’s dead beloved. In fact, a similar process of (self)interpretation that is both retrospective and progressive at the same time can be found much earlier in European poetry. The article starts from certain theoretical reflections and an overview of the two fundamental models provided by Dante’s 'Vita Nova' and Petrarch’s 'Canzoniere' in order to focus on some poems from two contemporary Italian 'canzonieri in morte': Eugenio Montale’s 'Xenia' (in 'Satura,' 1971) e Milo De Angelis’ 'Tema dell’addio' (2005). The aim is to show how the complex temporality that Freud named Nachträglichkeit can perform different essential functions: to organize the lyric macro-text; to construct a new meaning for poems previously composed; to reconsider the poet’s own personal and poetic past; and to contribute to the creation of a new author. Certain features delineated in the 'canzonieri' will finally lead to reflect upon the ‘self-anthology’ as a form, that is to say, an anthology of the poet’s work selected and organized by the poet him/herself.

La Nachträglichkeit descritta dalla psicoanalisi moderna sembra essere la temporalità con cui si strutturano i "canzonieri in morte", le raccolte poetiche dedicate alla persona amata e perduta dal poeta. Un simile processo di (auto)interpretazione al contempo retrospettivo e progressivo, infatti, si ritrova molto prima nella poesia lirica europea. L’articolo muove da alcune riflessioni teoriche e da un breve riferimento ai due grandi modelli offerti dalla "Vita nova" di Dante e dal "Canzoniere" di Petrarca, per poi soffermarsi su alcuni esempi tratti da due "canzonieri in morte" italiani contemporanei: gli "Xenia" (in "Satura", 1971) di Eugenio Montale e "Tema dell’addio" (2005) di Milo De Angelis. Si vuole mostrare come la complessa temporalità che Freud chiama Nachträglichkeit possa assolvere diverse funzioni: organizzare il macrotesto lirico; produrre un nuovo significato per poesie composte in precedenza; portare avanti una revisione del passato biografico e poetico; contribuire a modellare una figura di autore. Alcune delle questioni delineate nei canzonieri permetteranno infine di riflettere sulla forma dell’auto-antologia, l’antologia poetica selezionata e organizzata dall’autore stesso.

La poesia di Gozzano non è pienamente ascrivibile al Modernismo né completamente al di qua di ess... more La poesia di Gozzano non è pienamente ascrivibile al Modernismo né completamente al di qua di esso. Resta intenzionalmente in quello stato intermedio che più tardi il poeta ritroverà nello stadio della crisalide descritto nelle "Farfalle". Da questa posizione Gozzano sviluppa una consapevolezza critica dell’ironia racchiusa nella storia che impedisce ogni fiducia nell’autenticità umana e conduce l’io lirico a considerarsi un personaggio creato dalle circostanze socio-culturali in cui si opera.

★

Gozzano’s poetry is neither fully ascribable to Modernism nor completely behind it. it intentionally lingers in an intermediate state that will later be reflected by the chrysalis stage described in "Le Farfalle". From this position, Gozzano develops a critical awareness of the irony embedded in history that impedes any candid trust in human authenticity, and leads the speaker to consider himself as a character created by the socio-cultural circumstances in which he has to exist.

The article focuses on Leopardi’s renowned poem "La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto" (1836) and ... more The article focuses on Leopardi’s renowned poem "La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto" (1836) and on the scholars who have firstly explored the ‘political’ ideas proposed by this text: C. Luporini in his "Leopardi progressivo" and W. Binni in "La nuova poetica leopardiana", both published in 1947. This particular field of the Leopardi scholarship – which originated in the postwar years – tries to bring the ideological ‘content’ of the text to the fore. After a quick look at Luporini’s and Binni’s readings, the inquiry focuses instead on the ‘form’ of the text, and more specifically on the practice of lyric discourse, in order to outline the general ethical dynamics which underlie the lyric use of language in "La ginestra": the relationship between the 'I' and the flower of the desert, the potential dialogism of the lyric voice, the context of production of the text, the posture assumed by the 'I' and the historical position of the critics, the truth telling as an ethical act of individual and collective resistance to crisis. By looking at these dynamics, it is possible to reconsider the political ‘ideal’ proposed by the text – in particular the "social catena" ("social chain") mentioned at line 149 – in the light of its discursive practices. The article, finally, emphasizes the similarities between this interpretative possibility and the philosophical interpretation proposed by Antonio Negri in his essay "Lenta ginestra. Saggio sull’ontologia di Giacomo Leopardi" (1987) in a cultural context very different from Binni and Luporini’s postwar Italy.

According to the definition promoted by Western philosophical tradition, poetry would not be a sp... more According to the definition promoted by Western philosophical tradition, poetry would not be a speaking of things in the logical sense of providing a shareable definition nor a speaking to things as addressees of a message. It would rather be an uttering that the thing purely is, without saying what it is or how it is. It would be a revealing and manifestative language, and not an onto-logical one. Through a careful reading of two exemplary poems: Shelley’s "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and the seventh of Rilke’s "Duino Elegies", the article wants to understand if such a 'revealing language' is a feasible possibility for the lyric – that is to say, a specific 'form' to be adopted –, or rather it is one of the opposing models employed by the discourse of the logic to identify its practice distinguishing itself from the alternatives and, in turn, it is the ideal model adopted by the lyric discourse to establish itself as autonomous from the defining discourse of Western logic. The main aim is to distinguish, in the cases taken into consideration, what poetry 'says' it wants to be and what it 'makes' instead in its practice. It seems that subjectivation happens in the attempt/effort to construct a sense, which is a never ending and never definitive operation. But, in the lyric, what gives a 'direction' to such an operation seems to be a desire for desubjectivation, because achieving the fullness of presence and sense the Western subject, whose subjectivity is defined as always looking for a sense, must disappear. The article wants to catch the irreducible difference between lyric 'saying' and lyric 'making' itself to understand how the two levels of its rhetorical construction interact in the text.

"Mimesis", as the very basis of a literary work, is a cognitive act which involves an experiencin... more "Mimesis", as the very basis of a literary work, is a cognitive act which involves an experiencing human subject and a real or mental object which is the selected object of a "mimetic desire". But, "mimesis" is not always the same. It can change along centuries from Alcman's imitation of partridges' song as the origin of his poetry to the cacophonic "Jug Jug" of Eliot's painted nightingale. It can assume new functions and new modes. It can reveal different relations between the subject (the lyric speaker, in this case) and the desired object. Beginning with Plato, Aristotle and Alcman and arriving to Eliot's "The waste land", the article does not want to give a comprehensive definition of "mimesis", but it intends to see how and, perhaps, why it works in a few lyric poems selected in the European tradition. A preferred object of mimesis has been chosen, it is the nightingale, because it is historically a favourite symbol of the lyric poet, and the genre chosen as field of investigation is specifically lyric poetry.

Writing delicate, quiet and sweet verses: is it really all that a minor woman poet of the 16th c... more Writing delicate, quiet and sweet verses: is it really all that a minor woman poet of the 16th century can do? The article investigates Francesca Turina Bufalini’s collection of sonnets devoted to her dead husband, within the composite frame of her book of "Rime spirituali sopra i Misterii del Santissimo Rosario" in which it was published in 1595, in order to show how the poetess consciously re-uses the Petrarchan model – deeply mediated by Vittoria Colonna’s poetry – to enter the field of contemporary local politics. The sonnets, which reveal an author with a broad awareness of contemporary poetry, are meant to support the widow-in-danger to negotiate a new social position for her and her family. The use of quotations from, or allusions to, Dante’s "Divina Commedia" and Torquato Tasso’s female heroines are clearly connected to the construction of the figure of a woman who is morally lost after her husband’s death; but, beyond the affective and moral distress, the complex world of local politics appears and the traditional poetical figure reveals itself to be also a rhetorical device skilfully selected to act in the real context, to ask Pope Clemente VIII – to whom the book is explicitly addressed – for help.

There is a particular space-time combination in which poetry is meant to find its perfect place, ... more There is a particular space-time combination in which poetry is meant to find its perfect place, its perfect happening: it’s the meridian moment, the midday spent in a locus amoenus singing and playing along with fellow-poets. It seems to be what Bachtin defines as a cronotope. Anyway, in lyric poetry this time-space reveals itself to be more and more a foundational ideal. In the bucolic world a man has to renounce personal experience, because it is a place full of (re-told) stories but without Story. Lyric poetry, instead, needs existential experience. Even bucolic love is not suffered by the subject as much as elegiac love, it does not possess the same degree of reality. The bucolic midday could be desired and invoked as a utopia of eternal harmony, but it cannot be real in a lyric text. Even when the (young) subject finds himself in the middle of such locus amoenus – as Freud shows in his story – he has to reject the full situational enjoyment and think that behind all that vital splendour there is always the constant menace of time and death. The subject defines himself in the desiring position and he is too attracted and tied to the object to abandon it and turn his mind toward abstraction as a true philosopher would (platonically) do. Finally, the investigation of the topos will lead to a reconsideration of Lacan’s idea of artistic creativity as a sublimation.

Between, Vol. 3, N. 5 (2013)

Sublimation is an idea often used to give a psychoanalytic interpretation of artistic creativity.... more Sublimation is an idea often used to give a psychoanalytic interpretation of artistic creativity. Focusing on the lyric speaker within the poem and considering the text as a mise-en-scène of poetic creation, the paper intends to investigate why sublimation could not be the right key to understanding the phenomenon. The subject’s dynamics, in modern poetry, show themselves as a continuous failure in the repeated attempt to possess the object. The speaker’s affective and cognitive desire is produced and constantly renewed by the impossibility of possessing the object (above all in its representation). But it is only in such a gap that the subject can exists. In order to feel desire, there should be an illusion of possession and representation. Subject and object create each other in lyric poem, and the former comes to coincide with the desire for the latter, it does not exist outside that desire.

Since lyric poetry shows itself as the unfolding of a subject that voices itself and is always involved in an object relation, it can be a privileged field of investigation for this kind of phenomena. Two poets will be taken into consideration: Thibaut de Champagne, a late trouvère who summons up the Provençal tradition, and Charles Baudelaire, one of the modern poets that have most deeply investigated the reality's lack of sense.

Nude Literary Review, Dec 30, 2012

Strumenti Critici 1/2013, Jan 2013

Two main topoi show the ascensional quality of lyric poetry, its founding on an (ideal) movement ... more Two main topoi show the ascensional quality of lyric poetry, its founding on an (ideal) movement from earth to heaven, actually a movement more invoked and frustrated than realized: Icarus with his wax-wings and the Swan. Icarus is a myth of the human desire to imitate nature, the attempt to create, by techne, something similar to the real object. Men are not gods and they have not the power of creation ex nihilo. But, in not being identical to divine creation, man’s creation defines itself as human. The Swan is the embodiment of the modern lyric speaker: a bird that does not manage to leave the ground behind. The human desire of elevation towards heaven, as a utopia of perfect sense, and its being unavoidably tied to earth. Between these two figures the lyrical subject defines itself.

Nude Literary Review, Dec 30, 2012

This symposium builds upon the success of the three-day investigation into ‘gesture’ held in Oxfo... more This symposium builds upon the success of the three-day investigation into ‘gesture’ held in Oxford in January 2024. Arising from this investigation was the notion that gestures can be bound within space and time; that they can enact – even preserve – meaning across the structures of images, texts, and performances. Continuing the investigative nature of the overarching ‘gesture’ project, this symposium aims to look more closely at the interrelations between the gestural and the textural, with a particular focus on the written word. The event will be accompanied by a small exhibition entitled 'A ribbon unfurling' by the artist Lara Smithson, and will be followed by a drinks reception. We are delighted to welcome the following speakers:

Professor Sos Eltis (University of Oxford)
Dr Natalie Ferris (University of Bristol)
Dr Francesco Giusti (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Dr Ewan Jones (University of Cambridge)
Dr Andrew Sackin-Poll (University of Cambridge)
Lara Smithson (artist)
Lily Stone (University of Cambridge)

Convened by Dr Rachel Coombes (University of Cambridge) and Dr Jennifer Johnson (University of Oxford).

For information and registration: https://www.gestureconference.com/

This interdisciplinary symposium interrogates the presuppositions of open/closed distinctions in ... more This interdisciplinary symposium interrogates the presuppositions of open/closed distinctions in Medieval culture with a view to exploring the semantic field of openness through such related notions as inclusivity, vulnerability, unfinishedness, permeability, excess, profanity. These conceptualizations of openness in the period have had profound influence in a wide array of disciplines such as literature, material culture, hermeneutics, religion, linguistics, history, and history of art. What does it mean to speak of an open text, an open body, an open mind, an open cosmos in the period? What kind of creative tension was there between the privileged spaces of the monastic cloister, the walled city, the moated castle, and their environments? What role did images of fluidity play in conceptualizing non-binary frames of reference? How did high medieval literature negotiate the exclusive experiences of the court, mystical excess, and sexuality with rhetorical strategies of inclusion toward a broader audience? How did manuscript culture and scholastic hermeneutics contribute to opening up texts to interpretation? How did texts themselves welcome uncertainty, open-endedness, and unfinishedness in their materiality and form? Interdisciplinary conversations will aim to open up channels of communication between the Middle Ages and present discourse. Can such present ideas as open source, open access, open education, open society, and open relationship be brought into productive dialogue with conceptualizations and practices of Medieval Studies? Can openness be constituted as critical method?

What is the relation between literary theory and world literature? Literary studies today tries t... more What is the relation between literary theory and world literature? Literary studies today tries to reckon with and transcend the parochialism and Eurocentrism of its tradition by adopting transnational, transhistorical, transcultural, translocal perspectives and by exploring the potential of the term 'world literature'. This large-scale shift of the discipline has been accompanied by a 'global turn' within literary theory, resulting in a renewed interrogation of the relation of literature to the world at large and of the ethics and politics of literature in a globalizing world. These developments -the turn to world literature and the global turn in literary theory -are understood sometimes as antagonistic, sometimes as complimentary to one another. While world literature is often presented as an antidote to theory, it is also clearly constituted by a very specific theorizing of literature and as such invites further theoretical challenges and reflections. The work of Derek Attridge demonstrates the critical and theoretical potential of the encounter between world literature and literary theory. In The Singularity of Literature (2004), Attridge insists that the book is complemented by his work in literary criticism on to the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, published the same year, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. It is as if the theory of literature -of literature in general -emerges out of a particular literary encounter, in this instance with a postcolonial writer pre-occupied with geopolitical, historical, and ethical limits -not least the limits of literature itself. And it is no coincidence that, while Attridge is critical of an oversimplified mapping of politics onto literature, his theory of literature involves politically charged terms such as singularity, otherness, exclusion, response, responsibility, as well as justice and hospitality.

