Alterity and Identity in Italian Literature. Encountering the Other from Dante to the Present, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2024 (original) (raw)
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Italica 88. 4 (2011): 658-659.
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Recensione del libro The Ultimate Italian. Dante and a Nation's Identity (Routledge, 2023), traduzione inglese del libro Il Sommo Italiano. Dante e d'entità della nazione (Carocci 2021).
2021
Petrarch pretends to show might be a consequence of his pain and torment for how disappointing his son had been in life, dying young before he could experience a real behavior change, a "mutatio in melius". Otherwise, this pain, as a philosophical and universal issue, finds space in the dialogical treatise De Remediis (II 44); Chines's investigation, from this standpoint, is summed up with a few final considerations on the importance, for Petrarch and Boccaccio, of focusing the reader's attention and critical inquiry on multiple issues, looking at the two poets and their texts as a complex system: on the one hand, their entire poetical production and, on the other, their modus operandi, their habitus as readers themselves, interpreters, editors, and scholars.
After almost seven centuries, Dante endures and even seems to haunt the present. "Metamorphosing Dante" explores what so many authors, artists and thinkers from varied backgrounds have found in Dante’s oeuvre, and the ways in which they have engaged with it through rewritings, dialogues, and transpositions. By establishing trans-disciplinary routes, the volume shows that, along with a corpus of multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters, and stories, Dante has provided a field of tensions in which to mirror and investigate one’s own time. Authors explored include Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, Derek Jarman, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Joyce, Wolfgang Koeppen, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Mann, James Merrill, Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Giorgio Pressburger, Robert Rauschenberg, Vittorio Sereni, Virginia Woolf. CONTRIBUTORS: Erminia Ardissino, Piero Boitani, Fabio Camilletti, Antonella Francini, Nicola Gardini, Manuele Gragnolati, Rachel Jacoff, Nick Havely, Tristan Kay, Dennis Looney, Davide Luglio, Manuela Marchesini, Angela Merte-Rankin, James Miller, Federica Pich, Teresa Prudente, Ronald de Rooy, Francesca Southerden, Florian Trabert, Rebecca West
Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance
Preface xi duction, and circulation should figure in critical assessments; and that the book itself be treated as an expressive form. The intent is to try to develop a bibliographic code, which, in turn would help us to understand the situation of the critic. The relation then, between chapters 3, 4, and 5, on the one hand, and chapter 6, on the other, is a dynamic one. Critical study along either line informs the other approach. Books not only, as Umberto Eco reminds us, "talk among themselves," they speak in a variety of waysthrough words as well as forms.1 Quotations from the Commedia are taken from the edition by Giorgio Petrocchi, La Commedia secondo I'antica vulgata, 4 vols.
This paper examines the reception of Dantean conceptions of suicide in the later medieval and early modern Italian literary tradition. Dante’s influence on the Western literary tradition at large is indisputable, and the indebtedness of the later medieval and early modern writers to be examined in this paper, from Petrarch to Tasso, has been the focus of much scholarly work. While scholarship acknowledges the presence of Dante’s poetic and thematic legacy within many of the works to be examined herein, the influence of Dante’s liminal depiction of suicide has not been noted. Dante’s portrayal of suicide as an act that embodies liminality and hybridity was highly visible to the authors of the later Italian literary tradition, and at times it profoundly influenced the way in which suicide was represented in that tradition. This paper will analyse literary depictions of suicide in the works of authors ranging from Petrarch and Boccaccio, who were writing in the time immediately following Dante’s death, to authors such as Bandello and Tasso, whose works share features of both later Renaissance and counter-reformation literature. It will argue that the scope of the implementation of Dante’s portrayal of suicide in the later Italian tradition is testament to his unorthodox decision to explore in great detail and nuance a subject ordinarily dominated by taboo.