Strumenti critici | 2015 | N. 1

From Homer to Wallace Stevens a singular meeting between Ulysses and the stars marks the history of Western poetry and Western views of the universe. The hero of the “Odyssey” is the first fictional character who sails following the stars, but this posture is repeated, with a hundred significant variations, in the story of Dante’s Ulysses as well as in Amerigo Vespucci’s letters and in Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”. Piero Boitani explores the scientific and literary meanings of this conjunction, showing that the division between the ‘two cultures’ is entirely false.

The article explores Tolstoj’s short novel “Family Happiness” putting it in comparison to contemporary European literature, notably Russian (Turgénev, Checov), and connecting it to the author’s biography and ideas. The focus of the analysis is the female narrator’s multifaceted psyche, from which stems the uncertainty regarding the peaceful end of the work.

The inquiry deals with the formal innovations introduced by Pascoli which mostly involve metrics and also have profound reverberations on the contents of his poetry. Special attention is paid to the phenomenology and structures of the rhetoric figure of analogy recurring throughout the texts.

A heretofore unknown typescript, written by Leo Spitzer in 1916 while working for the Austrian military censorship, has been recently found in the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna. The document helps to define the origin and the mutual relationships between the “Italienische Kriegsgefangenenbriefe” (1921) and the “Umschreibungen des Begriffes ‘Hunger’ im Italienischen” (1920), as well as to reconstruct the original text of few letters included in the collection.

The essay analyses the eccentric practice of self-annotation in Gadda’s books with special regard to Gérard Genette’s literary theory on paratext in his pionereeing typological study “Seuils” (1987). The overflowing and exhilarating footnotes appended to Gadda’s texts often invoke humour and satire. In this respect, such ironic uses of self-commentary are traced and compared to certain exemplary strategies that had been inventively employed by Jonathan Swift.

The article examines nine Second World War diaries that deal with the Italian liberation and were written by the following authors: Emanuele Artom, Dante Livio Bianco, Franco Calamandrei, Alba de Céspedes, Franco Fortini, Ada Gobetti Marchesini Prospero, Nuto Revelli, Massimo Salvadori, and Giovanna Zangrandi. In a contribution previously published in this journal, Sergio Bozzola analysed the use of verb tenses and their stylistic meanings. This paper focuses now on the rhetoric and narrative structures of the diaries that transform them into authentic short stories.

The essay examines the different ways Luciano Erba uses irony, considered as a form of the thought, in his works. Over the time, the poet turns to irony more clearly and openly, viewing it as a means – or even the only possible one – to find an answer to the endless quest for a meaning, which becomes increasingly strong in his poems. Erba’s Socratic questioning and dissembling is refined in the light of the elements of “kenosis” of the Evangelical language and leads the poet somewhere close to the truth, after his dangerous travel through the nothingness.

This article aims to provide a reinterpretation of Vittorio Sereni’s poetry entitled “Concert in the Garden”, collected in “Frontiera” (1941). Through the use of previously unexplored sources new light is shed upon certain passages of the text that allude to car races.