Critics have sometimes taken the fact that Aristotle does not engage with lyric poetry in his "Po... more Critics have sometimes taken the fact that Aristotle does not engage with lyric poetry in his "Poetics" as a sign that for him lyric poetry is not mimetic, or at least not as mimetic as drama. If we consider the presence or absence of references to lyric poetry in Aristotle’s works as significant, the lyric appears to be more related to rhetoric than to poetics. In the internal classification of Duke August the Younger’s book collection, the section named Ethica accommodates theatre plays, narratives, epistles, bucolic fables, pastoral poetry, and treatises on iconology and ethics. If one looks for Petrarch’s or Bembo’s lyric poetry, this is not to be found in the Ethica section, but rather in the Poetica. In the former, instead, one finds translations of Petrarch’s "De remediis utriusque fortunae" and "Triumphi". This appears to be due to formal features more than to thematic matters: love, indeed, is very much present in the Ethica section too. Paying attention to the way in which the works of certain authors have been divided between the two sections, the paper will reflect upon the apparent non-Aristotelianism of the classification; the non-fictional status of lyric poetry in the 16th and 17th century; and the notion of fiction this status presupposes. At the core of the investigation lies an interest in the reasons why literature seemed to require a certain fictionality in order to perform a proper ethical function in early modern times, and in the modalities in which certain practices – such as sonnet writing – could improve the individual’s ethical life before or beyond the transference of specific ethical notions.

In the attempt to narrate a prelapsarian age menaced but yet untouched by History (and war), Gior... more In the attempt to narrate a prelapsarian age menaced but yet untouched by History (and war), Giorgio Caproni collects delicate poems devoted to his dead mother Anna Picchi in the section entitled ‘Versi livornesi’ of his 1959 book 'Il seme del piangere'. In these fragile verses, he portrays a lively and sensual young woman of whom he can be imaginatively son and lover at the same time. Caproni’s combination of a personal loss and the retrieval of Cavalcantian poetics allows us to address crucial issues for the theory of the lyric both in its historical-contextual and trans-historical dimensions. Through the creation of a memory-bearing image that does not belong to the poet’s own experiential memory, Caproni presents both mourning and poetry as an attempt at significance without reference which does not acquire relevance for the intertextual game pursued in the text (as Riffaterre would have it), but for the gestures it re-enacts and the effort it embodies. Mourning exposes the open referentiality of lyric deixis, which makes the poem both personal and shareable at the same time. The iterativity encapsulated in the single poem (re-enacted in the ‘now’ of each reading, as Culler maintains) and the lack of direct referents break the very fictionality of the consoling image that the poem attempts to construct. To understand the inner workings and the singularity of the lyric, we should thus look at the frame of enunciation – the gesture performed by the utterance – not at the narrative fragments sometimes included in the text. In order to disclose these features, a helpful guide will be offered by Roland Barthes’ meditations on the death of his mother Henriette collected in 'Journal de deuil. 26 octobre 1977 – 15 septembre 1979' (2009).

In the attempt to narrate a prelapsarian age menaced but yet untouched by History (and war), Gior... more In the attempt to narrate a prelapsarian age menaced but yet untouched by History (and war), Giorgio Caproni collects delicate poems devoted to his dead mother Anna Picchi in the section entitled "Versi livornesi" of his 1959 book "Il seme del piangere". Through these fragile verses, he creates the portrait of a lively and sensual young woman of whom he can be imaginatively son and lover at the same time. Drawing on the connections with Cavalcanti and Dante on the one hand and on the differences from Ungaretti’s "La madre" (1930, in "Il sentimento del tempo", 1933) on the other hand, this paper will reflect upon Caproni’s mourning for his mother by considering it as a turning point in the author’s poetic production. The focus will be on specific poetic and textual features: the creation of a memory-bearing image that does not belong to the poet’s own memory; the explicit effort to find a different style of writing; and the circularity of time that makes death irredeemable. In order to disclose these features, a helpful guide will be offered by Roland Barthes’ meditations on the death of his mother Henriette collected in "Journal de deuil. 26 octobre 1977 – 15 septembre 1979" (2009), promptly translated into Italian by Valerio Magrelli in 2010.

Le "Birthday Letters" (1998) di Ted Hughes, pubblicate nell’anno della morte dell’autore, sono pr... more Le "Birthday Letters" (1998) di Ted Hughes, pubblicate nell’anno della morte dell’autore, sono probabilmente il più celebre (e discusso) canzoniere in morte del Novecento e, come il titolo stesso indica, esse sono esplicitamente immaginate come lettere “private” scritte nell’arco di venticinque anni e indirizzate alla moglie morta suicida nel 1963, la poetessa americana Sylvia Plath. L’idea di pubblicare i testi in forma di libro arriva solo nel 1997 quando, afferma Hughes, «abbastanza improvvisamente, ho capito che dovevo pubblicarli, non importavano le conseguenze» (dalla lettera inviata, in sostituzione della propria impossibile presenza, ai giudici del Forward Poetry Prize che avevano selezionato il libro per la vittoria). Concentrandosi su alcune poesie e sul più ampio processo di costruzione macrotestuale, il contributo vuole riflettere sulla dimensione comunicativa che organizza il discorso e sul peculiare funzionamento di questa comunicazione destinata (forse) a restare priva di risposta: il tentativo di comprensione/costruzione di un tu sospeso tra persona reale e personaggio letterario; la riscrittura nachträglich del passato personale, incluso quello della coppia; la problematica collocazione della comunicazione privata all’interno della più vasta arena dei discorsi pubblici, già presenti e virulenti, sulla coppia; il tentativo di costruire una narrazione significante e distanziante in cui inserire il personaggio Sylvia; il problema etico, oltre che poetico, sollevato dall’impossibilità della destinataria di contestare la figura che il sopravvissuto sta tentando di costruire per lei; la configurazione dialogica che l’io assume nei testi come risultante della stessa pratica poetica in contrasto con quella che sembrava essere l’intenzione iniziale.

La poesia lirica, come genere letterario, ha sempre avuto un rapporto piuttosto problematico con ... more La poesia lirica, come genere letterario, ha sempre avuto un rapporto piuttosto problematico con la "fine". Per discuterne, però, è necessario distinguere tra la fine intesa come "conclusione" e la fine intesa come "compiutezza". Se la poesia, in quanto artefatto, deve giungere a una conclusione, l’opera deve cioè sottrarsi al divenire; non è affatto scontato che raggiunga anche una compiutezza, la perfetta realizzazione delle istanze che l’hanno generata e la risoluzione definitiva delle sue tensioni interne. In un saggio intitolato "La fine del poema" e raccolto in "Categorie italiane" (2010), Giorgio Agamben osserva:

«Come se il poema, in quanto struttura formale, non potesse, non dovesse finire, come se la possibilità della fine gli fosse radicalmente sottratta, poiché essa implicherebbe quell’impossibile poetico che è la coincidenza esatta del suono e del senso. Nel punto in cui il suono sta per rovinare nell’abisso del senso, il poema cerca scampo sospendendo, per così dire, la propria fine in una dichiarazione di stato di emergenza poetica».

Agamben arriva a questa conclusione trattando della poesia di Baudelaire, ma il breve saggio fa della non coincidenza tra piano semantico e piano semiotico, che impedisce al testo di compiersi, un tratto generale della poesia. Il filosofo accenna infatti anche a Valéry e Mallarmé, osserva Arnaut Daniel e Raimbaut d’Aurenga, e dedica un certo spazio a Dante.
Pur conservando l’idea dell’incompiutezza come carattere generale della lirica, il contributo non si concentrerà sull’opposizione tracciata da Agamben, bensì sul carattere fallimentare del processo conoscitivo che il testo affronta al suo interno. Al soggetto testuale si potrebbe applicare quanto Rainer Maria Rilke, sia pur parlando della musica, scrive nei "Quaderni di Malte Laurids Brigge" (1910):

«Io, che fin da bambino sono stato così diffidente della musica (non perché mi portasse fuori di me più potentemente di qualsiasi altra cosa, ma perché avevo notato che non mi riportava indietro al punto in cui mi aveva trovato, ma mi lasciava molto più in profondità, da qualche parte nel cuore delle cose
non finite)…».

