Massimo Lollini | University of Oregon (original) (raw)

Papers by Massimo Lollini

Italian Studies in Southern Africa/Studi d'Italianistica nell'Africa Australe, 1998

This essay studies the complex role played by Eros in Giacomo Leopardi's Storia del genere umano,... more This essay studies the complex role played by Eros in Giacomo Leopardi's Storia del genere umano, the first of the Operette morali. In this text Leopardi recalls not only the platonic distinction between the divine and the vulgar Eros, but also the archaic dimension of the myth of Eros as it appears in Hesiod's Theogony. Lollini shows how the idea of Eros as primeval force and cosmic energy is crucial for Leopardi's philosophy and writing.

Forum Italicum, 2022

The article contributes to the rediscovery of the depth and complexity of Manzoni's thought, ... more The article contributes to the rediscovery of the depth and complexity of Manzoni's thought, which too often has been reduced to an uncritical expression of Catholicism. Narrating the plague that struck Milan in 1630 in The Betrothed and the History of the Column of Infamy Manzoni reveals political, social, and cultural mechanisms remarkably similar to ours while struggling with the Coronavirus pandemic. The essay analyzes the apparatuses of contagion, the crucial importance of language, the devices of alienation favoring the loss of the sense of objectivity during the 1628 plague, and the pandemic of our time. For Manzoni, the recovery of reality in its bare complexity is possible, to a certain extent, by referring to the two fundamental lines of his thought. On the one hand, the philosophical irony with deep roots in Friedrich Schlegel, European Romanticism, and the reaction to Kantian philosophy. Romantic irony triggers the ethics of writing that runs through Manzoni's no...

Humanist Studies & the Digital Age

When I proposed having the future at the center of this issue, which marks the 10th anniversary o... more When I proposed having the future at the center of this issue, which marks the 10th anniversary of Humanist Studies & The Digital Age, I was aware of the complexity of this controversial topic. The possibility of magnifiche sorti e progressive — a “splendid and progressive destiny” — made possible by human technology inspires hope in some and critique in others. The expression comes from one of Leopardi’s last poems, Ginestra o il fiore del deserto (Broom, or the flower of the desert), where he uses it ironically to suggest the powerlessnesss of humanity in the face of natural disasters. The poet argues with all those who praise the human condition and progress acritically. He condemns their hubris and bitterly invites them to visit the arid slopes of Vesuvius, reduced to a desert by the volcano’s eruption.

Humanist Studies & the Digital Age

The interview reconstructs Jeffrey Schnapp's brilliant career from his origins as a scholar o... more The interview reconstructs Jeffrey Schnapp's brilliant career from his origins as a scholar of Dante and the Middle Ages to his current multiple interdisciplinary interests. Among other things, Schnapp deals with knowledge design, media history and theory, history of the book, the future of archives, museums, and libraries. The main themes of the interview concern the relationships between technology and pedagogy, the future of reading, and artificial intelligence.

Humanist Studies & the Digital Age

The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Sc... more The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of Anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. From this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of Mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on Earth. The second part (“AI and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, AI (Garvin Minsky e Ray Kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (Eric Fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. Their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher Timothy Morton. He has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all th...

The Mediterranean Sea contributes to the vital rediscovery of meaning advocated by Giambattista V... more The Mediterranean Sea contributes to the vital rediscovery of meaning advocated by Giambattista Vico’s poetic geography and Sardinian writers search for roots by interjecting a sense of movement in the otherwise immobile Sardinian landscape. First, we see this feature at work in Grazia Deledda’s Cosima and Salvatore Satta’s Il giorno del giudizio. In their novels the movement of the landscape still concretizes in what Deleuze and Guattari call “faciality” (visageité). This characteristic tends to vanish in the writers of the younger generations. In Alberto Capitta’s Creaturine, Giulia Clarkson’s La città d’acqua and Marcello Fois’s Nel tempo di mezzo the “faciality” of the landscape tends to disappear, wrecked by violent history or submerged in a sort of Heraclitean flow of things. Finally, in Giulio Angioni’s Il mare intorno the sea recovers its double and contradictory nature of agent of both iso...

