Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy

Luzzi, Joseph

doi:10.12987/yale/9780300123555.001.0001

Cited by 95 publications

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“…In the church, the journalist visits the cenotaph of the nation's poet, Dante Alighieri. The scene closes with a voice-over reciting an extract of the Divine Comedy, namely Dante's digression to his wretched homeland -' a ship without a pilot' -that famously forges ' a female political allegory of Italy's incapacity for self-governance' and makes an argument for the need for a strong master for the feminised nation (Luzzi 2008). The Dantesque metaphor, which imagines Italy as a brothel, endows the earlier visual reference to D'Addario with further allegorical significance.…”

Section: Italy As Problem Italy As Girlfriendmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whose Comatose Girlfriend? Figures of Crisis in Neoliberal Italy

Bassi

2018

Modern Languages Open

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Section: Italy As Problem Italy As Girlfriendmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whose Comatose Girlfriend? Figures of Crisis in Neoliberal Italy

Bassi

2018

Modern Languages Open

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“…The restlessness of Manzoni's portrait of the cardinal is not usually considered in the critical analysis which prefers to identify in it yet another sign of traditional and conservative religiosity. See for example Luzzi, 2009: 46–48.…”

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“… 35. For a more recent interpretation of the novel based on the central role of divine Providence see Luzzi, 2009: 42–48.…”

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Re-reading Manzoni at the time of COVID-19: Contagion, ethics and justice

Lollini

2022

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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The article contributes to the rediscovery of the depth and complexity of Manzoni's thought, which too often has been reduced to an uncritical expression of Catholicism. Narrating the plague that struck Milan in 1630 in The Betrothed and the History of the Column of Infamy Manzoni reveals political, social, and cultural mechanisms remarkably similar to ours while struggling with the Coronavirus pandemic. The essay analyzes the apparatuses of contagion, the crucial importance of language, the devices of alienation favoring the loss of the sense of objectivity during the 1628 plague, and the pandemic of our time. For Manzoni, the recovery of reality in its bare complexity is possible, to a certain extent, by referring to the two fundamental lines of his thought. On the one hand, the philosophical irony with deep roots in Friedrich Schlegel, European Romanticism, and the reaction to Kantian philosophy. Romantic irony triggers the ethics of writing that runs through Manzoni's novel. On the other hand is the religious direction that Manzoni finds expressed in the Gospels, human conscience, and the idea of “eternal justice”. It emerges in crucial moments of the novel and its appendix, in what Emmanuel Levinas called the “epiphany of the face” which is considered in intersection with Paul Ricoeur's idea of “oneself as another”. Manzoni sees all the problems inherent in both reason and religion. In trying to keep them united, he participates in the most advanced Romantic view of religion and politics, what Frederick Beiser has defined as “one of the most creative and interesting attempts in the history of philosophy to surmount the classical dilemma between humanism and religion.”

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“…The connection between 'Sopra il monumento di Dante' and Petrarch's 'Italia mia,' though, goes beyond this limited association. Leopardi's full poem, which has also been shown to have extensive echoes of Dante (Luzzi, 2008), is a lamentation of continual wars during the 14th century with the German 'barbari,' and thus Petrarch's 'tedesca rabbia ' (1964: l. 35) had made its presence known on Italian soil. Similar to the deaths of Italian soldiers under Napoleon, here too we have the unnecessary deaths of Italians (above all in the case of the Italian mercenaries), and the unwelcomed influence of a foreign power.…”

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The problem of the ‘guasto legnaggio’ in Leopardi’s ‘Sopra il monumento di Dante’

Collins

2015

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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Amid shallower reactions to the cenotaph to Dante in Florence, Giacomo Leopardi's 'Sopra il monumento di Dante' presents a symptomatic reading of how the empty tomb is emblematic of the weakened cultural state of Italy in the early 19th century. The central issue of the poem is the past's discontinuation; a lack of respect for 'fathers' and 'ancestors,' and therefore, failed 'sons.' In this light, a pair of key indicators of a broken cultural genealogy which were brought up by Leopardi himself in the poem are discussed: Dante had been principally forgotten in the 17th century, and more recently Italy had been subjected to Napoleonic rule. These, along with this lack of a Florentine monument to Dante, pointed toward Italy's discontinuous relationship with its own cultural history during this time. Unlike most of the celebrations surrounding the moment when Dante's cenotaph was erected -including Melchiorre Missirini's essay in which he misuses this very poem -Leopardi's analysis is truly an intrinsic one. As for how he suggests Italy might mend this problem, however, especially as indicated in particular works of prose written around the same time as this poem, it may be that the young Leopardi, at this early stage of his intellectual development, was still somewhat wanting in a broader realization of what cultural genealogies can and should be.When 1 TS Eliot wrote that matured artistic talent requires a sense of both the presence and pastness of the past, he was not constructing a new concept, but rather, presenting in a masterful phrase a fundamental facet of literary history: the

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Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy

Cited by 95 publications

References 0 publications

Whose Comatose Girlfriend? Figures of Crisis in Neoliberal Italy

Whose Comatose Girlfriend? Figures of Crisis in Neoliberal Italy

Re-reading Manzoni at the time of COVID-19: Contagion, ethics and justice

The problem of the ‘guasto legnaggio’ in Leopardi’s ‘Sopra il monumento di Dante’

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