Se consideriamo "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819) di John Keats come un’incarnazione esemplare del progetto della lirica moderna, è evidente che nel corso del testo non si dà alcuna progressione lineare nella conoscenza effettiva dell’antico cimelio, ma neppure una chiusura del cerchio con un semplice ritorno alla posizione iniziale. La costruzione ad anello, marcata da echi testuali che risuonano tra la prima e l’ultima stanza, segna sì una conclusione formale del testo, ma questa non corrisponde al compimento del desiderio iniziale. Allo stesso tempo, però, un qualche avanzamento deve esserci stato: la posizione finale non coincide perfettamente con quella iniziale. Qualcosa accade nel mentre. Una sorta di progresso ha avuto luogo, non verso l’oggetto specifico, ma sul soggetto stesso come essere umano. L’io matura un’esperienza e comprende una verità relativa, una meta-conoscenza sul suo conoscere: la celebre massima «Beauty is truth, truth beauty».
Riprendendo le riflessioni sulle differenti modalità con cui poesie di epoche diverse marcano la loro conclusione indagate da Barbara Herrnstein Smith in "Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End" (1968), sulla circolarità che il testo lirico innesca nell’atto di lettura proposta da Timothy Bahti in "Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry" (1996) e sul carattere queer che l’incompiutezza può assumere rivendicato in "Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry" (2002) di John Emil Vincent, il contributo vuole indagare, attraverso Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale e Milo De Angelis, in che modo la poesia contemporanea si faccia carico dell’incompiutezza. L’ipotesi è che, se per secoli questa incompiutezza è stata anche un grande tema della poesia – si pensi soltanto all’incongruenza tra la chiusura formale del testo della poesia medievale e rinascimentale e la ribadita impossibilità di una perfetta rappresentazione dell’oggetto d’amore – dal Modernismo in poi la lirica non rinunci a intraprendere il suo percorso, ma assuma consapevolmente su di sé l’errore facendone il principio strutturante del proprio discorso.
Il cerchio che non chiude diventa allora una forma specifica della temporalità per la lirica (e per il lettore) che non insegue il successo del percorso lineare, ma accoglie l’errore insito nel suo sforzo per accettare di praticare un’approssimazione infinita e per maturare coscienza della propria pratica. La recollection romantica si chiarisce nella nachträglichkeit psicoanalitica: la riattivazione nel presente di esperienze e sensazioni passate descritta da Wordsworth si definisce nel Novecento come doppio movimento in cui si riconosce il passato come parte integrante del presente e, allo stesso tempo, il presente ridefinisce continuamente il passato. Se la recollection, in altre parole, sembra ancora avere in sé il desiderio del presente tinto di nostalgia del passato tipico della lirica, con la nachträglichkeit il presente si rivela sempre più sfuggente: è un punto di vista provvisorio da cui si osserva il sovrapporsi dei passati in un’operazione potenzialmente infinita, perché riconosce che non soltanto l’oggetto resta opaco all’interpretazione, ma il soggetto stesso muta nel processo.
La non compiutezza della poesia, infine, potrebbe essere proprio quel che assicura la ripetibilità del testo. Partendo dal valore centrale che l’iteratività formale della lirica assume nel recente "Theory of the Lyric" (2015) di Jonathan Culler, nell’ultima parte il contributo tenterà di costruire un’ipotesi sulle ragioni per cui proprio il fatto che la poesia, come artefatto, debba concludersi senza necessariamente compiersi interamente consente al testo lirico di presentarsi come performance ripetibile attraverso i secoli e rinnovabile ad ogni atto di lettura.

Psychoanalytic Nachträglichkeit appears to be the temporality that structures the 'canzonieri in ... more Psychoanalytic Nachträglichkeit appears to be the temporality that structures the 'canzonieri in morte,' i.e. collections of poems devoted to the poet’s dead beloved. In fact, a similar process of (self-)interpretation that is both retrospective and progressive at the same time can be found much earlier in European poetry. The paper starts from certain theoretical reflections and an overview of the two fundamental models provided by Dante’s 'Vita Nova 'and Petrarch’s 'Canzoniere' in order to focus on some poems from two contemporary Italian 'canzonieri in morte': Eugenio Montale’s 'Xenia' (in 'Satura,' 1971) e Milo De Angelis’ 'Tema dell’addio' (2005). The aim is to show how the complex temporality that Freud named Nachträglichkeit can perform different essential functions: to organize the lyric macro-text; to construct a new meaning for poems previously composed; to reconsider the poet’s own personal and poetic past; and to contribute to the creation of a new author. Certain features delineated in the 'canzonieri' will eventually lead to reflect upon the ‘self-anthology’ as a form, that is to say, an anthology of the poet’s work selected and organized by the poet him/herself.

"Considered as the self-evident alternative to human society, Nature has always been the other pl... more "Considered as the self-evident alternative to human society, Nature has always been the other place where the subject - the narrative subject in our case - tries to re-position itself in order to gain a new point of view on its life, on its relations, and on the society he/she used to belong to, in the attempt to negotiate a new existence. A new existence supposed to be more real, pure, authentic, sincere, paradoxically even more human, than the one he/she used to live among human beings. A new positioning supposed to give the subject a better view on the society and the self, a new connection with the roots of life and a less conditioned voice. A better way for human cognitive processes.
The paper will take into account H. D. Thoreau’s 'Walden' (1854), Italo Calvino’s 'Il barone rampante' (1957) and the movie 'In to the wild' (Sean Penn, USA 2007, from the novel by Jon Krakauer, 1996), in order to understand how the displacement of the subject is carried out. It will also try to trace a development of the 'nature alternative' from Thoreau’s short-timed experience of a new possibility of existence, through the fantastic model of the Barone rampante’s one-man revolution, to the tragic, extreme ending of 'In to the wild'. From the middle of the XIX century to our days something is changed in our relationship with the 'otherness' of Nature and in the reasons to choose that 'otherness' against human society, the paper will outline the changes in Western culture which lie behind the differences shown in these three works."

(con Lena Schönwälder), "Niemandes Begehren, jedermanns Begehren", traduzione e commento di "Guido, i’ vorrei", in Dante Alighieri, "1 Sonett 30 Übersetzungen", Hrsg. von Judith Kasper, Andrea Renker, Fabien Vitali (Wien-Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2021), pp. 42-45

Testo a Fronte 47, II semestre 2012, Dec 2012

Assieme a The Wanderer, The Seafarer è stata la più nota e più studiata delle Old English Elegies... more Assieme a The Wanderer, The Seafarer è stata la più nota e più studiata delle Old English Elegies e almeno una delle sue traduzioni moderne, quella di Ezra Pound, ha valore di poesia in se stessa. Il poemetto presenta una figura di esule che nella prima metà del testo narra le sue esperienze personali, e nella seconda metà si muove verso riflessioni morali di carattere generale, fino ad arrivare a una chiusura esplicitamente religiosa.

Sociological research has demonstrated how communities enact mechanisms to claim internal coheren... more Sociological research has demonstrated how communities enact mechanisms to claim internal coherence and distinguish themselves from the outside. Lyric poetry can act as a privileged community-building mechanism in different respects: it can entail forms of protest within the same Gesellschaft, the creation of new languages within and beyond the national, the conquest of gendered spaces within traditions, the agonistic claim involved in imitation. Through lyric poetry, various forms of community formation can not only claim their coherence and consistency, but also powerfully demarcate boundaries and establish differences. The recent scholarly debate on lyric poetry has proposed transhistorical approaches based on the lyric genre’s unique performative features, potential of circulation, re-use and re-enactment of models and gestures. The workshop sets out to explore the potential of lyric poetry in imagining and enabling communities when representing conflict, enacting moments of tension, and creating outsiders, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era from a global perspective.

This workshop aims to focus on the double-edged dimension of community formations, arguing that enabling communities involves internal and external conflicts to circumscribe and exclude other collective formations. The complex dynamics between conflict and assent will be explored through the transnational re-creation or epigonal re-use of traditional forms, the emergence of minorities in the public sphere and in national literary traditions, the transcription and publication of oral performances, and the emergence of queer identities.

In cooperation with: EXC 2020 Temporal Communities; Dahlem Humanities Center; Italienzentrum – Freie Universität Berlin; Oxford Berlin Research Partnership; Center for Italian Studies – University of Notre Dame.

https://www.temporal-communities.de/events/2024/workshop-conflict-and-assent.html

The symposium sets out to explore the ways in which lyric poetry enabled or imagined community formation from the 11th to 17th centuries in both European and Middle Eastern worlds, investigating a variety of topics: the direct exchange of poems; the sharing of poetic codes; forms of collective writing; individual or collective performance; lyric poetry as a collective practice; the construction of collective voices; the practice of commentary for and within specific communities; the composition and circulation of manuscripts and early printed editions; transhistorical and transnational poetic communities; multilingual and homosocial literary relationships; and the role of translation in community formation.

The symposium is part of the "Rethinking Lyric Communities" project and aims to expand the inquiry begun with the two workshops funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership and held at Christ Church (Oxford) on 23 June 2022 and at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry on 5 July 2022, which focused on modern and contemporary poetry.

This is a hybrid event. To receive the link, please write to Nicolas Longinotti by Thursday 15 June 2023: n.longinotti@fu-berlin.de

With the support of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership, the Christ Church Research Centre, and the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame

In cooperation with the EXC Temporal Communities at Freie Universität Berlin

From the circulation of poetic forms across different languages and traditions around the globe, ... more From the circulation of poetic forms across different languages and traditions around the globe, through the envisioning of national and transnational discursive communities, to the use of poetry in contemporary episodes of political resistance and its dissemination on social media, lyric poetry seems to be a privileged site for an inquiry into community formation and its politics. Various theoretical approaches, in fact, cast poetry in this peculiar role, from French and French-oriented political philosophy, exemplified in the famous exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy begun in the 1980s, to the reevaluations of poetry’s roots in orality and performance in reader-response criticism, as well as in postcolonial and decolonial studies. This two-session workshop aims to bring the investigation of historical poetic communities into dialogue with recent developments in the theory of the lyric and theories of community. While discussing a variety of phenomena in modern European poetry that have been at the center of the critical debate — the poetics of the fragment, the unworking or désoeuvrement of the work, the obscurity or polysemy of language, a change of aesthetic regime — the workshop will also explore the lyric, in its longer history and transnational features, as a particular discursive mode that may offer alternative models of community formation.

Speakers and discussants include Derek Attridge, Adele Bardazzi, Roberto Binetti, Philip Ross Bullock, Jonathan Culler, Manuele Gragnolati, Karen Leeder, Peter D. McDonald, Emily McLaughlin, Jahan Ramazani, Daniel Tiffany, and Anita Traninger. The Oxford session also includes a conversation with poet Vahni Anthony Capildeo and the Berlin session an evening event with Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Christian Hawkey, and Daniel Tiffany, who will read a selection of their work and offer their reflections on poetry, community, and translation.

In cooperation with ICI Berlin, Bard College Berlin and the EXC Temporal Communities
With the support of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership

Poetry, according to W.H. Auden, fundamentally is ‘memorable language’. From Sappho onwards, a de... more Poetry, according to W.H. Auden, fundamentally is ‘memorable language’. From Sappho onwards, a defining feature of poetic language appears to be its repeatability. In his seminal 'Theory of the Lyric' (2015), Jonathan Culler challenges Theodor W. Adorno’s claim that lyric poetry, in its utopian force, offers resistance to the language of commerce and alienation, as well as Jacques Rancière’s declaration that ‘[t]he poet belongs to politics as one who does not belong there, who ignores its customs and scatters its words.’

For Culler, the very fact that a lyric poem is meant to be repeated by different readers in a variety of contexts implies that it can be put to quite different uses and enlisted in conflicting ideological projects. On the other hand, poetry seems to play a peculiar role in French and French-oriented political philosophy, especially in reflections on community formation, exemplified in the famous exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy begun in the 1980s. This event will discuss the possible relationships between lyric and society and question whether lyric poetry could contribute, if not to the reformation of society, at least to the formation of (minority, resistant) communities based on the enactment and reenactment of particular poems.

An ICI Event in cooperation with the
‘Re-’ Interdisciplinary Network (CRASSH, Cambridge)

The work of Derek Attridge demonstrates the critical and theoretical potential of the encounter between world literature and literary theory. In 'The Singularity of Literature' (2004), Attridge insists that the book is complemented by his work in literary criticism on to the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, published the same year, 'J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading'. It is as if the theory of literature – of literature in general – emerges out of a particular literary encounter, in this instance with a postcolonial writer pre-occupied with geopolitical, historical, and ethical limits – not least the limits of literature itself. And it is no coincidence that, while Attridge is critical of an oversimplified mapping of politics onto literature, his theory of literature involves politically charged terms such as singularity, otherness, exclusion, response, responsibility, as well as justice and hospitality.

Responding to Attridge’s recent 'The Work of Literature' (2015), a group of scholars will reflect on the correspondences between world literature, literary theory, and the world writ large. The symposium sets out to explore the limits but also the liminality of literary theory and the historical, geopolitical and theoretical frameworks that inform and perhaps also tacitly delimit world literature.

With
Derek Attridge
and
Refqa Abu-Remaileh (Freie Universität Berlin)
Lorna Margaret Burns (University of St Andrews)
Francesco Giusti (ICI Berlin)
Benjamin Lewis Robinson (Universität Wien)
Rashmi Varma (University of Warwick)
Dirk Wiemann (Universität Potsdam)
Jarad Zimbler (University of Birmingham)

Programme

Thursday, 20 June 2019
19:30 Keynote by Derek Attridge
'Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature: A South African Example'

Friday, 21 June 2019
Workshop

10:30 Morning coffee
10:45 Introduction by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Robinson
11:00–13:00: Panel I
13:00–14:30: Lunch break
14:30–16:30: Panel II
16:30–17:00: Coffee break
17:00–18:30: Derek Attridge’s response and final discussion

Over the course of two decades, from 1995 to 2015, Giorgio Agamben published a series of nine boo... more Over the course of two decades, from 1995 to 2015, Giorgio Agamben published a series of nine books, not in sequence but conceived from the beginning as parts of a project sharing the title of its first volume, 'Homo sacer'. These nine books have now been collected into a single volume edition in French (2016), English (2017), and Italian (2018), rendering visible the extent to which the project as a whole amounts to a radical revision of Western philosophy yet also enacted a painstaking self-revision in its course. With the entire trajectory of 'Homo sacer' now evident in its completed arch and rearranged order, the symposium sets out to explore crucial concepts and issues at stake in the project and the new contours they reveal within the larger framework, while also interrogating the hidden spots in the work, unresolved points from which new researches will depart, as Agamben himself has incessantly done with his ever-growing meshwork of references and interlocutors. As he vowed in 1995, at the very outset of his endeavor: ‘… many of these notions demanded — in the urgency of catastrophe — to be revised without reserve.’

The day-long symposium includes a morning workshop on the last text Agamben added to the single-volume edition, well after the individual publication of its last book 'Stasis' — a fourteen-page ‘Note on War, Play, and the Enemy’, in which Agamben takes a newly measured distance from Carl Schmitt’s understanding of the political as resting on the possibility of violent conflict. After two panels with short presentations and time for discussion, the symposium will conclude with an evening event with Bettine Menke and Francesca Raimondi, a discussion revolving around the relationship between Agamben’s project and its historical context, the urgencies and catastrophes he sought to address, as well as alternative modes of addressing them.

With
Christiane Frey
Francesco Giusti
Damiano Sacco
Filippo Trentin
Katrin Trüstedt
Tom Vandeputte
Facundo Vega
Arnd Wedemeyer

Evening event with
Bettine Menke and Francesca Raimondi

Time stops. Time moves. Time ruins. Time heals. Time runs forwards, runs out, runs away. Time sha... more Time stops. Time moves. Time ruins. Time heals. Time runs forwards, runs out, runs away. Time shapes space, makes history, de/forms subjects. Time fills up and empties out.

This workshop — an event showcasing work by the current cohort of ICI fellows, who have worked collectively on the ICI core project ‘ERRANS, in Time’ over the past two years — will explore and explode questions of time and temporality.

Working across, between, and against disciplines and engaging with a diverse array of objects encompassing film, literature, psychology, philosophy, visual art, and critical theory, the speakers will address questions related to temporal errancy in conversation with invited discussants.

Aiming at bringing to a halt understandings of time as merely developmentalist, linear, and/or progressive, the event will investigate different forms and aesthetics of temporal errancies and their political implications.

What happens to the ‘death of the author’ when we do not read it as a manifest for a new critique... more What happens to the ‘death of the author’ when we do not read it as a manifest for a new critique, but as a commentary on contemporary art? What happens to our perception of "Camera Lucida" when we read it not only as a textbook for photography doubled with a tale of mourning but as a visual manifesto for minorities?

Engaging with Barthes’s politics of in/visibility in a broad sense, this workshop will interrogate the centrality of the margins in Roland Barthes’ works and explore their underlying visual universe. Acclaimed for his decipherings of everyday mythologies, Barthes not only developed a wide set of tools and concepts to deconstruct the ideologies governing the visible: his critique of cultural stereotypes, his new approach to literature and the arts always go hand in hand with a reflection on the margins and a commitment to minorities.

Magali Nachtergael will guide our discussion of pre-circulated texts. By confronting some of Barthes’ central concepts with the visual universe that innervates them, Nachtergael will help us ask how what is left in the margins can sometimes crucially shift perspectives on the reception of these concepts.

Programme:

16:00-18:00 Workshop

19:30 Evening Keynote by Magali Nachtergael
Barthes, Queer Before Queer? A Journey Into Barthes’s Visual Culture

Followed by a roundtable discussion with Julie Gaillard, Francesco Giusti, and Dirk Naguschewski

In his 'Convivio,' Dante claims that 'the supreme desire of each thing, and the one that is first... more In his 'Convivio,' Dante claims that 'the supreme desire of each thing, and the one that is first given to it by nature, is to return to its first cause.' Yet this formulation is marked by a tension: return is both a destination and a process. To put it in terms of an Augustinian distinction: does each thing simply desire to arrive in/at its 'patria' (homeland, destination, telos), or is its desire also directed towards the 'via' (way, process, journey)? On the one hand, the desire for return is teleological and singular; on the other, it is meandering, self-prolonging, perhaps even non-progressive. And return itself can also be errant, even when successful: to take one important example, medieval theology frequently conceptualizes the sins of heresy and sodomy as self-generating returns to unproductive sites of pleasure or obstinacy.

Return, then, is an uncanny thing, with a distinctive temporality that conjoins recollection, satisfaction , and frustration. It plays an important role in shaping many kinds of medieval cultural artifact. Return is a basic component of pseudo-Dionysian (and later, Thomistic) theories of intel-lection; for Boethius, it is inherent to the process of spiritual transcendence. Return also shapes literary texts: for instance, romance heroes desire to return to their homeland, but the obstacles placed in their path, or the digressions they undertake, are the basic preconditions of the stories in which they find themselves. In such cases, only a deferred return can satisfy; and is not inevitably satisfying, even when accomplished— it can also be a frustrating repetition of a well-trodden path. This is true of lyric texts as much as narrative ones: medieval lyric poems are often concerned with the human inclination to go back to an unfruitful site of pain, loss, or even dangerous enjoyment.

Return is also embedded in the very texture of medieval poetic and musical forms: the sestina, the refrain, and the terza rima all embody different kinds of recursivity. Dante's re-use of rhyme sounds in the unfolding of the 'Divine Comedy' — a poem that, at various crucial points, thematizes return as a transcendent symbol — performs a spiraling movement that combines repetition and progressive ascent. Reiteration can disrupt linear and teleological progress, but also empower it. How does medieval culture cope with this ambivalence?

In modern English, the prefix re- is used to coin verbs and nouns denoting a repetition. In older... more In modern English, the prefix re- is used to coin verbs and nouns denoting a repetition. In older formations, re- can also indicate a movement back to a previous state, or carry an intensifying force. At first glance transparent and directional, re- in fact complicates the linear and teleological models commonly accepted as structuring the relations between past, present and future, opening onto many temporal paradoxes.

As the first presentation of the collaborative work undertaken as part of the ICI’s Core Project ERRANS, in Time, this workshop seeks erratic temporalities in which sequences are agitated, teleologies unsettled, and time unhinged. Taking various instantiations of re- as its points of departure, current ICI Fellows will present an errant glossary in order to provoke reactions, resonances and responses.

Conversion – from the Latin 'conversio' – implies a (re)turn and a change of direction. In the Ch... more Conversion – from the Latin 'conversio' – implies a (re)turn and a change of direction. In the Christian tradition, it is normative and teleological, accompanied by repentance and/or longing for rebirth. The convert’s soul turns towards goodness and renounces evil in order to enter a new and true life. Conversion can be presented as a return to the self, or rather as the very constitution of self-identity: in these cases, it represents a solution to inner conflict, providing a divided ‘I’ with a feeling of coherence and integrity. In Western conversion narratives, for which Augustine’s "Confessions" are the paradigm, the narrating self must be radically and definitively different from, and yet in continuity with, the unconverted self whose story is told. This complex temporality is one of the core tensions of conversion: is it an event which befalls the inner self, or a lifelong process which will be fully accomplished after death?

How can one think of the relationship between the definitiveness of conversion, the teleological reconstruction of the past, and the integrity of the self? What are the implications in terms of subjectivity, gender, and desire? Is conversion a process that can be narrated or rather something constituted through the performance of narration itself? Can the paradox that conversion appears as both the condition and the performative product of self-narration be resolved through conversion’s teleological temporal structure? To what extent is an irreducibly complex experience reduced by being unfolded in such a linear temporality and at what cost for the self and for others? And finally, if Western paradigms not only of autobiography but of narration as such have arguably become inextricably bound up with conversion and its temporality, how can one think of (narrative and textual) forms that propose other articulations of time and subjectivity?

This workshop will problematize the concept of conversion by looking at the interactions between theological discussions and literary re/presentations. It will also question conversion’s temporal structure by considering contemporary critiques of teleology, normativity, and futurity.

With
Phil Knox (Cambridge)
Jonathan Morton (KCL)
Francesca Southerden (Oxford)
Elizabeth Eva Leach (Oxford)
Jennifer Rushworth (Oxford)
Irene Fantappiè (HU Berlin)
Laura Ashe (Oxford)
Marco Nievergelt (Warwick)
Daniel Barber (Pace U)
Marisa Galvez (Stanford)
Christoph Holzhey (ICI Berlin)
Almut Suerbaum (Oxford)
David Bowe (Oxford)

The seminar aims to bring the investigation of historical poetic communities into dialogue with recent developments in the theory of the lyric and in theories of community. While discussing a variety of poetic phenomena in modern European poetry that have been at the center of the critical and philosophical debate — the poetics of the fragment, the unworking or désœuvrement of the work, the obscurity or polysemy of language, a change of aesthetic regime — the workshop will also explore the lyric, in its longer history and transnational features, as a particular discursive mode that may offer alternative models of community formation.