Our goal for the "Oregon Petrarch Open Book," or "OPOB," is to enhance a scho... more Our goal for the "Oregon Petrarch Open Book," or "OPOB," is to enhance a scholarly database-driven website around Francis Petrarch's fourteenth-century poetry collection, the Canzoniere. Using open source software we intend to build a more flexible and comprehensive structure for our current digital assets and strengthen the groundwork for international collaboration among scholars and institutions around this central work of world literature. In the current iteration of OPOB, a scholar is able to read a poem in the original, examine a Renaissance commentary, compare a series of different translations, analyze contemporary rewritings, and finally, explore multimedia assets associated with the poem. For the tenure of this grant we plan to enhance the functionality of existing software, such as the Compare Tool, by providing multiple moveable containers of selectable content, text, images, audio or video.

Uno studio sulla funzione del dialetto nella poesia neo-dialettale di Pierpaolo Pasolini, Andrea ... more Uno studio sulla funzione del dialetto nella poesia neo-dialettale di Pierpaolo Pasolini, Andrea Zanzotto e Franco Loi.

's contribution to the definition of baroque culture, and I claim for his major work on this issu... more 's contribution to the definition of baroque culture, and I claim for his major work on this issue, La cultura el barroco: AndUsis de una estructura h;stor;ca (1975), the status of a classic in baroque culture studies. MaravaH's study rivals Heinrich Wolfflin's Renaissance und Barock (1888), which is a frequent point of reference for all those who work on baroque culture. First, I show how, in presenting a broad idea of culture, MaravaH draws partly on the Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony, even though he does not mention it. Then, I focus more closely on the relationships between the aesthetic definition of baroque provided by Wolfflin and the political and social one elaborated by Maravall. The two scholars seem not to have anything in common. Maravall insists that he does not consider the baroque as a style but as an historical structure, and he claims to go beyond the aesthetic and stylistic definition of the baroque. On the other hand, he cannot ignore Wolfflin's study: he quotes Wolfflin precisely because of the classic status that Renaissance und Barock work has acquired and because WOlfflin has created the horizon of meaning that surrounds the word baroque in modem culture. Whereas Wolfflin speaks of "forms," Maravall focuses on the "social history of mentalities." In this perspective the latter appears to be related to the French historians of the Annales school and with those known as historians of mentalities. I contend that Maravall's Culture of the Baroque allows one to go beyond Wolfflin's approach, without forgetting the importance of his analysis. On the contrary, it is still possible to take advantage of his exemplary study of the baroque style, along the lines of what Walter Benjamin has done in The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, in which he recalls Wolfflin's concept of baroque style in developing his own idea of "artistic will" as characteristic of baroque art, as opposed to classical art. This perspective does not answer all the questions related to baroque and modem literature. It does not, for example, pay enough attention to problems of subjectivity and identity. Nevertheless, Wolfflin's analysis of baroque style and Maravall's study of the baroque as an historical structure possess enduring significance as introductions to the problematics of modem culture. The main feature of Maravall's methodology of historical research is an emphasis on the decisive relevance of culture and mentality in human history

... Infatti la studiosa riconosce la complessità della posizione del soggetto lirico nelle poesie... more ... Infatti la studiosa riconosce la complessità della posizione del soggetto lirico nelle poesie diPetrarca: “Petrarch's polyphonous speaker creates a gendered and complex subject of speech, desire, vision, and knowledge [...] 8); la studiosa inoltre sostiene che il modello ...

ANNALI D ITALIANISTICA, 1995

... 352 Massimo Lollini come ha scritto Benjamin (170). ... Si è parlato a questo proposito dell&... more ... 352 Massimo Lollini come ha scritto Benjamin (170). ... Si è parlato a questo proposito dell'intensa spiritualità del mondo barocco, spesso nascosta sotto spoglie ingannatrici e vuote (David, p. 96), ea questo rilievo intendiamo ricollegarci nella convinzione che se è vero che il ...

California Italian Studies, 2013

Il mondo visto da Sud e "La prima volta." Una conversazione con Franco Cassano A cura di Massimo ... more Il mondo visto da Sud e "La prima volta." Una conversazione con Franco Cassano A cura di Massimo Lollini Ogni tanto, molto spesso solo per caso, ci accade di ricordarci che al mondo non ci siamo solo noi. E allora, per un attimo, riusciamo a guardarci attorno e rimaniamo storditi e sommersi dallo spettacolo del fiume infinito delle prime volte, dalla loro immensa successione, a partire dalla prima di tutte, dal venire al mondo del mondo. Nessuno del resto può sottrarsi alla prima volta: atomo, molecola, pianeta o stella, albero, cavallo o uomo. Franco Cassano, "La prima volta" (2013)

In this essay on "Scrittura e alterità in Petrarca," Massimo Lo... more In this essay on "Scrittura e alterità in Petrarca," Massimo Lollini is interested in ethics as a point of intersection between philosophy and literature. Lollini studies how the notion of otherness in literature emerges in Petrarch's writings, which, for Lollini, constitute a necessary premise to modern critical discourse on alterity. In the writing process Petrarch discovers two main form of alterity, first of all, the alterity of the face of Laura, which he cannot "write" or present in its proper form (Canzoniere 308: 5-8). Lollini then argues that the ethical moment in the Canzoniere is located precisely in Petrarch's awareness of the impossibility to reduce the face of the other to a pure representation because in that face there is something infinite (Canzoniere 339: 9-14). The second fundamental dimension of alterity explored by Petrarch is related to his reflection on time and death, through which he introduces a notion of truth grounded not on the ontological and transcendental plane but on the ethical discourse.

A study of Leopardi Song to Spring in the context of Modern lyric poetry.

Italian Studies in Southern Africa/Studi d'Italianistica nell'Africa Australe, 1998

This essay studies the complex role played by Eros in Giacomo Leopardi's Storia del genere umano,... more This essay studies the complex role played by Eros in Giacomo Leopardi's Storia del genere umano, the first of the Operette morali. In this text Leopardi recalls not only the platonic distinction between the divine and the vulgar Eros, but also the archaic dimension of the myth of Eros as it appears in Hesiod's Theogony. Lollini shows how the idea of Eros as primeval force and cosmic energy is crucial for Leopardi's philosophy and writing.

Forum Italicum, 2022

The article contributes to the rediscovery of the depth and complexity of Manzoni's thought, ... more The article contributes to the rediscovery of the depth and complexity of Manzoni's thought, which too often has been reduced to an uncritical expression of Catholicism. Narrating the plague that struck Milan in 1630 in The Betrothed and the History of the Column of Infamy Manzoni reveals political, social, and cultural mechanisms remarkably similar to ours while struggling with the Coronavirus pandemic. The essay analyzes the apparatuses of contagion, the crucial importance of language, the devices of alienation favoring the loss of the sense of objectivity during the 1628 plague, and the pandemic of our time. For Manzoni, the recovery of reality in its bare complexity is possible, to a certain extent, by referring to the two fundamental lines of his thought. On the one hand, the philosophical irony with deep roots in Friedrich Schlegel, European Romanticism, and the reaction to Kantian philosophy. Romantic irony triggers the ethics of writing that runs through Manzoni's no...

Humanist Studies & the Digital Age

When I proposed having the future at the center of this issue, which marks the 10th anniversary o... more When I proposed having the future at the center of this issue, which marks the 10th anniversary of Humanist Studies & The Digital Age, I was aware of the complexity of this controversial topic. The possibility of magnifiche sorti e progressive — a “splendid and progressive destiny” — made possible by human technology inspires hope in some and critique in others. The expression comes from one of Leopardi’s last poems, Ginestra o il fiore del deserto (Broom, or the flower of the desert), where he uses it ironically to suggest the powerlessnesss of humanity in the face of natural disasters. The poet argues with all those who praise the human condition and progress acritically. He condemns their hubris and bitterly invites them to visit the arid slopes of Vesuvius, reduced to a desert by the volcano’s eruption.

