Early Italian Lyric

In order to examine the relationship between Dante and the early Italian lyric, this chapter focuses on two key moments of Dante’s rewriting of his own story as lyric poet: first in the Vita nuova, which traces the relationship to fellow poet Guido Cavalcanti, and second in the encounters with Bonagiunta da Lucca and Guido Guinizzelli in Purgatorio XXIV and XXVI, which redefine the roles of the major poets of the past generation. These passages are less ambiguous than has often appeared: they doubtless intend to promote Dante’s poetic choices and literary authority, but they also testify to objective developments in the history of vernacular love poetry.

The Dream (Film)

This chapter begins with a scene from the 2001 film Hannibal, where the recitation of Dante’s first poem from the Vita nuova plays a crucial part in elaborating the main character’s cannibalism, and a passage from Luciano Berio and Edoardo Sanguineri’s polyphonic setting of Dante’s dream in their musical work Laborintus II. Arguing that these popular adaptations bring into focus Dante’s distinctive mixing of horror and humor, this chapter uses the cannibalist theme to understand Dante’s relationship with his first friend Guido Cavalcanti. Drawing on the idea of cultural cannibalism developed in the Brazilian Antropófago movement, which was itself deeply informed by Dante, the chapter explores the significance of Dante’s relationship with Cavalcanti by exploring the different ways scribes and editors have presented their poems on the page. This inquiry also addresses larger transformations of Dante’s book such as the tendency to reduce it to its poetic components alone following the model of Petrarch.

Introduction

The Introduction lays out the aims and scope of the book and outlines its methodology. It triangulates the ‘dialogue’ of the title with medieval literary practices and theories of dialogue, in particular the tenzone, and with literary and linguistic theories of dialogism (Mikhail M. Bakhtin) and performative speech (John L. Austin). This Introduction provides an extensive definition of the tenzone and a summary of the critical problems surrounding this mode of writing, with particular reference to Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica. It introduces the importance of these dialogic process for our understanding of Dante and medieval Italian literature, including the works of Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, and Guido Cavalcanti.

Guido Cavalcanti

Chapter 3 introduces Guido Cavalcanti’s radically internalized model of poetic subjectivity as a point of contrast with the other poets in this study. The chapter demonstrates Cavalcanti’s resistance towards any sort of unitary poetics or accounts of self and his ambivalence towards religious authority as a source of literary validation. Cavalcanti’s divergence from his predecessors is demonstrated through analysis of his own poetry in dialogue with the works of Guittone, Guinizzelli, and Dante. The chapter explores Cavalcanti’s alternative model of subjectivity and love poetry, in which his texts perform an irreducibly polyphonic subjectivity through multiple personifications, justified by natural philosophy. This analysis foregrounds the importance of an intra-discursive dialogism, in which poetry and subjectivity are generated through tensions and internalized dialogues.

»...l’aere ne tremesse.«

RiassuntoCon questo saggio si intende in primo luogo mostrare come Dante si conformi all’osservazione fisica di Alberto Magno, secondo cui l’orecchio umano sente solo quello che si trasmette »cum aere tremente«, evocando con l’emistichio »l’aere ne tremesse« (Inf. I, 48 secondo la grafia dell’Edizione Nazionale) un suono ben preciso: il ruggito del leone, che ostacola il cammino di Dante, rappresentando il peccato capitale della superbia. L’immagine dell’aria tremante attesta così sia la forte tendenza dantesca a produrre effetti sinestetici sia la sua integrazione delle dottrine fisiche contemporanee nel discorso poetico. In secondo luogo, l’emistichio sarà preso in considerazione come citazione del sonetto »Chi è questa che vèn« di Guido Cavalcanti. Si mostrerà così come Dante impieghi l’immagine dell’aria tremante, proprio perché citazione di Cavalcanti, a fini già attestabili per la Vita Nova: per distanziarsi dal predecessore, evidenziando la necessità di superare quel genere di lirica d’amore profana e così fondare una nuova poetica ‘sacrale’.

Possibilities of Lyric

Opening to passion as an unsettling, transformative force; extending desire to the text, expanding the self, and dissolving its boundaries; imagining pleasures outside the norm and intensifying them; overcoming loss and reaching beyond death; being loyal to oneself and defying productivity, resolution, and cohesion while embracing paradox, non-linearity, incompletion. These are some of the possibilities of lyric that this book explores by reading Petrarch’s vernacular poetry in dialogue with that of other poets, including Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Shakespeare. In the Epilogue, the poet Antonella Anedda Angioy engages with Ossip Mandel’štam and Paul Celan’s dialogue with Petrarch and extends it into the present.

Acerca del presunto Epicureísmo Florentino del Siglo XIII

No solo Platón y Aristóteles son recordados en la Firenze comunal. También está Epicuro, que mencionan Dante, Boccaccio y Villani. Pero ¿existió un epicureísmo florentino? En su imaginario viaje de la Commedìa, Dante y Virgilio –con la ayuda divina– logran entrar en la Ciudad de Ditis, donde se encuentran los heréticos. Dentro de sepulcros llenos de fuego, deberían estar los miembros de todas las sectas y también los seguidores de Epicuro (muerto el 270 a.C.), que era conocido a través de Cicerón. En realidad, el poeta pone en evidencia a connotados gibelinos. Habla con Farinata degli Uberti e interviene también el padre de Guido Cavalcanti, al que da una ambigua respuesta que, en mi opinión, es un rayo de esperanza para uno que es tachado de sostener la “opinión de los epicúreos”. Más bien podría ser un averroísta, lo que acomuna a todo un grupo de intelectuales de la época que niegan la inmortalidad del alma.