Books by Francesca Southerden
This volume takes Dante’s rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nuova to the C... more This volume takes Dante’s rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nuova to the Commedia, as a point of departure in investigating medieval concepts of desire in all their multiplicity, fragmentation and interrelation. As well as offering several original contributions on this fundamental aspect of Dante’s work, it seeks to situate the Florentine writer more effectively within the broader spectrum of medieval culture and to establish greater intellectual exchange between Dante scholars and those from other disciplines. The volume is open to diverse critical and methodological approaches, and explores the extent to which modern theoretical paradigms can be used to shed light upon the Middle Ages.
This volume takes Dante’s rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nova to the Co... more This volume takes Dante’s rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nova to the Commedia, as a point of departure in investigating medieval concepts of desire in all their multiplicity, fragmentation and interrelation. As well as offering several original contributions on this fundamental aspect of Dante’s work, it seeks to situate the Florentine writer more effectively within the broader spectrum of medieval culture and to establish greater intellectual exchange between Dante scholars and those from other disciplines. The volume is open to diverse critical and methodological approaches, and explores the extent to which modern theoretical paradigms can be used to shed light upon the Middle Ages.
Contributors: Daniela Boccassini, Bill Burgwinkle, Fabio Camilletti, Peter Dent, Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Giuseppe Ledda, Elena Lombardi, Jonathan Morton, Monika Otter, Francesca Southerden, Robert Sturges, Almut Suerbaum, Paola Ureni, Annette Volfing, Marguerite Waller
Papers by Francesca Southerden
This paper proposes a new reading of Petrarch’s RVF 70, an intertextual canzone (and part-cento) ... more This paper proposes a new reading of Petrarch’s RVF 70, an intertextual canzone (and part-cento) that ends with an explicit textual return to the poet’s own RVF 23, the so-called canzone delle metamorfosi [canzone of the metamorphoses]. The incipit of canzone 23, ‘Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade’ [In the sweet time of my first age] forms the final line of canzone 70 and is the last in a series of quotations of the incipits of earlier poems (by the pseudo-Arnaut Daniel, Cavalcanti, Dante, and Cino da Pistoia), each of which closes one of the stanzas of Petrarch’s poem. The trend has been to read RVF 70 teleologically and as a palinode, in which the poet renounces errant desire and arrives at a new mode of loving and speaking by moving beyond the limitations of the previous tradition and his own earlier poetics, including the sensually-directed eros expounded in canzone 23. Instead this paper explores what happens if we take RVF 70 as a more literal return to RVF 23, which unsettles or resists the resolution of change proposed in the poem by keeping the question of desire more open and expressing a form of poetic subjectivity that paradoxically seeks to have it both ways – to recognize a fault in desire without renouncing it and to take pleasure in repeatedly giving itself over to what harms it. In this reading, the poet’s decision to end RVF 70 with a return to the beginning of his own RVF 23 not only destabilizes the narrative of conversion on which critics usually insist, but leads the poems to reenter themselves endlessly, making repetition and deferral the blueprint of Petrarch’s poetics.
This essay brings Petrarch and Dante's poetry into dialogue in order to highlight some crucial te... more This essay brings Petrarch and Dante's poetry into dialogue in order to highlight some crucial tensions that have to do with the continuing presence of a fundamentally lyric component within the framework of Christian paradise. 'Lyric', in our analysis, stands for an aspect of identity bound up with the relation to the beloved and to a desire contained in the body and expressed in the longing for it. Our focus is on the different modes of textuality at play in Dante's Paradiso and Petrarch's Triumphus Eternitatis and the ways they express the " form of desire " informing each poet's work and especially his eschatological imagination. 1 Our approach draws on Manuele Gragnolati's reading of Dante's Paradiso in Amor che move: linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (2013) and extends some of the questions raised there to Petrarch's Triumphus Eternitatis. In particular, we aim to examine the relationship between language and corporeality as explored in the concept of the resurrection of the body, which carries a relational sense of identity bound up with the individual's memory, desires, and history and both complicates and opens up an understanding of poetry and eschatology. Our point of departure are the shores of Dante's Purgatory, where the pilgrim encounters a shade who has also just arrived at the realm of purgation: the shade of Casella, an old friend from the times of youth when Dante had not yet been exiled from Florence. This episode rewrites the Virgilian motif of the failed embrace between a living and a dead person: the pilgrim and the shade of the old friend try to embrace each other but they cannot because – as the poet laments – shades in the otherworld are " vane " , empty (Purg. II, 79). 2 Indeed, as the figure of Statius explains in Purgatorio XXV, shades in Dante's afterlife have an aerial body that gives them an appearance – " aspetto " – but no substantiality: " Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l'aspetto! / tre volte dietro a lei le mani avvinsi, / e tante mi tornai con esse al petto " [Oh empty shades, except in seeming! / Three times I clasped my hands behind him / only to find them clasped to my own chest]
Conferences organized by Francesca Southerden
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Books by Francesca Southerden
Contributors: Daniela Boccassini, Bill Burgwinkle, Fabio Camilletti, Peter Dent, Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Giuseppe Ledda, Elena Lombardi, Jonathan Morton, Monika Otter, Francesca Southerden, Robert Sturges, Almut Suerbaum, Paola Ureni, Annette Volfing, Marguerite Waller
Papers by Francesca Southerden
Conferences organized by Francesca Southerden
Contributors: Daniela Boccassini, Bill Burgwinkle, Fabio Camilletti, Peter Dent, Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Giuseppe Ledda, Elena Lombardi, Jonathan Morton, Monika Otter, Francesca Southerden, Robert Sturges, Almut Suerbaum, Paola Ureni, Annette Volfing, Marguerite Waller