Humanist Studies & the Digital Age

The interview reconstructs Jeffrey Schnapp's brilliant career from his origins as a scholar o... more The interview reconstructs Jeffrey Schnapp's brilliant career from his origins as a scholar of Dante and the Middle Ages to his current multiple interdisciplinary interests. Among other things, Schnapp deals with knowledge design, media history and theory, history of the book, the future of archives, museums, and libraries. The main themes of the interview concern the relationships between technology and pedagogy, the future of reading, and artificial intelligence.

Humanist Studies & the Digital Age

The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Sc... more The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of Anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. From this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of Mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on Earth. The second part (“AI and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, AI (Garvin Minsky e Ray Kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (Eric Fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. Their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher Timothy Morton. He has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all th...

The Mediterranean Sea contributes to the vital rediscovery of meaning advocated by Giambattista V... more The Mediterranean Sea contributes to the vital rediscovery of meaning advocated by Giambattista Vico’s poetic geography and Sardinian writers search for roots by interjecting a sense of movement in the otherwise immobile Sardinian landscape. First, we see this feature at work in Grazia Deledda’s Cosima and Salvatore Satta’s Il giorno del giudizio. In their novels the movement of the landscape still concretizes in what Deleuze and Guattari call “faciality” (visageité). This characteristic tends to vanish in the writers of the younger generations. In Alberto Capitta’s Creaturine, Giulia Clarkson’s La città d’acqua and Marcello Fois’s Nel tempo di mezzo the “faciality” of the landscape tends to disappear, wrecked by violent history or submerged in a sort of Heraclitean flow of things. Finally, in Giulio Angioni’s Il mare intorno the sea recovers its double and contradictory nature of agent of both iso...

Our goal for the "Oregon Petrarch Open Book," or "OPOB," is to enhance a scho... more Our goal for the "Oregon Petrarch Open Book," or "OPOB," is to enhance a scholarly database-driven website around Francis Petrarch's fourteenth-century poetry collection, the Canzoniere. Using open source software we intend to build a more flexible and comprehensive structure for our current digital assets and strengthen the groundwork for international collaboration among scholars and institutions around this central work of world literature. In the current iteration of OPOB, a scholar is able to read a poem in the original, examine a Renaissance commentary, compare a series of different translations, analyze contemporary rewritings, and finally, explore multimedia assets associated with the poem. For the tenure of this grant we plan to enhance the functionality of existing software, such as the Compare Tool, by providing multiple moveable containers of selectable content, text, images, audio or video.

Uno studio sulla funzione del dialetto nella poesia neo-dialettale di Pierpaolo Pasolini, Andrea ... more Uno studio sulla funzione del dialetto nella poesia neo-dialettale di Pierpaolo Pasolini, Andrea Zanzotto e Franco Loi.

's contribution to the definition of baroque culture, and I claim for his major work on this issu... more 's contribution to the definition of baroque culture, and I claim for his major work on this issue, La cultura el barroco: AndUsis de una estructura h;stor;ca (1975), the status of a classic in baroque culture studies. MaravaH's study rivals Heinrich Wolfflin's Renaissance und Barock (1888), which is a frequent point of reference for all those who work on baroque culture. First, I show how, in presenting a broad idea of culture, MaravaH draws partly on the Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony, even though he does not mention it. Then, I focus more closely on the relationships between the aesthetic definition of baroque provided by Wolfflin and the political and social one elaborated by Maravall. The two scholars seem not to have anything in common. Maravall insists that he does not consider the baroque as a style but as an historical structure, and he claims to go beyond the aesthetic and stylistic definition of the baroque. On the other hand, he cannot ignore Wolfflin's study: he quotes Wolfflin precisely because of the classic status that Renaissance und Barock work has acquired and because WOlfflin has created the horizon of meaning that surrounds the word baroque in modem culture. Whereas Wolfflin speaks of "forms," Maravall focuses on the "social history of mentalities." In this perspective the latter appears to be related to the French historians of the Annales school and with those known as historians of mentalities. I contend that Maravall's Culture of the Baroque allows one to go beyond Wolfflin's approach, without forgetting the importance of his analysis. On the contrary, it is still possible to take advantage of his exemplary study of the baroque style, along the lines of what Walter Benjamin has done in The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, in which he recalls Wolfflin's concept of baroque style in developing his own idea of "artistic will" as characteristic of baroque art, as opposed to classical art. This perspective does not answer all the questions related to baroque and modem literature. It does not, for example, pay enough attention to problems of subjectivity and identity. Nevertheless, Wolfflin's analysis of baroque style and Maravall's study of the baroque as an historical structure possess enduring significance as introductions to the problematics of modem culture. The main feature of Maravall's methodology of historical research is an emphasis on the decisive relevance of culture and mentality in human history

