850 Italienische, rumänische, rätoromanische Literaturen
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Transforming a text - narrative or poetic - into a play, made of dialogues and organized into scenes, has been one of the most frequent forms of literary transcodification both in the past and in the present. We can find examples of this procedure at the very origins of Italian theatre, which indeed began as the rewriting of earlier texts, both in the "sacre rappresentazioni" and in the profane field: the Bible in the first case and the Ovidian mythologies in the second. Poliziano's "Fabula d'Orfeo" and "Cefalo e Procri" by Niccolò da Correggio are the first well-known examples of this process. Thus, the metamorphosis of a text into a dramatization has many models in the history of theatre and literature. It would be of great interest to start with an overview of the different types, aims, and forms of transcodification of texts that are enacted in order to create dramatizations capable of being performed on stage. Erminia Ardissino attempts to offer an introduction to her study of Giovanni Giudici's play about Dante's "Paradiso" with a brief discussion of three different practices of theatrical transcodification. She looks at three pièces written at the request of the Italian scenographer Federico Tiezzi between 1989 and 1990 as stage productions of the three cantiche of the Divine Comedy. Although they belong to the same project, are inspired by the same person, and share a unified aim, the three pièces created by Edoardo Sanguineti, Mario Luzi, and Giovanni Giudici show three different approaches to the task of transcodifying a text in order to produce a drama - the task, in Genette's words, of creating a theatrical palimpsest.
The chapter explores the dimension of the living present as a form of temporal reduction, looking at its manifestation in literary texts. Bazzoni proposes here a focus on the living present as different from a still, eternal moment, and contrasts the experience of the living present with the reduction at play in trauma. Finally, the author discusses the affective, ethical, and political dimensions of the temporality of the living present as a site of subjectivation, which effects a counter-reduction of normative discourses.
Bruno Besana's article 'Badiou's Pasolini: The Problem of Subtractive Universalism' also deals with Pasolini's script about Saint Paul, but from the perspective of Alain Badiou's theoretical essay "Saint Paul and the Foundation of Universalism" and of Badiou's different thoughts on Pasolini, on the logic of emergence of novelty, and on its thwarted relation with universalism. Two main points appear in Besana's comparative reading. First, the idea that radical novelty or change can only be built in a 'subtractive manner', i.e. via the appearance of something that, by its sole presence, erodes the consistency upon which the present is structured. This is developed through Pasolini's ideas of 'inactuality' and 'forza del passato' and by Badiou's concept of 'event'. Second, a fundamental paradox inherent to the logic of change: change is only possible if it is organized in a set of coherent consequences, but the organized mode (for instance, the party) of such consequences inevitably reduces change to a constant compromise with the present.
'Dante and Ireland', or 'Dante and Irish Writers', is an extremely vast topic, and to cover it a book rather than an essay would be necessary. If the relationship between the poet and Ireland did not begin in the fourteenth century - when Dante himself may have had some knowledge of, and been inspired by, the "Vision of Adamnán", the "Vision of Tungdal", and the "Tractatus de purgatorio Sancti Patricii" - the story certainly had started by the eighteenth, when the Irish man of letters Henry Boyd was the first to produce a complete English translation of the "Comedy", published in 1802. Even if one restricts the field to twentieth-century literature alone, which is the aim in the present piece, the list of authors who are influenced by Dante includes Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney - that is to say, four of the major writers not only of Ireland, but of Europe and the entire West. To these should then be added other Irish poets of the first magnitude, such as Louis MacNeice, Ciaran Carson, Eiléan Ní Cuilleanáin, and Thomas Kinsella. Therefore Piero Boitani treats this theme in a somewhat cursory manner, privileging the episodes he considers most relevant and the themes which he thinks form a coherent and intricate pattern of literary history, where every author is not only metamorphosing Dante but also rewriting his predecessor, or predecessors, who had rewritten Dante. Distinct from the English and American Dante of Pound and Eliot, an 'Irish Dante', whom Joyce was to call 'ersed irredent', slowly grows out of this pattern.
Francesca Cadel's paper 'Outside Italy: Pasolini's Transnational Visions of the Sacred and Tradition' points out that in the 1940s and 1950s Pasolini's themes were all related to the specificity of Italian society, history, and traditions, while, beginning with the 1960s, Pasolini started travelling around the world, widening his perspectives on a rapidly changing world. Hence he developed new critical patterns, combining an increasing interest in sprawling transnational post-colonial economies with his strenuous defence of tradition and the sacred within human societies. Cadel uses different examples - including Pasolini's Indian travelogues - to show how his initial devotion to Italian millenary traditions and peasant cultures finally led to an open vision and understanding of human behaviours and mores, beyond any national boundary.
