The works of Paolo Cognetti, or In praise of the wild boy

The author examines works by Paolo Cognetti in light of the myth he has created about a wild boy from the Alps and the wise mountain folk inhabiting various corners of the world. The myth, including the appeal to return to one's roots, to life in harmony with nature, has resonated with many people who are feeling out of place in modern urban civilisation. At the same time, Cognetti has developed his distinctive poetics by combining traditions of the American short story and those of Italian prose and by proposing a compelling stylistic ideal. The article dwells on the origins of Cognetti's writing, its defining features and Italian as well as foreign influences on his works. Cognetti's principal work, the novel The Eight Mountains [Le otto montagne], is analysed along with autobiographical stories The Wild Boy: A Memoir [Il ragazzo selvatico. Quaderno di montagna] and Without Ever Reaching the Summit: A Himalayan Journey [Senza mai arrivare in cima: Viaggio in Himalaya]. The myth of a savage and idealisation of the past help to explain Cognetti's popularity and the fact that he has lent his voice to a whole generation.

Of Reformed Versifying

This chapter examines how the development of English poetry in the second half of the sixteenth century is characterized by the search for an appropriate style. In this context, ‘reformed versifying’ may be understood as a reconciliation of high and low in which the common is reconfigured as a stylistic ideal of the mean. That development can be traced in debates about prosody where an alternative sense of ‘reformed versifying’ as adapting classical metres to English verse is rejected in favour of native form. At the same time Sidney recuperates poetry by reforming it as an agent of virtue. Reformation and Renaissance finally come together in Spenser, who realizes Erasmus’ aim of harmonizing the values of classical literature with Christian doctrine, and reconciles the foreign and the ‘homewrought’. The Faerie Queene of 1590 represents the triumph of the mean in both style and, through its celebration of marriage, in substance.

Asianism and Atticism

Asianism is a modern coinage referring to the rhetorical practice of certain Greek and Latin orators whose styles were designated by ancient critics as Asian (Asianus, Asiaticus, Ἀσιανός)—the “Asia” in question being the Republican Roman province. Asian eloquence was often contrasted unfavorably to a corresponding Attic style (Atticus, Ἀττικός), which was modelled on the prose of classical Athenian writers (a practice now known as Atticism). This opposition between Asian and Attic styles is first attested in Roman oratorical circles during the mid-1st century bce and was subsequently adopted by Greek critics in Augustan Rome, but seems to have fallen out of fashion by the reign of Tiberius. While Attic remains a general stylistic ideal in the more broadly conceived classicism of Imperial Greek literature, the term Asian disappears as a stylistic label. In a related, but separate development, from the late 1st century ce onwards, Greek literary writers increasingly adhered to a linguistic, rather than stylistic, variety of Atticism, which concentrated on reproducing the ancient Attic dialect used by Athenian authors of the 5th and 4th centuries bce. This Atticism was opposed, not to anything Asian, but to the literary koinê of the Hellenistic and early Imperial era.

Façades and Functions Sigurd Frosterus as a Critic of Architecture

Alongside his work as a practising architect, Sigurd Frosterus (1876–1956) was one of Finland’s leading architectural critics during the first decades of the 20th century. In his early life, Frosterus was a strict rationalist who wanted to develop architecture towards scientific ideals instead of historical, archaeological, or mythological approaches. According to him, an architect had to analyse his tasks of construction in order to be able to logically justify his solutions, and he must take advantage of the possibilities of the latest technology. The particular challenge of his time was reinforced concrete. Frosterus considered that the buildings of a modern metropolis should be constructivist in expressing their purpose and technology honestly. The impulses of two famous European architects – Otto Wagner and Henry van de Velde – had a life-long influence on his work. Urban architecture with long street perspectives and houses with austere façades and unified eaves lines was the stylistic ideal that he shared with the Austrian architect Wagner. An open and enlightened urban experience was Frosterus’s future vision, not National Romantic capriciousness or intimacy drawing from the Middle Ages. According to Frosterus, the Belgian van de Velde was the master interior architect of the epoch, the interior of the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar being an excellent example of his work. However, already in the 1910s Frosterus’s rationalism developed towards a broader understanding of the functions of the façades of business edifices. In his brilliant analyses of the business palaces by the Finnish architects Armas Lindgren and Lars Sonck, he considered the symbolic and artistic values of the façades to be even more important than technological honesty. Moreover, references to the history of architecture had a crucial role in the 1920s and 1930s when he wrote about his main work– the Stockmann department store in the centre of Helsinki.

The Fable as Figure: Christian Wolff's Geometric Fable Theory and Its Creative Reception by Lessing and Herder

ArgumentIn his Philosophia practica universalis (1738–39), Christian Wolff proposes a “mathematical” theory of moral action that includes his statements on the Aesopian fable. As a sort of moral example, Wolff claims, the fable is an appropriate means to influence human conduct because it conveys general truths to intuition. This didactic concept is modeled on the geometrical figure: Just as students intuit mathematical demonstrations by looking at figures on a blackboard, one can learn how to execute complex actions by listening to a fable. Wolff's “scientific” fable theory met with an ambivalent reception. Lessing, who in his fable treatises re-translates Wolff's suggestions into the conceptual framework of poetics, interprets the geometric model as a stylistic ideal. The famous passage on Homer's successive descriptions in Lessing's Laokoon can be seen as another attempt to apply the representational model of geometry to literature. Herder, reading Wolff in a way that might be called deconstructive, replaces Wolff's geometric theory of poetry by a poetic anthropology of geometry.

Molon's Influence on Cicero

Since Klingner's dissertation it has generally been accepted by Ciceronian scholars that Molon's influence upon Cicero's prose style consisted in his imparting to his pupil no new stylistic ideal but rather moderation in both language and style. According to Cicero (Brutus 325), Molon's style had developed under the teaching of Menecles of Alabanda who, though himself an Asianist, aimed rather at crebrae venustaeque sententiae, a more elegant and concise form of antithesis, parallelism, and stylistic balance.