Moderna | 2023 | N. 1

The contribution deals with some theoretical questions concerning the Paolo and Francesca’s episode in Dante’s Commedia, namely : narration’s levels, dialectic author/characters, topics of memory, isotopies, connection of reading and action.

This essay explores Dante’s influence on Rosselli’s poetry, especially on Variazioni Belliche. I have based my analysis on the annotated copies of two works: Dante’s Rime from Rosselli’s personal library (kept in Fondo Rosselli in Viterbo) and T. S. Eliot’s Dante (kept in Centro Manoscritti of University of Pavia). Rosselli’s Dantism is a modernist one: the great poet is read through the lens of T. S. Eliot’s interpretation which considers Dante a master of the allegorical method. Virginia Woolf’s legacy is fundamental as well: the use of parody in Orlando influences Rosselli’s process of rewriting the lyrical tradition of dolce stil novo Poetry. Modernist literary devices such as allegory and parody are chosen to represent the alienation of modernity and embrace an idea of literature as political resistance against violence and social injustices.

Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations are two examples of narratives concerned with the personal development of an individual as he learns about himself and tries to find his place in the world. They stand at the beginning and at the height of the development of the European Bildungsroman; Great Expectations is also known for its distinctive treatment of the genre, which sets it apart from other novels, such as Dickens’s own David Copperfield. This study focuses on a comparison between the Conte du Graal and Great Expectations showing that both texts share a similar narrative structure and a number of themes and motifs. The analysis of these shared features allows us to understand the different approaches to the theme of personal development in the texts and also their role in the development of the Bildungsroman tradition.

The essay is dedicated to the pamphlet written by the politician and jurist Mino Martinazzoli (1931-2011). Based on the reworking of various speeches made during the bicentenary of Alessandro Manzoni’s birth (1985), the text contains an original interpretation of the Storia della Colonna Infame. In it, Martinazzoli analyses Manzoni’s work from the point of view of style and argument construction, and it demonstrates its proximity to a trial indictment. The essay contextualises the contribution in the cultural, ideological and political debate of the 1980s and examines Martinazzoli’s interpretative thesis, focusing in particular on its ethical-political and stylistic-formal analysis.

This essay strives to enquire into landscape, to understand and illustrate how the latter is an experience, a perception that has been lived through, but, at the same time, a sensation connected to images rooted in people’s minds and stored in iconic works of art. We start by concentrating on how landscape works, and how beholders make sense of the intense emotions it conveys; this sense-effect will be studied as a product of the cultural preconditions which give shape to a landscape’s sensuous feeling in its interaction with the social environment that determines its final meaning. Our study will focus on a sphere that englobes passive and active factors, immediacy and negotiations, surprise and intentionality, that coexist in a peculiar fusion of private and collective units. This analysis, will also take a look at the various hi-tech versions.

The ‘spatial turn’, as defined by Edward Soja in 1986, has represented a crucial paradigm shift which has led to new perceptions and representations of spaces and has made it possible to give new interpretations to postmodern spatial features. This article analyzes samples of the works of the most eminent Italian poets of the second half of the twentieth century, Vittorio Sereni, Giorgio Caproni and Andrea Zanzotto, with the aim of tracing their relationships with their native places and landscapes and defining their spatial-environmental poetics.

In this issue of Moderna Michael Jakob and Clelia Martignoni share a similar, geographically oriented and literary structured goal: Jakob tries to understand how landscape makes both an emotional and a physical claim on us, and how we are to respond. Relying on geocritical and geopolitical bibliography Martignoni examines the work of famous Italian 20th century poets in order to discover how geographical images or metaphors in poetry are not simply ways of mirroring the world, but essential elements for understanding landscape in its double role of cultural construction and figure within which we find or lose ourselves. This introduction illustrates the theoretical context in which both scholars operate, locating the origin and the historical and iconic stages of development for a full-fledged geo-centred aesthetic ; it also suggests that geocriticism not only absorbs all forms of perception and consciousness in its visual paradigm, but also dictates the symbolic rules through which we nowadays, consciously or unconsciously, interact with the world around us.