Between 1816 and 1821, the philologist François Raynouard (1761–1836) published a "Choix des poésies originales des troubadours". His connections with Madame de Staël's cultural circle at Coppet determined the construction of the myth of courtly love as a forerunner of Romantic love. [...] Acording to this cultural tradition, Dante is an intermediate (although pre-eminent) step in the history of Western desire, a process begun in medieval Provence and revitalized by European Romanticism. When Lacan approaches Dante, it is therefore one Dante - this Dante - that he is approaching. The present essay, in which Fabio Camilletti analyses three tightly interwoven texts, explores some of the reverberations of this encounter. In 1958, Lacan published in "Critique" an article entitled 'La jeunesse d'André Gide, ou la lettre et le désir'. This text, later included in Lacan's "Écrits", was meant to be a review of a biography of the young Gide published in 1956 by Jean Delay, entitled "La jeunesse d'André Gide". In comparing Gide's life with his works of youth, Delay notably focused on Gide's novel of 1891, "Les Cahiers d'André Walter", the third text on which Camilletti focuses his inquiry. These three texts evoke in various ways the relationship between Dante and Beatrice, using it as a cultural allusion through which specific problems of sexuality (or, better, of the absence of sexuality) are conveyed. This essay aims therefore to be a study in the rhapsodic and subterranean presence of Dante and the "Vita Nova" between the end of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, as well as in the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis through the quartet Dante-Gide-Delay-Lacan.
This essay interprets Dante's "Commedia" as an 'open work' (Eco). It grounds its open-endedness in its representations of interruption: from fictional obstacles in the protagonist's path in the "Inferno" to the narrator's anxiety over unfinishedness in the "Paradiso". Taking its cue from Boccaccio's creative rewriting of Dante's life, the essay resists the pressure of 'total coherence' embedded in (and often projected onto) the "Commedia", in order to reclaim the material vulnerability of the text and of its author.
The essay investigates the meteorological phenomena represented in Dante Alighieri's Commedia and their interrelation with the subjectivity of the dead in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Examining how the dead weather the afterlife and how the elements affect them, in turn, the essay takes the complex enantiosemy of the word 'weathering' as a conceptual guiding thread for the exploration of dynamics of exposure ('Inferno'), vulnerability ('Purgatorio'), and receptivity ('Paradiso').
By focusing on Pasolini's uncompleted film project "San Paolo", Luca Di Blasi's article 'One Divided by Another: Split and Conversion in Pasolini's "San Paolo"' analyzes the notion of split (the split in the structure of time and, above all, the split of the figure of Paul) and concentrates especially on the very moment of Paul's Damascene conversion. Di Blasi refers to the "Kippbild" as a model that can be used to understand better certain ambivalences in Pasolini's Paul. Locating Pasolini's reading of the founder of the Church in a triangulation with two major contemporary philosophers, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, Di Blasi shows that two opposing possibilities of interpreting Paul - as militant subject of a universal event and its necessary consequences (Badiou) and as representative of softness, weakness, poverty, "homo sacer" (Agamben) - fit perfectly with the two aspects of Pasolini's Paul. Pasolini's profoundly split Paul thus represents a dichotomy which disunites two major figures of contemporary leftist thought.
The de-constitution of the 'I' is at the centre of Manuele Gragnolati's essay 'Differently Queer: Temporality, Aesthetics, and Sexuality in Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Petrolio" and Elsa Morante's "Aracoeli"'. The essay explores the relationship between temporality, aesthetics, and sexuality in the final novels of two twentieth-century Italian authors: Pasolini's "Petrolio" (1972–75) and Morante's "Aracoeli" (1982). Both novels mobilize a form of temporality that resists a sense of linear and teleological development and that instead appears contorted, inverted, and suspended. The article argues that both novels thereby allow for the articulation of queer desires and pleasures that cannot be inscribed in normative logics of completion, progression, or productivity. It shows how the aesthetics of Pasolini's and Morante's texts replicate the movement of queer subjectivity and dismantle the traditional structure of the novel but do so differently. The fractured and dilated movement of "Petrolio's" textuality corresponds to a post-Oedipal and fully formed subject who is haunted by his complicity with bourgeois power and wants to shatter and annihilate himself by replicating the paradoxical pleasure of non-domesticated sexuality. "Aracoeli", by contrast, has a 'formless form' ('forma senza forma') that corresponds to the position of never completing the process of subject formation by adapting to the symbolic order. The poetic operation of Morante's novel consists in staging an interior journey, backwards along the traces of memory and the body and at the same time forward towards embracing the partiality and fluidity of an inter-subjectivity that is always in the process of becoming.