Strumenti critici | 2015 | N. 2

Cesare Segre’s great philological enterprises and critical works are retraced and reconsidered one year after his death (16th March 2014).

This essay seeks to address the following question: how is it possible to explain Italo Calvino’s constant interest in Galileo’s works? On various occasions, Calvino expressed strong admiration for Galileo’s style as well as for his prototype of the modern ‘homo curiosus’ and his ‘cosmological ambition’, which he felt very close to his own and by which his literary production was deeply influenced.

The various ways in which writers begin their poems are scrutinized through an analysis of a wide range of literary texts from antiquity to modern times. Particular attention is paid to both Dante’s theory of inspiration and Paul Valéry’s idea of the divine origin of the opening verse.

From an etymological point of view, the adjective ‘falsch’ refers to both deception and self-deception. In Thomas Mann’s novel “Der Tod in Venedig”, the lexical area and semantic field related to falsehood essentially concern art and artists in their relationship to life and, most notably, concern erotic desire viewed as life’s most powerful manifestation.

Through the study of the books consulted by Elsa Morante whilst she was writing La storia (1974), the article suggests a typology of the writer’s various approaches to her literary, philosophical, and historical sources.

The present article discusses some aspects of the film “The Innocents” directed by Jack Clayton and the differences between the filmic narrative and the novel “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James that inspired it. The intentional ambiguity of the film’s narrative structure is examined with a special focus on the mechanisms of projective identification that it triggers in both the spectators and the critics.

The paper deals with the Italian translation of Meletinskij’s major essay on the poetics of the short story. Such a comprehensive scholarly research brilliantly reconstructs the history of the literary form through a broad comparative approach and, despite some puzzling gaps, remains inspiring and thought-provoking.

This essay offers a close-reading of Nerina, the short-story that Paul Heyse (1830-1914) published in 1878 as the opening text of his translation of Leop¬ardi’s poems. Heyse’s text builds on the stereotype of the melancholic, solitary and unhappy poet. It is, however, complemented by his essay Leopardi’s “Welt anschauung”, which draws a fairly complex profile of Leopardi with insights into the poet that will gain ground in the 20th century, and which may explain why Heyse decided to omit “Nerina” in the second edition of his translation from Leopardi.

By identifying the authorship of a manuscript note in the so-called “Albo dell’officina”, Jean Lorrain’s Le Noêl de Line is recognised as the source of a few verses in Guido Gozzano’s poem “La Signorina Felicita”.

The examination of the manuscripts of Ottiero Ottieri’s “L’irrealtà quotidiana” held at the University of Pavia’s Fondo Manoscritti allows the recontruction of the history of the novel and sheds light on the autobiographical theme and the author’s intellectual background.

This article builds on the assumption that Sannazaro’s “Arcadia” has a deeply unitary structure which has its centre in the opposition between nature and culture as expressed in the “Prologue”.