Literary criticism

Today the distance is not far. It is near. It is walkable, domestic. In fact, it is in our homes, on our computer monitors, on our cell phone screens. Because the technique of our time is the technique of the distant: the ancient Greek adverb téle -distant- is part of the elements and instruments of contemporary technique. Everything that is far away -islands, deserts, events, customs- comes to us, becomes surface, screen, sound.

«In this essay on the translation of the poetic text the author places himself at the opposite end of the spectrum from any corseted theory, any peremptory manifesto: he simply exposes, in a fluid, elegant language, with multiple resonances, the fruit of readings and reflections extending over several years and having nourished his own practice of translation. His position is based on two essential facts in his eyes: translation is in itself an act of writing; translation is the best interpretation one can give of a text.

Francesco Orlando, future French scholar and one of the most important literary critics of his generation, met Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in the early 1950s, during the summer in Palermo. It was a meeting between a young university student with naive ambitions and a literary prince “of formidable head and culture,” on the threshold of writing Il Gattopardo. Memorable conversations and confrontations on writing and literature of all times would follow over the course of few years.

How do you say love? In what language and with which images does this desire, both origin and breath of the world, take shape and come to light? Antonio Prete follows the line traced by these questions among the ‘classics’ of poetry, fiction and the arts; he explores a few key concepts pertaining to love in literature: emotional turmoil, secrecy, jealousy, tenderness, seduction, hindrance. The key line of thought in the book centers around a multitude of images of otherness, as well as that emptiness that fuels desire, its relationship with boundlessness and the act of waiting.

This book reconstructs and questions the figures that define Leopardi’s thought: the relationship between finiteness and the infinite, the lunar presence, the stellar element, the link between the breath of living beings and that of the earth, and between the individual and the cosmos.

They continue to roam among us, even more fearsome than ever, the ghosts of modernity, which Leopardi kept at bay with a poetical thought capable of listening to the “sentient, recollecting and fantasizing singularity.”

Boccaccio is one of the most familiar, well-loved and loveable authors of our tradition. In this book, based on his lectures given at the University of Basel, Mario Lavagetto has two main aims. One is to apply to a fourteenth-century text the most effective instruments of literary theory that were produced in the twentieth century, without ignoring the letter of the text.

Between the mid-eighteenth century and mid-twentieth century western poetry is transformed. Poets acquire unprecedented freedom; they can write in an obscure manner, break the rules of metre and syntax, regenerate vocabulary, eliminate any mediation between their own biographical person and the character which says ‘I’ in the texts. Poetry becomes the most self-centred genre in modern literature. By analysing some exemplary texts, the author reconstructs the successive stages in this metamorphosis and interprets them as a symptom of profound historical changes.

The novel is the most important form of Western literature. It aims to represent the totality of life; it is the flagship that literature sends out against the systematic thought of science and philosophy. Indebted to Lukács and Bakhtin, to Auerbach and Ian Watt, Guido Mazzoni’s Theory of the Novel breaks new ground, building a historical understanding of how the novel became the modern book of life: one of the best representations of our experience of the world. The genre arose during a long metamorphosis of narrative forms that took place between 1550 and 1800.

With this anthology, of which an augmented edition has just been published, Antonio Prete provides a global map of a modern feeling: nostalgia. The starting point of the inquiry is a dissertation which Johannes Hofer presented to the University of Basel in 1688, where the term nostalgia appears for the first time. Hofer uses the term (derived from nostos, return home, and algos, pain) to describe the melancholy which afflicted Swiss soldiers serving in foreign garrisons.

Like the night sky, the inside of our mind has attracted cosmographers since ancient times: philosophers, novelists, theologians and poets have examined, contemplated and deciphered thoughts, passions and desires. Gradually a language for describing the mobility of the ego and of the emotions has evolved, and the point of greatest consonance with the living rhythm of the world has been located in the depths of the mind.