Strumenti critici | 2023 | N. 161

In this essay I trace, first, through Hesiod’s Theogony and Boccaccio’s Genealogie, the genealogy of oblio, oblivion. The mostly negative connotations of the word – and of the actual physical state it describes – are constant through the Middle Ages (witness John of Salisbury) down to Shakespeare, yet lethe has from the very beginning something in common with poetry and truth (a-letheia). The struggle between oblivion and memory (as exemplified in the terzine beginning with «Qual è colui che sognando vede») dominates Dante’s account in Paradiso XXXIII, but at one point in the canto he talks of letargo («Un punto solo m’è maggior letargo»), and seemingly with a positive connotation. I go back to the sources Dante employs here and pick up precise definitions by Hugutio of Pisa. Quoting Mallarmé, I show how «lethargy» evokes Argo the mythical ship, and Argo the constellation. The conclusion is with T.S. Eliot’s final lines in Four Quartets.

The hermeneutic concept of ‘application’ is central to Gadamer’s philosophy and represents a definite perspective in literary studies. This essay proposes to test the Gadamerian Anwendung on Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, in order to highlight the topical elements present in the Sicilian writer’s work and its ability to speak today, to the women and men of our time, on such decisive issues as human relationship and the body.

Starting with a text of the Fifties, 1944: FAIER, the theme, or rather the situation, of the writing on the walls recurs in both Andrea Zanzotto’s poetry and prose. Mostly anonymous, wall inscriptions almost always signify the passage of time and history, and their traumatic ‘tattoo’ on the subject’s psyche as well as on the territory’s «flesh-earth». The origin of this obsessive theme is to be found in the funeral inscriptions engraved in monumental Fascist memorials, or in humble country stones, in memory of those fallen in the First World War: monumental presences, in a broad sense, that marked the poet’s childhood and youth.

The article offers an analysis of Italo Calvino’s novel A Plunge into Real Estate (1957). Through the semi-autobiographical story of the construction of a building during the economic boom of the 1950s in Italy, the author examines many aspects of the Italian society at the time. Calvino chooses a prescribed construction model and focuses on the representation of the building site and the personal and professional relationships that revolve around it. Thus, through a comparison between the perspective of the protagonist Quinto, an ex-Communist intellectual, and that of Caisotti, a rather dishonest entrepreneur and builder, Calvino addresses themes such as the rise of the new bourgeoisie and the legacy of the Resistance.

This article explores the reception history of the story of Ugolino in Dante’s Inferno from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. The analysis focuses on the relationship between literature and the arts in the works of Jonathan Richardson, Joshua Reynolds, Johann Jakob Bodmer, Lord Byron, and William Blake.

The verb torpere ‘to numb’, following the example of Dante and Petrarch, was used in poetry until the nineteenth. In the twentieth century it significantly reappears in Eugenio Montale’s Ossi di seppia and in a late poem by Carlo Betocchi.

Being the son of a great writer is far from simple, especially if you end up becoming the translator into various languages and the curator of the paternal legacy. Even more difficult, if the father in question is Vladimir Nabokov, an author who until his last breath opposed a granite resistance – as solid as his incomparable defensive narcissism – to Freudian thought and to the ambivalence that undermines (and ultimately enriches) any true affection.

In 1937, in defiance of the fascist regime, Giuseppe Pagano, editor of «Casabella», invited Alfonso Gatto to collaborate with the magazine. Gatto had spent six months in the San Vittore prison because of his anti-fascist activities. Pagano thus hoped to fill the void following Edoardo Persico’s death (10 January 1936). Gatto was a friend of Persico, who had acted as his mentor, and accepted this challenge by contributing to the monthly column ‘Cronaca dell’architettura’ from March 1937 to November 1938. This essay highlights Gatto’s pieces on Fascist architecture, which he considered to be the mirror of a moral and cultural involution of the hegemonic classes. As was generally the case with the magazine ‘Casabella’ in the interwar period, however, Gatto’s polemical work lacked a reflection on the theme of the city and rather mainly focused on individual buildings. Only in 1964 Gatto wrote his most mature article: a reflection on the housing issue that can still be considered one of the best contributions on the topic to this date.

In 1990 Federico Tiezzi commissioned Giovanni Giudici to rewrite Dante’s Paradiso for his stage adaption of the entire Commedia, which was concluded the following year. This article aims to analyse Giudici’s drama from an intertextual perspective, by highlighting the way the poet used a great variety of literary and philosophical works as the basis for his personal interpretation of Dante’s third cantica. More specifically, it explores the relationship between Giudici’s rewriting and Walter Benjamin’s philosophical account of history and language as well as Augustin’s Confessions and other significant works and authors (like Paul of Tarsus, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot and Giacomo Noventa), who are quoted in the poet’s private notebooks but also in the text itself. Lastly, by considering Giudici’s poetic production and essays, the essay provides an interpretation of the text which takes into account the author’s poetic theory.

The essays analyses the images of fading light in T.S. Eliot’s first poetry collection Prufrock and Other Observations by focusing on the prevalent twilight and nocturnal atmosphere in numerous texts, most notably in the Preludes, where a significant connection can be found with a passage from The Ascent of the ’F6 by Auden and Isherwood. The fading of the light – connected with the end of the working day – is the objective correlative of the deactivation of the human world, highlighted by the contrast with the culmination of the sun which is instead the archetypical symbol of the fertility of life forces. Such images are intertwined with a series of images of death, degradation and degeneration which constitute the semantic opposition of the archetypes of water and fire and thus of fertility.