The seminar is the fourth instalment of a series of events with the same title: the workshops held at Christ Church (Oxford) on 23 June 2022 and at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry on 5 July 2022, and the panel at the congress of the European Society of Comparative Literature in Rome (5-9 September 2022).

Possible topics include:

- the direct exchange of poems
- sharing of poetic codes
- forms of collective writing
- individual or collective performance
- lyric poetry as a collective practice
- the construction of collective voices
- the practice of commentary for and within specific communities
- transhistorical and/or transnational poetic communities
- translation and community formation
- the use of poetry in episodes of political resistance
- the use of poetry on social media
- lyric poetry and human-nonhuman communities
- poetry and environmental awareness

The seminar sets out to explore the relationship between lyric poetry and community formation in both pre-modern and modern times. Paper proposals focusing on non-Western poetic traditions are particularly welcome.

Papers can be submitted here: https://www.acla.org/rethinking-lyric-communities

After the so-called "end of the great narratives"-according to someone synonymous with the sunset... more After the so-called "end of the great narratives"-according to someone synonymous with the sunset of modernitythe theoretical frameworks founded on the concept of totality have given way to a multitude of theoretical perspectives, often characterized by a certain degree of autonomy and isolation. This fragmentation has given birth to, since the end of the Seventies, new fields of study and encouraged a tendency towards a methodological relativism, without, however, creating a real debate over proposals and outcomes, at least in the field of Literary Theory. There was no lack of attempts to declare the very necessity of "theory" useless and inconclusive, particularly when the term assumed multipurpose and (perhaps) dispersive meanings. Consequently, our goal, grounded in the necessity to historicize the most recent theoretical perspectives, is wondering whether and how literary theory-to be understood also as a dialectical moment within the broader critical theory-live (or survive) in the works of contemporary intellectuals. Is literary theory still necessary as a monitoring

The Shape of Return Progress, Process, and Repetition in Medieval Culture International Conferenc... more The Shape of Return
Progress, Process, and Repetition in Medieval Culture
International Conference
29-30 September 2017

Organized by
Francesco Giusti and Daniel Reeve

Keynote speaker
Elizabeth Eva Leach (University of Oxford)

The conference will explore the ways in which medieval literary, artistic, musical, philosophical, and theological texts perform, interrogate, and generate value from the complexities of return, with particular reference to its formal and temporal qualities. Reconsidering the practical and theoretical implications of return — a movement in time and space that seems to shape medieval culture in a fundamental sense.

Papers will be given in English, and will be limited to 30 minutes. Please email an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short bio-bibliographical profile (100 words maximum) to theshapeofreturn@ici-berlin.org by 15 April 2017. An answer will be given before 1 May 2017. A full programme will be published on the ICI Berlin website (www.ici-berlin.org) in due course. As with all events at the ICI Berlin, there is no registration fee. We can provide assistance in securing discounted accommodation for the conference period.

Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch, 2022

Cosa vuol dire sognare la pioggia quando si è avvolti da una siccità lunga cinque anni? E perché ... more Cosa vuol dire sognare la pioggia quando si è avvolti da una siccità lunga cinque anni? E perché ricordare rovesci lontani, i temporali di Roma, quando si è nell'assolata California? La ristampa per Castelvecchi di Roma, la pioggia… di Robert Pogue Harrison (prima edizione italiana Garzanti 1995) non poteva scegliere momento più adatto per venire alla luce dell'estate 2017 troppo arida ed eccessivamente calda. Un'estate che degli effetti nefasti della siccità ha fornito ripetutamente prove disastrose, recando gravi danni, tra l'altro, proprio a quei boschi al cui valore culturale per la nostra civiltà Harrison ha dedicato il suo Foreste. L'ombra della civiltà (1992). Disastri ambientali che quest'anno non si sono placati nemmeno con l'arrivo dell'autunno. La pioggia, per Harrison, non è soltanto, romanticamente e metaforicamente, una dimensione dell'essere; è, ecologicamente, la condizione di possibilità dell'esserci, della vita qui su questa terra, e quindi anche del pensiero umano. La pioggia batte un tempo, permea la terra, dà profondità alla vita umana. Per questo nel sottotitolo ci si può chiedere: A che cosa serve la letteratura? O, si potrebbe dire, perché e come leggere?

Jonathan Culler’s long-awaited book "Theory of the Lyric" was finally published by Harvard Univer... more Jonathan Culler’s long-awaited book "Theory of the Lyric" was finally published by Harvard University Press in 2015. Culler’s trans-historical approach to the internal workings of the lyric intends to oppose the historicist-contextualist criticism, currently dominant in the United States, which considers the "lyric" as a modern category illegitimately employed to describe a variety of preceding poetic forms. After having outlined this critical context, the review focuses on the main points of Culler’s "project in poetics". They can be summarized as follows: Western lyric is an uninterrupted literary genre which goes basically undisturbed from Archaic Greece to the present; the lyric has nothing to do with mimesis and therefore with the (fictional) representation of previous events or utterances; the lyric is essentially an epideictic discourse, it presents evaluations and statements about our world; the poem itself is an event which is re-enacted in the present of enunciation; its ritualistic features are the rhythmic and phonic organization, the triangulated address, the hyperbolic character, and the presentness of its utterance. The last section is devoted to Culler’s acknowledgement that the social effects of a poem are impossible to foresee. They vary according to the different contexts of its reception: a poem which appears to be radical on one level can be considered as reactionary on another level according to the socio-political theories of the reader.

Winfried Wehle, Poesia sulla poesia. La Vita Nova: una scuola d'amore novissimo, traduzione di Ch... more Winfried Wehle, Poesia sulla poesia. La Vita Nova: una scuola d'amore novissimo, traduzione di Christine e Dora Ott, Firenze, Franco Cesati Editore 2014, 155 pp.

Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 90 (2015)

Manuele Gragnolati, Amor che move. Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini ... more Manuele Gragnolati, Amor che move. Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante, Milano, il Saggiatore 2013, 231 pp.

William Franke (Vanderbilt University) presents his latest book "Dante’s 'Paradiso' and the Theol... more William Franke (Vanderbilt University) presents his latest book "Dante’s 'Paradiso' and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection" (New York: Routledge, 2021) in conversation with Francesco Giusti. The opening conversation will be held in Italian, but questions in English or German are welcome. You are all welcome to join. To join the event, simply click on this Zoom link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom.us/j/94404275830?pwd=U3hNSEdqZUpNc2kzS09tNzA5RE1OUT09 at 5:00 pm CET on Friday, June 25.

The event will be hosted by the international online seminar Lirica&Teoria, coordinated by Francesco Giusti (Bard College Berlin) and Christine Ott (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt). The seminar Lirica&Teoria brings together a group of scholars based in different countries to discuss questions of lyric theory as well as new approaches to the lyric, with a particular focus on the Italian poetic tradition. On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, the seminar will also host events open to the public and related to Dante’s lyric poetry.

LITERARY WORKS ARE NEITHER autonomous, transcendent objects nor mere by-products of historical ci... more LITERARY WORKS ARE NEITHER autonomous, transcendent objects nor mere by-products of historical circumstance, but rather co-actors that exhibit a certain degree of agency. They cannot be easily extricated from the network of relationships in which they are entangled, nor can they be reduced merely to the context of their production. Even the variety of methods that have dominated academic criticism in the last decades, usually gathered under the label “critique,” reveal the passionate attachments and affective investments that animate and motivate them. This is what Rita Felski argues in her brilliant 2015 book, "The Limits of Critique."

