From Giorgio Agamben's Italian category of 'Comedy' to 'Profanation' as the political task of modernity : Ingravallo's soaring descent, or Dante according to Carlo Emilio Gadda
- Manuela Marchesini brings Agamben's ideas to bear on Gadda's "Pasticciaccio" and vice versa. While preserving the specificity of their different fields of operation, this mutual exposure contributes to reframing the Culture War of yore. On the one hand, we have a novel published after World War II with a tortuous gestation and convoluted publication history and reception, written by an author who happened to outlive his creative 'canto del cigno'; on the other, a philosophical and essayistic speculation on contemporary events. The function of Dante's "Comedy" in each author spans from the textual to the allegorical, but rests upon one single crucial common denominator: both Gadda and Agamben take literature seriously. [...] The present essay, part of a larger project unfolding along the same lines, attempts a 'close reading' in the spirit that Edward Said has solicited from the humanities in his lectures at Columbia - or, to put it differently, a tentative 'exercise' of critica in the wake of modern Italian Romance philology and textual criticism from Pasquali through Contini and Debenedetti (a lineage of which Agamben's approach appears to be mindful). [...] Marchesini passes over the general Dantesque infernal allegory of "Pasticciaccio" in order to expand on its final scene. Her thesis is that "Pasticciaccio's" allegorical use of Dante's "Comedy" does not just unravel its interpretive knot. It also points to a utopian overcoming of binarism that concurs with Agamben's reflections. "Pasticciaccio's" closure is neither an epiphany (in the sense of a final celebration of the missing piece that completes the puzzle of the novel), nor does it signal a collapse into ambiguity or irrationality (in the sense that everything is left undecided, wavering between one possibility and its opposite). Gadda maintains his interpellation of wholeness unequivocally throughout the novel.
Author: | Manuela Marchesini |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-516313 |
URL: | https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-02/marchesini_comedy-and-profanation.pdf |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_17 |
ISBN: | 978-3-85132-617-8 |
ISSN: | 2627-731X |
Parent Title (English): | Metamorphosing Dante : appropriations, manipulations, and rewritings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries / ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti and Fabian Lampart ; Cultural Inquiry ; 2 |
Publisher: | Turia + Kant |
Place of publication: | Wien |
Document Type: | Part of a Book |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2019/10/29 |
Year of first Publication: | 2011 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2019/11/20 |
Tag: | Italian literature; Productive reception |
GND Keyword: | Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia; Rezeption; Gadda, Carlo Emilio; Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana; Agamben, Giorgio |
Page Number: | 19 |
First Page: | 285 |
Last Page: | 303 |
HeBIS-PPN: | 456536043 |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik |
8 Literatur / 85 Italienische, rumänische, rätoromanische Literaturen / 850 Italienische, rumänische, rätoromanische Literaturen | |
Sammlungen: | CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft |
CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / ICI Berlin | |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - Namensnennung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen |