Straniamenti e spaesamenti di Luigi Gualdo

Estrangement and Out-of-Placeness in the Works of Luigi Gualdo Characters and places between ideal and reality, cosmopolitanism and uprooting This paper focuses on the different forms of estrangement and out-of-placeness which can be found in Luigi Gualdo’s works. Gualdo (1844-1898) was a prominent writer whose works are influenced by French realism and Parnasse, Italian scapigliatura and the European decadence and estheticism. Moreover, he lived between France and Italy and he was one of the main passeurs between French and Italian literature of his time. This particular condition of the writer is reflected in his works and in particular in the portraiture of his characters, which are often rootless artists and mundane women with a strong component of cosmopolitism. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the characteristics and features of Gualdo’s characters according to the parameters of estrangement and out-of-placeness. In particular I will focus on the ambiguous nature of the relation between ideal world and reality, of artistic genius and its place in society and the normal world, as well as on more specific topics related to the subject, such as spleen, places described as theatrical decors, hotel rooms and feminine nomadic attitudes, cosmopolitism as both a challenge and an opportunity for the characters. I will conclude on a specific issue regarding the struggle between the estranged character, time, and aging.

NHÓM TỪ CHỈ MÙI HƯƠNG TRONG TRUYỆN KIỀU

Words for scent and fragrance appear in more abundance in “The Tale of Kieu” than in any other classical Vietnamese literary work. However, scent, aroma, smell, and fragrance are quite different. There are things and people who have a fragrance without a smell and vice versa. The expressive meanings of scent are very different and are expressed according to different aesthetic ideals and artistic principles. This article gives an in-depth exploration and understanding into such matters. This is also a way to discover and assert that Nguyen Du was an artistic genius.

(Not an) ambivalence toward Michelangelo in Federico Borromeo’s De pictura sacra and Musaeum

This article discusses the role of Michelangelo Buonarroti in the Seventeenth-century art theory treatises of Cardinal Federico Borromeo De pictura sacra and Musaeum. In the referred text we can notice an ambivalent approach to the artistic genius of Buonarroti. In several cases Borromeo mentions Michelangelo as an artistic example who equalled or even exceled the great artists of Antiquity, albeit in other paragraphs the author criticises the artist for his aesthetic fallacy. A close reading of De pictura sacra and Musaeum, as well as an analysis of Borromeo’s didactic programme in the newly established Accademia del disegno in Milan allows to heed that Cardinal was rather an admirer of Michelangelo’s personality and talent. In De pictura sacra Buonarroti and other Renaissance Masters serve a rhetoric function and allow to conceptualise the theological and aesthetic framework for a post-Tridentine Catholic religious art.

Value

Especially after the British Parliament formally adopted the gold standard in 1821, economists reinforced its legitimacy by building on Adam Smith’s account of value in The Wealth of Nations, which followed gold from its decorative uses to its use as a basis of credit. They also sharpened his distinction between gold’s minimal use-value and its exchange-value; and, under newfound conditions of scarcity, they focused attention on the diversion of gold away from ornamental purposes. In laying out this multipronged elaboration of gold’s value, political economy shared space with numerous other discourses—evident in novels, poems, essays, and sermons—that used gold as a metaphor for Christian virtue, artistic genius, and class; or that emphasized gold’s poisonous potential, building on a long history of the metal as an object of monstrous desire.

Le Songe d’une nuit d’été of Ambroise Thomas: L’éclat at the end of the tunnel

This article argues that Ambroise Thomas’s opera Le Songe d’une nuit d’été functions as a Romantic allegory of the coarse artistic genius elevated and sanctified by royal and spiritual powers in an attempt to glorify and justify Shakespeare. Simultaneously, and more importantly, the opera is an appeal to French artists to move away from their adherence to neoclassical symmetry, restraint, and stasis, which persisted even in the work and opinions of the French Romantics.

Kant on Fine Art, Genius and the Threat of Private Meaning

Wittgenstein’s private language argument claims that language and meaning generally are public. It also contends with our appreciation of artworks and reveals the deep connection in our minds between originality and the temptation to think of original meaning as private. This problematic connection of ideas is found in Kant’s theory of fine art. For Kant conceives of the capacity of artistic genius for imaginatively envisioning original content as prior to and independent of finding the artistic means of communicating this content to others. This raises the question of whether we can conceive of art as both original and meaningful without succumbing to privacy.

The Genius of Shakespeare’s “Plagiarisms”. Case Studies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth

This paper aims at exploring the cultural ambiguity which William Shakespeare remarkably extracts from the sources of his major plays, turning it, eventually, into an essential instrument of the tragic and the tragedy. What in normal/modern circumstances would easily count as “plagiarism”, becomes here, paradoxically, a token of artistic genius and brilliant creation. Our examples will be from the four outstanding tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. The sources selected by our research will be Saxo Grammaticus’s Histoires tragiques, Cinthio’s Un Capitano Moro, the Celtic legend Leir of Britain and, obviously, Holinshed’s Chronicles. We shall try to demonstrate that the so-called cultural ambiguity adopts various forms in Shakespeare’s plays, going from the clash of civilisations (Hamlet and Othello) to the crisis of identity (Lear and Macbeth).