Strumenti critici | 2021 | N. 155
Anno 2021 – Annata: XXXVI – N. 155
A cura di Federica Bellei
Titolo articolo: Chi chiamerà questo tempo antico? Immagini del futuro
Imagining the future was, in the past, the concern of divinely inspired prophets and sibyls – Tiresias and Cassandra, Samuel and Isaiah. Three masterpieces of science-fiction invent different futures: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Clifford Simak’s City, and Stanley Kubrick’s (and Arthur Clarke’s) 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this essay the author discusses these modern masterpieces in the light of the image Dante uses in Paradiso XVII when he asks his ancestor Cacciaguida whether he should reveal what he has learnt on his journey through the other world. In that passage Dante creates a surprisingly new notion of the future which is confirmed in other episodes of the Comedy (notably Oderisi da Gubbio’s in Purgatorio XI) and is modelled on a conception of history more “humanµ than that presented by twentieth-century science-fiction.
Lingua: Italiano/InglesePag. 3-27
Etichette: Profezia, Clifford Simark, Dante, Stanley Kubrick, Walter M. Miller,
Titolo articolo: Disappartenenza e rispecchiamento. I ‘requiem’ di Tabucchi tra lingue e paesi
This essay examines the cultural complexity which characterizes Antonio Tabucchi’s inventive world by focusing on crucial aspects of his fiction also in relation to Fernando Pessoa’s works. Set in Italy, France, Portugal and Greece, Tabucchi’s stories are dominated by interchanges and heterotopia. His privileged places are cafes, trains, stations, hospitals, and cemeteries, which Foucault considered to be heterotopic par excellence. Characters often mix places and languages, blurring the boundaries between reality, dreams, and hallucination. Requiem, a novel in Portuguese, is an exemplary case in this regard: it is narrated in Paris but the events take place in Lisbon, and it only contains one syllable in Italian, in the Tuscan dialect of the author’s childhood.
Lingua: ItalianoPag. 29-40
Etichette: Antonio Tabucchi, Pessoa Fernando, Heterotopia, Requiem,
Titolo articolo: Filologia e impazienza. Tre piste per una biografia intellettuale di Maria Corti
Maria Corti, one of the most prominent Italian literary scholars of the twentieth century, was for more than three decades Professor of History of the Italian Language at the University of Pavia, the founder of the internationally renowned Fondo Manoscritti (now Centro di ricerca sulla tradizione manoscritta di autori moderni e contemporanei), the author of some forty seminal books and innumerable essays, the director of two editorial collections and three innovative literary journals (Strumenti critici among them). However, this brilliant cursus honorum does not fully cover the multifaceted, colourful, unexpected aspects of her literary research. This essay aims to track three main themes – or questions – that run through her whole work and elucidate its most adventurous sides: the detective-like attitude that led Corti to face literary texts as puzzles to be solved; the connection she always saw between erudite studies and the cultural issues of her times; her curiosity for the process of literary creation. By following the inter-twined paths of these motifs, a deeper insight is provided into Corti’s tendency to go off the beaten track and into her ability to anticipate some developments of the literary research.
Lingua: ItalianoPag. 41-70
Etichette: Filologia, Linguistica, Maria Corti,
Titolo articolo: Bella e malata. Analisi di un topos nella poesia tra Cinquecento e Seicento
This article explores a frequent theme in Renaissance and Baroque poetry: the poet praying to a divinity to restore his beloved to health. Already present in Latin elegies, the theme is introduced into Italian verse by Petrarch, who refers to Laura’s illness in four sonnets of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. From the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the subject of the ailing beloved becomes a topos, giving rise to a series of variations and combinations
Lingua: ItalianoPag. 71-93
Etichette: Amore, Barocco, Malattia, Poesia,
Titolo articolo: Parole per Pin. Emergenze nel lessico del primo libro di Calvino
The hero’s condition in The Path to the Spiders’ Nests is defined by two pairs of recurring words, related to the ideas of exclusion and integration, enthusiasm and disgust. Pin oscillates between these opposite terms, but this inconsistency, due to his extreme youth, is matched by remarkable qualities, especially in guessing other people’s feelings and characters. His constant thinking over people and events, as well as the monologues of two minor characters (Giacinto and Pietromagro), help reduce the gap between the plot and the ideological reflections, mainly entrusted to the Brigade Commissar Kim
Lingua: ItalianoPag. 95-106
Etichette: Lessico, Italo Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Pin,
Titolo articolo: Da Selene all’Apollo. Nuove acquisizioni sugli articoli ‘spaziali’ di Dino Buzzati
The essay examines a corpus of seven previously unknown articles on Moon landing published by Dino Buzzati in the culture column of Italy’s major newspaper, Corriere della sera. On the one hand, the articles witness the fears of the Atomic Age by reflecting on mankind’s excessive ambitions and disillusionment after 1969. On the other, they trace flattering portraits of astronauts as well as common observers, molding science with everyday life (an attitude reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics). What emerges is the transition from an imagined, literary moon to a more tridimensional, nuanced representation. Such contradictory instances are expressed through a variety of genres, forms, and registers that place Buzzati’s ‘spatial’ articles among the most interesting outcomes of his production between the 1960s and the 1970s.
Lingua: ItalianoPag. 107-127
Etichette: Archivio, Fantastico, Luna, Dino Buzzati, Italo Calvino,
Titolo articolo: Manifesto: appunti per una lettura critica. Retoriche, politiche, parodia
By tracing the general structures of avant-garde manifestoes, this essay aims to point out how women apply specific rhetorical strategies when writing manifestoes. As a genre that derives from the historical functions of public speech (mostly shaped during the French Revolution), feminist or proto-feminist manifesto interacts with the notions of identity, citizenship, public space, imaginary and embodied autorship. The outcomes of an alternative genealogy, from Olympe de Gouges to Carla Lonzi and the most recent feminist manifestoes, challenge the universality of masculine literary canon by using parody as a subversive tool.
Lingua: ItalianoPag. 129-154
Etichette: Canone letterario, Femminismo, Parodia, Politica,
Titolo articolo: Le streghe e la chiesa corrotta: il regno di Culfora nel «Baldus» della Toscolanense (1521)
The first draft of Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus, knows as the Paganini (1517), ends with the killing of the witch Culfora. The episode is very short and unbound from the rest of the poem. In the Toscolanense (1521), the second draft of the work, Folengo substantially rewrote the episode of Culfora: the few lines of the Paganini version become two cantos (21-22), and Culfora becomes the queen of a very powerful sect whose members are cardinals and contemporary politicians. This article examines this episode, with particular focus on the overlapping between fiction and historical reality (the corruption of the Church)
Lingua: ItalianoPag. 155-181
Etichette: Stregoneria, Teofilo Folengo, Baldus,
Titolo articolo: «La pura luce dell’esistere». Tracce petrarchesche in «Conglomerati» di Andrea Zanzotto
The aim of this essay is to examine and clarify the functions and meanings of the complex intertextual relationship between Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Andrea Zanzotto’s last poetry collection Conglomerati (2009).
Lingua: ItalianoPag. 183-202
Etichette: Intertestualità, Andrea Zanzotto, Francesco Petrarca, Conglomerati,
A cura di: Angela Maria Andrisano e Vinicio Tammaro
Edizioni: Libreria Universitaria, Padova – 2019
Lingua: Italiano
Pag. 203-210
Recensore/i: Jean Robaey
Etichette:
Titolo libro/articolo recensito: Un mondo migliore
Edizioni: Bompiani, Milano – 2019
Lingua: Italiano
Pag. 210-211
Recensore/i: Luca Lenzini
Etichette:
