Strumenti critici | 2017 | N. 3

In two theatrical works of different ages – “Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de la Feuillée” (13th century) and Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck” (XVIII c.) – an unusual connection appears: that between peas and madness. Reasons, circumstances and variants of such a connection are discussed in this article.

The article focuses on the origin and the structural coherence of Decameron IV 2: the analysis also highlights its similarities with the frame narrative structure of the ‘Seventh Day’ stories (in which wives play tricks on their husbands) and with a group of comic old French tales that end tragically (a lover priest is punished). The comparison clarifies how Boccaccio rewrote the literary source of the central episode and inserted it in another narrative structure.

The article suggests that the name of Prospero, Shakespeare’s duke of Milan, might have been inspired by Prospero Podiani, a humanist who lived in Perugia between the 16th and the 17th century. This hypothesis is not merely based on the homonymy of the two characters, but associates their name with their common passion for books and learning, and points to a thick net of historical circumstances that could have carried information about Podiani to the cultural and political circles of Elizabeth I’s London.

Starting with the analysis of a problematic lexical choice in Salvatore Satta’s posthumous masterpiece “Il giorno del giudizio”, the essay aims to trace back one of the novel’s main autobiographical topics, the «missed family legacy», hypotesizing its connection with the book’s genesis and structure.

The essays analyzes Luciano Cecchinel’s poetry written in both Italian and in the dialect spoken in the northern area of the province of Treviso. In doing so, the author employs Dante’s categories and argues that the «scented panther of the poetic language» originates from Cecchinel’s bilingualism and the constant tension between Italian and the poet’s local dialect.

Since Edoardo Persico’s writings have no longer been available in bookshops, their re-release is meritorious as well as an opportunity for a new evaluation of his figure. Edoardo Persico, who died nearly at thirty-six under mysterious circumstances, is a contradictory figure. His main legacy can be considered his critique in the field of modern architecture to which he especially devoted the last five years of his life. Although he became an intellectual leading figure, Persico promoted the separation between architecture and town planning culture. This is a long-lasting trend which still affects history and criticism of architecture in Italy and abroad.

This paper aims to describe the crisis of the leibnizian possible worlds’ model in “Kosmos”, the last novel by Witold Gombrowicz. To underline the damage undergone by the leibnizian selection mechanism, which was previously able to guarantee the correspondence between world and soul, we mainly take into consideration one of the last essays by Deleuze, “The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque”, aimed at pointing out Leibniz’s legacy in our Neobaroque age.

The main model of Segreti di Milano is Balzac’s “La Comédie humaine”, from which Testori takes the concept of ‘melodramatic imagination’ (Peter Brooks), a narrative mode typical of 18th-century French Operas, which emphasizes the struggle between Good and Evil. In the short stories of “Segreti di Milano” part I, “Il ponte della Ghisolfa” (1958), and in the posthumous novel “Nebbia al Giambellino”, written at the beginning of the 1960s, we can notice that traditional values spread in the country stand for Good, while greed, callousness, selfishness, characteristics of the new metropolis, stand for Evil, which starts colonizing the outskirts too.

An early draft of the first chapter of “Le armi l’amore” (1963) – Emilio Tadini’s first novel – was published in the journal «Quaderni milanesi» in 1962. Being quite different from the definitive version, this text allows to understand how Emilio Tadini worked on the verbal structure and on the syntax configuration in order to obtain a perfect narrative machine, the literary expression of his ‘poetica dell’integralità’.

Considering “L’Allegria” as the book that establishes the «poetic diary» as the emerging model of 20th-century lyric collections, the paper points out that what Ungaretti actually composed was a simulated diary. Diary simulation enabled Ungaretti to realize a deep redefinition of the traditional lyric pact, updating its ritual root and inscribing it in a nearly imperceptible but powerful mimeticfictional frame, capable of affecting both the macro-textual arrangement and the internal structure of the single texts.