... Infatti la studiosa riconosce la complessità della posizione del soggetto lirico nelle poesie... more ... Infatti la studiosa riconosce la complessità della posizione del soggetto lirico nelle poesie diPetrarca: “Petrarch's polyphonous speaker creates a gendered and complex subject of speech, desire, vision, and knowledge [...] 8); la studiosa inoltre sostiene che il modello ...

ANNALI D ITALIANISTICA, 1995

... 352 Massimo Lollini come ha scritto Benjamin (170). ... Si è parlato a questo proposito dell&... more ... 352 Massimo Lollini come ha scritto Benjamin (170). ... Si è parlato a questo proposito dell'intensa spiritualità del mondo barocco, spesso nascosta sotto spoglie ingannatrici e vuote (David, p. 96), ea questo rilievo intendiamo ricollegarci nella convinzione che se è vero che il ...

California Italian Studies, 2013

Il mondo visto da Sud e "La prima volta." Una conversazione con Franco Cassano A cura di Massimo ... more Il mondo visto da Sud e "La prima volta." Una conversazione con Franco Cassano A cura di Massimo Lollini Ogni tanto, molto spesso solo per caso, ci accade di ricordarci che al mondo non ci siamo solo noi. E allora, per un attimo, riusciamo a guardarci attorno e rimaniamo storditi e sommersi dallo spettacolo del fiume infinito delle prime volte, dalla loro immensa successione, a partire dalla prima di tutte, dal venire al mondo del mondo. Nessuno del resto può sottrarsi alla prima volta: atomo, molecola, pianeta o stella, albero, cavallo o uomo. Franco Cassano, "La prima volta" (2013)

In this essay on "Scrittura e alterità in Petrarca," Massimo Lo... more In this essay on "Scrittura e alterità in Petrarca," Massimo Lollini is interested in ethics as a point of intersection between philosophy and literature. Lollini studies how the notion of otherness in literature emerges in Petrarch's writings, which, for Lollini, constitute a necessary premise to modern critical discourse on alterity. In the writing process Petrarch discovers two main form of alterity, first of all, the alterity of the face of Laura, which he cannot "write" or present in its proper form (Canzoniere 308: 5-8). Lollini then argues that the ethical moment in the Canzoniere is located precisely in Petrarch's awareness of the impossibility to reduce the face of the other to a pure representation because in that face there is something infinite (Canzoniere 339: 9-14). The second fundamental dimension of alterity explored by Petrarch is related to his reflection on time and death, through which he introduces a notion of truth grounded not on the ontological and transcendental plane but on the ethical discourse.

A study of Leopardi Song to Spring in the context of Modern lyric poetry.

This book studies Vico’s reflection on the evolution of poetry, poetics and rhetoric from Renaiss... more This book studies Vico’s reflection on the evolution of poetry, poetics and rhetoric from Renaissance to Baroque. Vico believes that poetry, having lost its mythological origins, no longer has any eternal or fixed content. This process was particularly acute in the baroque period. The emergence of the mask as an emblem of Baroque culture testifies, as Vico writes, to the loss of the perception of nature as divine substance, producing a loss both of the constitutive referentiality of language and of its supposed “natural” origin.