Strumenti critici | 2016 | N. 2

By using a variety of examples ranging from medieval to late nineteenth-century literature, the essay argues that the main aim of literature is not simply cognition, but rather, as writers have always known, to touch the readers’ heart and, like music, to make it resonate.

The essay explores various aspects of Gianni Celati’s narrative and critical works. Celati’s conception of narration underlines the difference between the tradition of the novel and the tradition of everyday storytelling.

Over the past forty years, a vast corpus of Gadda manuscripts (published and unpublished texts, working notebooks) have re-emerged. During this time, though, no manuscript draft of the “Pasticciaccio” was traced. This great lacuna prevented scholars from providing answers to such crucial questions as: did Gadda plan to complete the novel? Who murdered Liliana Balducci? Who were the murderer’s accomplices? The recent discovery of a section of the “Pasticciaccio” ‘s genetic dossier allows us to propose, at long last, some answers, and above all to read the splendid, ‘imperfect’, conclusion which Gadda wrote in the late forties, after publishing the first version of the novel in ‘Letteratura’ (1946).

This essay aims to focus on the unexpectedly weak sensitivity to visual arts shown by the Nobel Prize in Literature (1906), Giosuè Carducci. As a matter of fact, Carducci’s imagery of ancient Greek art and landscape looks very scholarly and in some way phantasmal, whereas his expertise on Italian and especially Etruscan antiquities appears to be remarkably in-depth and up-to-date. The reasons for such an impressive difference of perception lie in the Etruscan self-identity, claimed by Carducci as born in Tuscany, and his dedicated time and attendance at scientific meetings of archaeologists and historians, who were operating at the University of Bologna.

One of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s most typical forms of artistic expression was certainly the ‘double work of art’. In this specific area it is possible to find numerous hints of Laurence Sterne’s influence on Rossetti’s works. As in “Tristram Shandy”, the relation between images and words becomes a way to enter, albeit with different aims, the very process of creation.

The essay focuses on Toti Scialoja’s poetry by reading it as a unity based on the dialectic between continuity and discontinuity. By analyzing the texts from Scialoja’s first and second period and by interpreting the similarities and differences that come to surface, a detailed examination of Scialoja’s poetic production will be provided with particular attention to his literary memory and the representation of the animal world.

In this essay I will discuss how Vincenzo Consolo’s idea of history changes from the beginning of his literary career to its end, from an initial still conceivable optimism to a final almost aphasic desperation. Only theatre may still offer a vital chance to future generations.

The aim of this essay is to investigate the birth of comparative literature in Russia by analyzing the theory of Aleksandr Nikolaevicˇ Veselovskij, who is considered the founder of Russian comparativism, and by examining his influence on Viktor Maksimovicˇ Žirmunskij and Eleazar Moisievicˇ Meletinskij. The former related Vesleovskij’s theory to the formalist approach, the latter to the study of folklore and myth. In order to understand their theory, the essay explores Žirmunskij’s account of English literature and Meletinskij’s analysis of Scandinavian culture, with a special focus on the major thread running through the entire essay, i.e. the veselovskijan conception of comparative literature.