Literary criticism

In what sense can Virgil be defined as urgent? And then, is it only Virgil who is urgent, or are the other classics too, provided they are read and reread under certain conditions?

Towards a Freudian Theory of Literature is the second essay in what Francesco Orlando called the “Freudian cycle”: four books published between 1971 and 1982 and republished in three volumes between 1990 and 1992 under the collective title Literature, Reason, Repressed. This dense and rigorous book illustrates the assumptions of the project and is very different in character from the others, which are variously calibrated on the empirical analysis of literary works.

Faced with the charade-like nature of literary texts, readers who are more or less aware and astute end up finding themselves in the shoes of the riddle-maker. Even if they do not display the talent of Poe, who, reviewing a novel by Dickens that was not yet finished after a few installments, managed to discern the author's plan, which was then modified during the course of the work, they are still forced to untangle real clues and red herrings, allusions and coups de théâtre, imbalances and second thoughts, veils and revelations.

Starting from the basic rules of the game (the framework provided by the rigorous and formalized typology of voices), Lavagetto analyzes Verdi’s librettos using all the tools of linguistics and semiotics in search of their structural and linguistic constants.
The essay, published in 1979 by Garzanti and presented here in a second revised edition with corrections, updates, and additions, leads the reader through the fundamentals of Romantic musical dramaturgy, with fruitful insights of a linguistic, sociological, and historical nature.

The protagonist of the most famous tragedy of antiquity, Sophocles' Oedipus experiences in extreme terms the separateness of person and destiny: on the one hand, the precipitous embodiment of the highest human values, reason and social belonging, and on the other, the transgressor of the highest prohibitions, parricide and incest. In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud would see in these violations the fulfillment of every man's childhood desires, reinterpreting in this sense the Aristotelian dogma of the universality of poetry.

For twenty-five centuries, theater has been staging characters who offer themselves to a very special emotional identification, because they are enhanced in the spectator by sharing the same experience, its times and rhythms, and even more so by the value of truth to which it aspires, calling us to penetrate to the heart of the deepest human instances.

The outcome of several master classes given at the turn of the millennium, The Semiotic Turn soon became a milestone in the semiotic literature, a real revolution for research, not only of sign science but of the entire field of human and social sciences.

On May 9, 1962, Italo Calvino wrote to Umberto Eco that he wanted to draft a manifesto “for a cosmic literature.” At a certain point in his life, in the early 1960s, Calvino looked at science as he had never done before. To understand “our insertion into the world,” he feels the need to deal with the images that science produces and the language it employs in doing so. This will be a turning point for him.

One hundred years after Marcel Proust’s death, this book collects five essays on the great writer published by Francis Orlando between 1973 and 2010, along with the transcript of one of his lectures on the Recherche. A posthumous volume that contains,in the author’s words, “what little I have written about Proust.”