Felski, who is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (where she leads a large research project on “The Social Dimensions of Literature”), has brought the conceptual tools of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) into literary studies. Such re-orientations in critical and creative vocabularies are becoming increasingly visible in academic discourse, and Felski has been at the forefront of these transformations, a position that will only be further cemented by her new book, "Hooked: Art and Attachment," forthcoming in fall 2020.

This conversation, which took place via email, addresses the main arguments and aims of Felski’s scholarly work in the context of current trends in literary and cultural criticism.

After applying to CRASSH to set up the idea of a Re- Interdisciplinary Research Network, Clare Fo... more After applying to CRASSH to set up the idea of a Re- Interdisciplinary Research Network, Clare Foster visited Berlin’s Institute for Cultural Inquiry, whose ERRANS, in Time project seemed to be thinking along similar lines. The CRASSH Research Network looks at cultural repetition more pragmatically, interested in the politics of culture; the ICI Berlin with a more theoretical, philosophical angle – a complementarity that was exciting to all. And both projects express an interdisciplinary ethos and mission that CRASSH, Cambridge and the ICI Berlin hold profoundly in common. ICI Fellow Cristina Baldacci became a Re- Interdisciplinary Network co-convenor, and she and co-Fellow Francesco Giusti visited CRASSH on February 6th, 2019 to respond to the annual ‘Re-‘ lecture given by Richard Coyne. The ICI’s 'Re-: An Errant Glossary' (2019) was published just the week before, so the Re- Network was delighted to also celebrate its launch at CRASSH. Looking forward, Foster, Baldacci and Giusti are planning a series of Re- events for 2019-2020 under the heading 'Canons Vs Icons'.

A TEXT IS NOT literary — or non-literary — by essence. It becomes literary when readers let it wo... more A TEXT IS NOT literary — or non-literary — by essence. It becomes literary when readers let it work as literature, when they do justice to it. This is what the emeritus professor of English at the University of York Derek Attridge brilliantly argues in "The Work of Literature", published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Though focused on the specificities of the literary, his inquiry does not resort to any essentialistic conceptions of literature. It is in the individual act of reading that we put a text to work and can share something of its literary power. Attridge had proposed the main line of his theory in "The Singularity of Literature" (Routledge, 2004), but his recent achievement presents a richer and more articulated argument, one that also takes into account critical responses to the previous book. Paying attention to the developments of the current debate in literary criticism and theory, our conversation spontaneously gravitated toward the issues of form(s) and formalism(s) that are giving rise to much discussion in the United States these days. Attridge, one of the world-leading thinkers of singularity, situates his own long commitment to literature in relation to this context.

NOT “WHAT IS the lyric?” — but rather, “How does the lyric work?” That is the question Jonathan C... more NOT “WHAT IS the lyric?” — but rather, “How does the lyric work?” That is the question Jonathan Culler poses in his "Theory of the Lyric," published by Harvard University Press in 2015. After decades of relative neglect, the last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the theory of the lyric, and Culler’s wide-ranging study is undoubtedly a milestone in this complicated process. The leading critic and theorist — and Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University — will also be one of the keynote speakers at the first biennial conference of the recently founded International Network for the Study of Lyric, to be held at Boston University on June 7–11, 2017. In the following conversation, Culler not only explains the main premises and results of his work, but also suggests potential further directions for the investigation of this apparently ungraspable genre, probably the most continuous in Western literature. The title of this interview references to his 2006 book "The Literary in Theory" (Stanford University Press), in which he charts the places of literature and the literary in contemporary theory.

Il meticciato, il politico, l’identità, la conoscenza e la sua trascrizione (o trasposizione) in ... more Il meticciato, il politico, l’identità, la conoscenza e la sua trascrizione (o trasposizione) in parola, in gesto poetico sono alcuni dei grandi temi che hanno animato la mia lettura delle poesie che Samir Galal Mohamed ha pubblicato nel "Dodicesimo quaderno italiano" e, di conseguenza, la nostra lunga conversazione a distanza. Se le prospettive singolari, a prima vista, non sempre s’incontrano – e credo sia una dinamica produttiva dell’atto di lettura, anche della lettura “critica” – è pur vero, mi sembra, che le questioni affrontate hanno fatto reagire molto della scrittura poetica di Samir e hanno sollevato in me molti interrogativi sulle possibilità o potenzialità del discorso lirico. Ringrazio perciò Samir per questo intenso dialogo e spero che il lettore possa trovarvi elementi di interesse sia per quanto riguarda i testi che sono oggetto di discussione sia per quel 'fare' poesia che, dopotutto, è la pratica quotidiana del poeta.

In a poem entitled Orfeo and collected in her Vita Nova (1999), the celebrated American poet Loui... more In a poem entitled Orfeo and collected in her Vita Nova (1999), the celebrated American poet Louise Glück points out the unstable, painful, but intrinsically creative position of the mythological poet:

Negli ultimi anni la riflessione teorica sulla poesia lirica gode di un rinnovato interesse e mol... more Negli ultimi anni la riflessione teorica sulla poesia lirica gode di un rinnovato interesse e molte sono le domande che animano il dibattito internazionale, a partire da quella fondamentale sull'esistenza o meno di un genere letterario, ritracciabile attraverso i secoli, che possa effettivamente essere chiamato "lirica". Studiosi che operano in diversi paesi sono stati invitati al seminario online per discutere contributi teorici recenti e per riflettere insieme su poesie di varie epoche. Gli incontri vogliono favorire la discussione intorno alle questioni centrali del campo di studi, esplorare nuovi approcci alla lirica accanto ai suoi rapporti con altri generi e forme d'arte, e rafforzare la presenza della tradizione lirica italiana nel dibattito internazionale.

Il seminario si svolgerà prevalentemente in lingua italiana e ospiterà anche eventi aperti al pubblico: incontri con critici e teorici, presentazioni di pubblicazioni recenti e progetti editoriali e di ricerca. Nel 2021 gli eventi pubblici proporranno inoltre un focus sulla produzione lirica di Dante in occasione delle celebrazioni per i 700 anni dalla morte del Sommo Poeta.

Conference on Mourning in Italian Poetry (28 April 2018) Featuring: Adele Bardazzi Fabio Camille... more Conference on Mourning in Italian Poetry (28 April 2018)
Featuring:
Adele Bardazzi
Fabio Camilletti
Marzia D’Amico
Vilma de Gasperin
Francesco Giusti
Peter Hainsworth
Martina Piperno
Emanuela Tandello

Organised by Adele Bardazzi and Emanuela Tandello

With the support of Christ Church, the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages of the University of Oxford, the Society for Italian Studies, and in association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

WEAVING MEDIA IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN POETRY A Seminar Series at the Department ... more WEAVING MEDIA IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN POETRY

A Seminar Series at the Department of Italian, Trinity College Dublin
In Collaboration with Interdisciplinary Italy Network

Co-ordinated by Dr Adele Bardazzi

This series of research seminars at the Department of Italian at Trinity College Dublin is dedicated to modern and contemporary Italian poetry and is in collaboration with Interdisciplinary Italy Network .
Poetry’s engagement with other media is far from being a recent phenomenon. Yet, as this seminar series seeks to highlight, Italian poetry seems to be a particularly reactive literary scene in which from the 20th-century onwards poets have increasingly engaged with a wide range of media in such a way as to further extend the experiments of avant-garde movements. From this viewpoint, this seminar series will not be limited to the works of poets belonging to avant-garde movements such as Futurism or cases of visual and concrete poetry, and will include investigations of some of the most interesting examples of intermediality in modern and contemporary Italian poetry. In addition, attention will be given to defining possible theoretical frameworks and methodologies that can be helpful in approaching intermedial poetic works and, most importantly, what do we mean by ‘intermedial poetics’.