Strumenti critici | 2022 | N. 158

The essay offers a stylistic and linguistic commentary on Antonio Machado’s poem Siesta included in the collection De un cancionero apócrifo

Many critics have stressed the unprecedented attention bestowed to (and the centrality acquired by) material artifacts in Balzac’s novels. This essay questions and problematizes this critical assumption by highlighting the many ambivalences that are at play in Balzac’s materialistic stance and the paramount role played, in the narrative universe of La Comédie humaine, by objects as signs that always stand for something else, beyond their immediate materiality and their simply “being thereµ. Along these lines, the essays explores the complex dialectics between sign and presence, objects and things, the object and the subject, in the wake of the industrial revolution, the emerging consumer society, and the dramatic social changes of the first decades of the nineteenth century

This article offers an analysis of the recurring motif of the bones in Giorgio Caproni’s works (poetry, narrative, criticism) and examines the textual links connecting a number of Caproni’s poems which focus on this motif and allude to relevant passages from the Bible.

This article, devoted to Zanzotto’s first collection of poems, Dietro il paesaggio (1951), starts with a critical discussion of the possible meanings of the title, which leads to a new interpretation of the meanings of the word ‘dietro’ (‘behind’) in dialect. This critical proposal makes it possible to revise the alleged antithesis between nature and history that many scholars have attributed to this work. It also suggests the adoption of a different perspective which is not focused on current events but is connected to the pantheistic view that Friedrich Hölderlin – at that time Zanzotto’s most influential poetic model – had learnt from Spinoza, an author who figures prominently in Zanzotto’s philosophical library.

The essay starts with an analysis of the poem La quercia sradicata dal vento in IX Ecloghe (1962) and a few autograph notes by Andrea Zanzotto, and thereby examines the poet’s previous production in order to shed light on certain psychic and symbolic features connected with parental figures, and to identify their connection with the author’s poetics

The essay illustrates and analyzes the critical edition of the manuscript Saibante-Hamilton 390, recently produced under the direction of Maria Luisa Meneghetti. The manuscript gathers some of the earliest and most remarkable texts from Northern Italy. The critical edition contains an in-depth study of every aspect of the manuscript including its iconographic apparatus; the work is thus an outstanding model for future research in this field.

The essay presents a philological and intertextual interpretation of La morte meditata, a short sequence of poems included in Sentimento del Tempo. Starting from Petrarch’s Triumphus Mortis, through an articulated re-interpretation based on the fundamental words of his entire work (‘memory’, ‘dream’, ‘death’), Ungaretti recreates a new discourse about memory, which introduces to the new poetry of La Terra Promessa.

Through the close reading of a page of García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca, this essay aims to show the formal strategies of the novel and how they blend with the content of the text, more specifically with the representation of power. Five main elements are analyzed: narrative structure, style, tone, voice, and space/time.

Alberto Nessi is a Swiss poet and writer from Ticino, better known in Switzerland than he is in Italy. This essay aims to offer the first comprehensive analysis of Nessi’s long poetic itinerary, begun in the Sixties and still ongoing. A few emblematic poems are analyzed also in the light of Nessi’s conception of poetry.