Papers by Ernesto Livorni
Modern Humanities Research Association eBooks, Sep 29, 2017
T. S. Eliot, Eugenio Montale e la modernità dantesca, 2020
La Casa editrice garantisce la massima riservatezza dei dati forniti dagli abbonati e la possibil... more La Casa editrice garantisce la massima riservatezza dei dati forniti dagli abbonati e la possibilità di richiederne la rettifica o la cancellazione previa comunicazione alla medesima. Le informazioni custodite dalla Casa editrice verranno utilizzate al solo scopo di inviare agli abbonati nuove proposte (Dlgs. 196/2003).
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Classics in International Modernism and the Avant-Garde, 2017
Representing Italy Through Food, 2017
Romanic Review, 2006
[...] tutta la mia poesia e un modo platonico di sentire le cose, ed essa ha del resto due maestr... more [...] tutta la mia poesia e un modo platonico di sentire le cose, ed essa ha del resto due maestri nel campo dello spirito, da una parte Platone e i Platonici, e dall'altra Bergson: sono i due maestri che mi hanno sempre accompagnato quando io ho dovuto pensare [...]. This is an important statement that Ungaretti writes regarding the philosophical thought grounding his poetic work: it is a precise and final statement, even though offered parenthetically in the context of his fourth and last lecture delivered at Columbia University in May 1964. (1) Making this statement at the end of his poetic parabola, Ungaretti organizes his entire "life of a man," following the teachings of Vico, around a specific trend of Western thought. This trend may be defined by its specific interest in metaphysics especially in relation to the question of time from a spiritualistic perspective. (2) Ungaretti's statement coherently places itself not only in the realm of a poetics of memory, which is one of the distinctive marks of Ungaretti's poetry, but it also introduces the two thinkers who, within the history of philosophy according to our poet, represent the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem: Plato and Bergson. In fact, it is between these two masters that Ungaretti unfolds his intellectual history, a history that comprises some of the greatest poetic voices of the tradition up to Ungaretti's time: Saint Augustine, Petrarch, Gongora (next to whom one must place Tasso on the one hand and Vico on the other, through the Metaphysical poets), Leopardi, Mallarme, Valery. In the commentary to the Canzone the idea of memory, through which Ungaretti nurtures so much of his poetry, at least from L'Allegria to La Terra Promessa, evolves into at least three fundamental concepts: the opposition between "effimero" and "eterno" (inherited through Baudelaire); "reminiscenza;" and "prima imagine." All three concepts immediately reveal the Platonic mark. (3) However, the idea of memory in Ungaretti's poetry shapes itself autonomously vis-a-vis the chronology of philosophical thought, although it is true that the poet officially begins writing poetry only after listening to Bergson lecturing in Paris between 1912 and 1914. (4) The outcome of the critical reflection provoked by that experience percolates for more than ten years. Then, in 1924 Ungaretti publishes the two short essays "L'estetica di Bergson" and "Lo stile di Bergson," which in turn are followed two years later by the three-folded crafting of the fundamental "Innocenza e memoria." (5) It seems that the writings on Bergson enable the poet to free himself from that presence which by now, as the elaboration of Innocenza e memoria shows, has become burdensome. In that short number of years Ungaretti pays homage to a thought, which had been until then guidance for his reflection, and he starts distancing himself from Bergson. At the same time Ungaretti gets closer to some principles of Platonic philosophy mediated through the Neo-Platonists and the Pre-Socratics, as the poet himself states. (6) In this respect, the lecture on Plato assumes emblematic value, especially when Ungaretti briefly lists those approaches, proposed by philosophers and poets alike, to the very concept of idea, which was crucial to him: (7) Quando si dice idea, si da a questa parola un contenuto che non pub essere sempre lo stesso. La parola idea per il Petrarca ha un significato diverso da quello che aveva per Platone, per Hegel ha un significato diverso da quello che aveva per il Petrarca, per il Leopardi ha un significato diverso da quello che aveva per Hegel, per Bergson ha un significato diverso da quello che aveva per Leopardi ed io stesso, per esempio, nella mia poesia, le ho dato un contenuto diverso da quello che le aveva dato Bergson. This is a rare recognition on Ungaretti's part of the conceptual distance separating his poetry from Bergson's philosophy, even though he does not venture to specify the difference in content to which he aspires, nor to date his emancipation from the French philosopher's thought. …
Romanticism and the City, 2011
Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed was in many respects a novelty in the panorama of the Ro... more Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed was in many respects a novelty in the panorama of the Romantic historical novel.1 Written in the first half of the nineteenth century (three editions appeared between 1821 and 1840), the novel is the only one Manzoni ever wrote and, more importantly perhaps, one of the first novels, if not the first, that places a peasant as the hero of the entire work. To be sure, as the title of the first edition (Fermo e Lucia) suggests, the heroes are both the peasant Renzo and his fiancee Lucia, but it becomes quite apparent from the hero’s first appearance in the novel that the narrator thoroughly enjoys the opportunities the main character offers for general remarks on the embarrassing aspects of the human soul. Furthermore, Manzoni takes advantage of those episodes to make political statements revealing of the ideology of the writer, converted to Catholicism in 1810.2
Annali D Italianistica, 2004
AmeriQuests, 2015
The Great War is the first modern war in which a great awareness of the double role soldiers play... more The Great War is the first modern war in which a great awareness of the double role soldiers played was elaborated, as many of those soldiers were also writers and artists who kept on working on their artistic endeavor while at war. Among them, there were certainly poets who immediately earned the compound title of soldier-poets, according to an order of the two terms that remarked the priority of the urgency of the contingencies of war: they were soldier-poets rather than poet-soldiers. To be sure, the definition of poet-soldier gained some popularity during the Romantic period and the Italian Risorgimento, in particular: one may think of poet-soldiers such as Ugo Foscolo, but also Lord George Byron. Even during World War I there was a poet-soldier of the caliber of Gabriele D’Annunzio. However, it is during the Great War that the compound title of poet-soldier is reversed into soldier-poet. Furthermore, another broader distinction was elaborated: that between combatant and non-com...
The Modern Language Review, 2003
... Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake. ... more ... Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake. Book by Lucia Boldrini; Cambridge University Press, 2001. ... JOYCE, DANTE, AND THE POETICS OF LITERARY RELATIONS Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake. ...
Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies, 2013
A number of writers from the USA lived in Italy during the years of the unification of Italy, bot... more A number of writers from the USA lived in Italy during the years of the unification of Italy, both during the years of the Roman Republic and after Rome had become the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Among the most important figures were William Dean Howells, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Henry James. In some of their writings, these authors discuss several aspects of Rome, taking into consideration especially the artistic importance of the city, but also and inevitably its social and political relevance in the Risorgimento.
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Papers by Ernesto Livorni