Strumenti critici | 2022 | N. 160

Anna Maria Ortese is not used to arguing, nor to expressing her beliefs in a systematic way. However, her essays and journalistic writings, as well as the reflections contained in her novels, have a deep-seated consistency. Starting from the analysis of a 1967 exchange of views with Italo Calvino about space travels, this essay highlights Ortese’s early environmentalist conscience, and points out two recurrent topics in Ortese’s work: the idea that not only the living, but the whole world (actually, the entire universe) breathes, and the need of a radical change in the way we inhabit our planet. Her aim is to foster a new concern for the poorest and the most marginalised, and a caring attitude of the surrounding world.

This essay explores the light paradigm in P.B. Shelley from a comparative perspective by arguing that his well-known representation of the cosmos in terms of light physics goes far beyond Western culture’s narrow boundaries. On the contrary, it draws from ancient India’s Vedic and Upanishadic cosmology, specifically, the so-called ‘doctrine of the Brahman’, whom Shelley learned through Sir William Jones’s Works and artistically modelled in his writings, from Queen Mab to The Triumph of Life.

The article offers an interpretation of canto XXX of Paradise by reading Dante through Dante. Various connections are traced with other passages of the poem and with other works, Dante’s lyric poetry, Vita nuova, Convivio and the Epistles.

Published in 1958 by Garzanti, I viaggi la morte offers a multifaceted portrayal of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s critical activity over the span of thirty years, by gathering texts as diverse as linguistic, literary, and philosophical essays, reviews of works of different types, and interviews. This article aims to piece together the book’s elaborative history through the examination of previously unexplored manuscripts, kept at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan. As revealed by several documents, Gadda already planned to put together a collection of critical essays in the early thirties but postponed its realization for decades. A few tentative lists of texts drawn up by Gadda in February and March 1956 show that he had a clear idea of the work’s structure before Pietro Citati, editor at Garzanti, assisted him with the volume’s publication. New light is also shed on the genesis of Come lavoro (1949), the future opening text of I viaggi la morte: it originated from the unfinished draft of an imaginary interview with Gadda’s doppelgänger, Anadiabante De Carlo, concerning the conditioning of the social milieu on the writer.

Harold Bloom was an attentive and profound reader of Hamlet. This essay aims to demonstrate that despite his claims and denials, his critical theory strongly relied on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis.

This article investigates Leonardo Sciascia’s non-fiction writing to demonstrate how the need to extract the obscure multifaceted truth from the underground of reality and bring it to the surface determines his choice to ally with some partisan authors (particularly Pirandello, Savinio, and Calvino) in the battle against «deep writers». Savinio claims, for example, that there is no depth that «intelligence cannot make superficial», except for stupidity, which remains deep. Intelligence thus belongs solely to the surface, as in the case of Stendhal, who chooses not to adopt ‘depthism’. Sciascia learns this lesson from Savinio, who is often referred to, and returns to it so frequently that it becomes his preferred method in criticism and fiction.

The article analyses a few previously unknown and unpublished letters by Giovanni Verga and Luigi Pirandello. Some letters were sent to members of the Geneva family Plan during the first thirty years of the twentieth century, while other messages commemorate those who died in the Great War.

Through the analysis of Giorgio Manganelli’s critical notes on John Keats and Gabriele D’Annunzio, this essay aims to highlight some cultural models (Walter Pater, Mario Praz and Benedetto Croce, among the others) that have shaped the author’s literary remarks in 1948-1949.

The editorial correspondence between Franco Fortini and the Einaudi publishing house consists of more than one thousand letters, mostly unpublished, which are held at the Einaudi Archive (Turin), the Fortini Archive (University of Siena). This article provides a first analysis of these materials from both a philological and a historical-critical perspective. It also offers a description of the database Epistulae, published in July 2022 after being developed within the project “Phil-Ounilµ at the University of Lausanne.

This essay explores a large corpus of texts encompassing the French versions of the Dante’s Comedy from the nineteenth century to the present, by focussing on the translation of the diatopic variation from Italian into French, more specifically on the case of the Bolognese affirmative particle «sipa» (Inf., XVIII). Four main translation strategies of Dante’s heterolingualism are identified: nontranslation, suppression, intratextual translation, and oblique translation.