U.F.R. d'Etudes italiennes

How can the power of wholes be resisted without essentializing their parts? Drawing on different archives and methodologies, including aesthetics, history, biology, affect, race, and queer, the interventions in this volume explore different ways of troubling the consistency and stability of wholes, breaking up their closure and making them more dynamic. Doing so without necessarily presupposing or producing parts, an outside, or a teleological development, they indicate the critical potential of partiality without parts.

Conversion – from the Latin 'conversio' – implies a (re)turn and a change of direction. In the Christian tradition, it is normative and teleological, accompanied by repentance and/or longing for rebirth. The convert’s soul turns towards goodness and renounces evil in order to enter a new and true life. Conversion can be presented as a return to the self, or rather as the very constitution of self-identity: in these cases, it represents a solution to inner conflict, providing a divided ‘I’ with a feeling of coherence and integrity. In Western conversion narratives, for which Augustine’s "Confessions" are the paradigm, the narrating self must be radically and definitively different from, and yet in continuity with, the unconverted self whose story is told. This complex temporality is one of the core tensions of conversion: is it an event which befalls the inner self, or a lifelong process which will be fully accomplished after death?

How can one think of the relationship between the definitiveness of conversion, the teleological reconstruction of the past, and the integrity of the self? What are the implications in terms of subjectivity, gender, and desire? Is conversion a process that can be narrated or rather something constituted through the performance of narration itself? Can the paradox that conversion appears as both the condition and the performative product of self-narration be resolved through conversion’s teleological temporal structure? To what extent is an irreducibly complex experience reduced by being unfolded in such a linear temporality and at what cost for the self and for others? And finally, if Western paradigms not only of autobiography but of narration as such have arguably become inextricably bound up with conversion and its temporality, how can one think of (narrative and textual) forms that propose other articulations of time and subjectivity?

This workshop will problematize the concept of conversion by looking at the interactions between theological discussions and literary re/presentations. It will also question conversion’s temporal structure by considering contemporary critiques of teleology, normativity, and futurity.

With
Phil Knox (Cambridge)
Jonathan Morton (KCL)
Francesca Southerden (Oxford)
Elizabeth Eva Leach (Oxford)
Jennifer Rushworth (Oxford)
Irene Fantappiè (HU Berlin)
Laura Ashe (Oxford)
Marco Nievergelt (Warwick)
Daniel Barber (Pace U)
Marisa Galvez (Stanford)
Christoph Holzhey (ICI Berlin)
Almut Suerbaum (Oxford)
David Bowe (Oxford)

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]

Boccace, «Elegia di madonna Fiammetta» et «Corbaccio», au programme de l’agrégation 2019, offrent un regard ‘décalé’ sur l’auteur du Décaméron, de part et d’autre des ‘Cent Nouvelles’. Il s’agit de deux œuvres ‘mineures’ et de prime abord antinomiques, chacune à sa manière féconde qui permettent de repenser la ‘question féminine’ au XIVe siècle : comment se présente-t-elle et se représente-t-elle ? Que dit de la passion amoureuse (amor hereos) sa féminisation ? Quel statut de la ‘lectrice’ ? Quel rapport entre regard masculin et auctorialité, et énonciation féminine, auctoriale à son tour. Ces oeuvres ont également une dimension réflexive importante : qu’est-ce qu’un ‘auteur’ au Trecento, si l’on est Boccace ? Comment jouer des, et avec les genres littéraires ? Quels pouvoirs pour la parole ‘artistique’, quelle fonction pour la littérature ? Boccace nous invite ainsi à actualiser la lecture de ses œuvres. Une actualisation jamais oublieuse toutefois de l’horizon propre des textes de leur auteur.

A cura di Manuele Gragnolati, Luca Carlo Rossi, Paola Allegretti, Natascia Tonelli, Alberto Casadei.
Il volume raccoglie i testi di quattro Workshop tenuti a Firenze, presso la Società Dantesca Italiana: i due dedicati alla «Vita nova» progettati da Manuele Gragnolati e Luca Carlo Rossi (WS 4-5, 2015), quello dedicato al «Fiore» progettato da Natascia Tonelli (WS 2, 2014), e quello dedicato all’«Epistola XIII» progettato da Alberto Casadei (WS 1, 2013). La ricchezza del risultato è anche nella pluralità dei punti di vista, dei metodi e dei problemi. Punto di arrivo di studi decennali e base di partenza per future ricerche.
La «Vita nova», una delle più dense e seducenti opere dantesche, è una complessa riorganizzazione di uno straordinar io passato poetico. L’autoesegesi in prosa si affianca alla riscrittura delle rime, al dialogo con altr i poeti, al discorso filosofico, all’ineffabile mistico, alla riflessione
sui sensi retorici del linguagg io poetico e sulla semantica salvifica delle parole, dei numeri e dei nomi. Il libello si organizza e prende forma parallelamente al suo autore. Le geniali strategie della costruzione di modelli complessi (testo, autore e storia dell’autore) procedono con modifiche e adattamenti puntualmente e sagacemente analizzati negli studi che qui si presentano.
I due poemetti anepigrafi, noti con i nomi moderni di Fiore e Detto d’Amore, sono opera di un autore genialmente attento alla riscrittura del modello, il Roman de la Rose, e molto aggiornato sui contenuti e sulle forme metriche della lir ica duecentesca. Volgarizzamento,
riduzione, citazione e parodia sono tecniche magistralmente adoperate. Tra i contributi, le ultime documentatissime discussioni pro e contra la paternità dantesca e, per la prima volta, un esame dello statuto scientifico dell’attribuzione tardo-trecentesca a Dante.
Sul versante attributivo, una tra le opere dantesche più problematiche e discusse è certamente l’Epistola XIII a Cangrande della Scala: il dibattito è sempre più sottile, assestato com’è su un terreno cronologicamente molto vicino alla data di mor te del Poeta.
Contributi di: Paola Allegretti, Erminia Ardissino, Furio Brugnolo, Alberto Casadei, Marcello Ciccuto, Paolo De Ventura, Luciano Formisano, Manuele Gragnolati, Giuseppe Indizio, Giuseppe Ledda, Elena Lombardi, Lino Pertile, Donato Pirovano, Roberto Rea, Luca Carlo Rossi, Pasquale Stoppelli, Natascia Tonelli, Marco Veglia.

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.