Nothing to Declare? Authorship and Contradiction In and Around Giacomo Leopardi's Canti (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nothing to declare? Authorship and Contradiction in and Around Leopardi's Canti
The essay explores the construction of Leopardi's authorial persona, focussing on the key concepts of contradiction and retraction through an examination of the works which were later brought together in his Canti (definitive edition 1845). Self-contradiction, apostasy, and the continuous redefinition of the figure of the author – also through irony and desacralization – are shown to characterize Leopardi, both as a poet and as a philosopher. The essay argues that these elements play an important in Leopardi's work, which acknowledges the need for openness, dilemma, and doubt as features of modern literature.
THE FORM OF THE PARADOX: GIACOMO LEOPARDI AS AN EARLY GERMAN ROMANTIC THINKER • A FORMA DO PARADOXO: GIACOMO LEOPARDI COMO PENSADOR PRIMEIRO-ROMÂNTICO, 2022
In this paper we aim to approach Giacomo Leopardi's theory of imagination, one of the keystones of the theory of literature developed in the Zibaldone di pensieri (2016), by reading it through the lens of early german romantic philosophy. The effort to think poetry, in the Zibaldone, is responsible for fascinating speculations which, according to recent studies, such as Dido (2020), Givone (2003), Garcia (2019), mark the limits of the materialistic nihilism as an hermeneutical paradigm. Therefore, by reading three different passages of the Zibaldone di pensieri (2016), we analyze how the problem of imagination is structurally connected with those of the final cause and of Geist. This exegetical step then leads us to read the three passages by comparing them with Friedrich Schlegel's (1973) notions of Witz and Ironie, as well as with Kant's (1974) remarks on determinative and reflective judgment. We conclude that Leopardi's speculation on imagination could be better understood if read from the post-kantian and early german romantic perspective, a tradition with which the leopardian theory of literature has been hitherto rarely compared.
Alessandro D'Avenia: Book on Giacomo Leopardi (2016)
2018
In the third millennium, Giacomo Leopardi is going through what could be termed a process of redemption. The most evident and visible example in the media in Italy today is Alessandro D'Avenia's book on Leopardi. In this work D'Avenia attempts to show his reader what a loss it would be for a poet like Leopardi to be branded an unlucky hunchback whose pessimism spans the universe. Instead, Leopardi, in D'Avenia's broader view, becomes the poet whose words are shown to be a vehicle to maturity: literature, therefore, not as an end but as a means that fills the void or works in a complementary relationship with myth and ritual.
The poet who lost his head. Giacomo Leopardi's pathographies, in
Littérature et Médecine. Approches et perspectives (XVIe-XIXe siècles), ed. A. Carlino e A. Wenger, Génève, Droz, 2007
viale dell'Università, 34/a, +39064451721 (tel. and fax) maria.conforti@uniroma1.it running title: Leopardi's pathographies Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837 is one of the greatest and probably the most widely read poet of 19 th Century Italy. Besides his celebrated poems, he is the author of fascinating prose works: the Zibaldone, a mixture of a diary and a commonplace book, and the Operette morali, short novels and dialogues mixing classical erudition with science fiction. 1 His works displays an ambivalent admiration -accompanied by a sharp critique -of his own times, from the years of the Revolution to the Restoration. They may also be read as expressing striking 'anti-Italian' features: he mercilessly dwelled upon the national propensity to rhetoric and lack of intellectual rigour. At the same time, Leopardi was an early proponent of an Italian 'Risorgimento', the political movement that opened the way to the unification of the country. He enjoys a place of excellence in the Italian pantheon of letterati; together with Dante Alighieri and Alessandro Manzoni he has posthumously contributed to the creation of a national (literary) identity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, he has been admired and re-assessed in turn by Positivist and Idealist critics, by Fascists -who despised his physical frailty, while appreciating his critique of the Enlightenment -, as well as by Marxist theorists of literature. Leopardi's materialistic notion of man and nature was shaped by Enlightenment writers -mostly French -such as Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Idéologues. Critics have recently called attention upon his debts towards John
Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature: Leopardi's Discourse on Romantic Poetry
2013
In 1816 a violent literary quarrel engulfed Bourbon Restoration Italy. On one side the Romantics wanted an opening up of Italian culture towards Europe, and on the other the Classicists favoured an inward-looking Italy, based on its Greco-Roman roots. Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), a young poet and philosopher, wrote a Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry in 1818, aiming to contribute to the debate from a new perspective; it was finally published in 1906. This study provides the first complete English translation of the Discourse by Gabrielle Sims and Fabio A Camilletti. It is placed in context and its potential impact on contemporary Restoration Italy is assessed. Camilletti argues that the Classicist/Romanticist clash can be seen as the aftermath of the political, social and cultural trauma caused by the Napoleonic Wars.
Giacomo Leopardi's Poetry of the Embodied Imagination
2019
This essay examines Leopardi's embodied notion of the imagination and its impact on his poetics. By analyzing his treatment of mental imagery and of perceptual illusions, it shows how the idea of the materiality of the imagination and its processes led Leopardi to distance himself from mimetic poetry and to highlight the psychological dimension of poetic expression.
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