Moderna | 2019 | N. 1-2

The subject of this essay is what may be defined «Living Art» (Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost), or what the Greeks called tevknh tou biou, life-craft, to be learned through the knowledge of oneself, self-control, and what Michel Foucault calls le gouvernement de soi, only through which can one learn state-craft as le gouvernement des autres, as Plato has it in Alkibiades A. The present essay on the Architecture of the self develops through a comparative analysis of what we may call the Renaissance tékhnai-teaching handbooks: Castiglione, Machiavelli, of course, as well as handbooks on fencing, horse-riding and dressage, or handbooks of rhetoric, and, painting (Alberti’s De Pictura). The essay closes on the emblematic recurrence of …..te.a (self-control) figures, in Modernism (Galsworthy’s The Man of Property, and T. S. Eliot’s «controlling hands» in The Waste Land).

In 1888 Verga, then a member of a ministerial commission for dramatic art, contributed to a document that denounced the precariousness of Italian theater people, subject to the changing tastes of the public. Some ideas expressed in that report, recovered from «Bollettino ufficiale dell’istruzione», and Verga’s ambivalent attitude towards theater, contributed to the genesis of Verga’s last book of short stories. The eponymous character, of don Candeloro, a Sicilian ‘puparo’, a puppeteer, shows profound affinities with his author: both, artists at different levels, must confront an «audience gathered in a crowd» and the progressive commodification of Art.

This essay investigates the use of haiku made by Italian poets such as Andrea Zanzotto and Edoardo Sanguineti between the end of 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium. To Andrea Zanzotto, especially between 1984 and 1985, writing in haiku form matched a need to condense words into fragments and chromatic flashes, spreading them in his neo-English ‘Petel’. On the other hand, in Sanguineti’s words, haiku develops into frames of small, real facts, subjected to the joyful control of word.

The national edition of Federigo Tozzi’s works, started with the publication of Giovani, can be a fruitful opportunity for a new reading of the collection, including those short stories which, although part of Tozzi’s initial project, were excluded from the posthumous collection published by Treves in 1920. The present study is based on the results of the most authoritative philological surveys and critical essays on Tozzi’s works as well as on the considerations about literature that the author himself expressed in his essays. Our analysis of his twenty-four short stories goes beyond the conventional view of what a ‘collection’ is and aims at organizing their different elements (thematic, psychological, stylistic, linguistic) so as to restore the coherence and systematicity of this work.

This essay is meant to analyse the relationship between themes and narrative forms in Beppe Fenoglio’s novel. Its main thesis is that Fenoglio’s fictional style, rich in analepsis, flashbacks and digressions, is meant to show the conflicts between public commitment and private dimension. The present and the past meet and clash in the pages of the novel. The result is polyphony, according to Michail Bachtin’s definition. Realism and symbolism, historical and metahistorical space are simultaneously visible in the novel. In it we also find ‘modes’ that date back to epic, to romance, to tragedy.

Also as a poet, Fortini was strongly engaged in political and social topics or, otherwise, in allegorical discussions detached from the private sphere. His style is always consistent and even more so in contradiction, as is powerfully shown in his erotic poems. Sexuality in Fortini’s poetry is in line with literary tradition and storytelling urge : memory, existence, desire and guilt are mixed in a typically Fortini-like dialectical process.

This essay is meant to take into consideration the ‘problem of existence’ in Vittorio Sereni’s Frontiera (1941). Through a comparative analysis of Sereni’s prose and poems, this essay is meant to show Sereni’s poetic, lyrical, and philosophical reaction to the early-thirties problem posed by the intersection between Phenomenology and existentialism in Antonio Banfi’s philosophical school.

Through the focus offered by a poem written by Volponi and dedicated in morte to his friend and mentor, Pasolini, five years dead, this essay takes into consideration all of Volponi’s poems, novels, articles, and letters addressed to Pasolini. Three main features will be taken into special consideration: sound figures, the construction of a system of meaning through figures of speech and the vocabulary, and the absolute relevance of the figures of light in a general allegorical framework. Each of these features is peculiar both to Volponi’s writing style and to his perspective on the role of the intellectual, fully embodied by Pasolini. In Five years dead, Pasolini becomes a mirror-image of the intellectual, as well as of Volponi’s own ideal of intellectual commitment.

This essay in meant to explain and account for Sicilian dialectal words in Iolanda Insana’s poems. Some parts of the poet’s own commentary on words of difficult interpretation from the Messina linguistic area are here transcribed and explained. Insana, born in Messina, lived in Rome for sev-eral years. Her expressionistic realism is clearly linked to her Sicilian Messina childhood, and thus to her background and childhood. Her style however changes its components in time, from one collection of poems to the next, yet her poetry seems to be strongly rooted on some remote re-pression of both a personal and an anthropological shock.

In a letter to Armando Marchi, in which Rosselli describes her project for a new edition of Primi Scritti, she explains how Le Chinois à Rome is to be considered the most important work of the entire collection. By focusing on a close reading of Rosselli’s text, this essay is meant to investigate Rosselli’s statement. Le Chinois contains in nuce the stylistic and thematic features of Rosselli’s work, such as the influence of music and art, the reflection on the relationship between chance, identity and writing, and the use of literary allusions, with André Breton’s Nadja working as the ‘palimpsest’ of Le Chinois. Both Amelia Rosselli and Leonora Carrington, who like Nadja experienced the horror of mental asylums, rewrite her story. The ‘nouvelle Nadja’, no longer the passive object of desire, and the muse of the amour fou, becomes the creative Genius denouncing historical and political injustices.

The following study traces a synthetic history of the reception of Franco Fortini’s work, focusing on the period between the year of the writer’s death (1994) and the present. In this framework, marked in depth by the ideology of neo-liberalism and the concomitant affirmation of the ‘post-modern’, the interpretation of Fortini’s work by new generations of critics takes on a special importance, reaffirming its exemplary value, precisely insofar as it deeply disputes any conciliation with the status quo and the dominant ideology.