Francesco Giusti
Francesco Giusti is currently wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. After completing his PhD at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences and Sapienza University of Rome in 2012, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of York (2013), the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (2014-2015), and the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2016-2018). He taught comparative literature at Bard College Berlin from 2019 to 2021. From 2021 to 2024 he was Career Development Fellow and Tutor in Italian at Christ Church and Associate College Lecturer at Worcester College and St John's College at the University of Oxford, where he is now an Honorary Faculty Research Fellow in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.
He has published two books devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to creative desire in lyric poetry, "Canzonieri in morte: Per un’etica poetica del lutto" (Textus Edizioni, 2015) and "Il desiderio della lirica: Poesia, creazione, conoscenza" (Carocci, 2016). He co-edited, with Christine Ott and Damiano Frasca, the volume "Poesia e nuovi media" (Cesati, 2018); with Benjamin Lewis Robinson, "The Work of World Literature" (ICI Berlin Press, 2021); with Adele Bardazzi and Emanuela Tandello, "A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry" (Legenda, 2022); with Irene Fantappiè and Laura Scuriatti, "Rethinking Lyric Communities" (ICI Berlin Press, 2024). His work has appeared in "Modern Language Notes", "The Italianist", "Italian Studies", "Italica", "Intersezioni", "Strumenti critici", "Between", "Critica letteraria", "California Italian Studies", "Exemplaria", and in many other Italian and international journals.
At Oxford he devised and now coordinates the interdisciplinary research project "Rethinking Lyric Communities", which brings historical poetic practices into dialogue with recent developments in the theory of the lyric and in theories of community. What is it that makes lyric poetry particularly shareable? How is it actually shared in its social, cultural and technological contexts? And what kind of community formation does it enable or envision? "Rethinking Lyric Communities" sets out to explore the relationship between lyric poetry and community formation in both premodern and modern times in a global perspective. The project is jointly funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership, the Christ Church Research Centre, and the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
He has published two books devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to creative desire in lyric poetry, "Canzonieri in morte: Per un’etica poetica del lutto" (Textus Edizioni, 2015) and "Il desiderio della lirica: Poesia, creazione, conoscenza" (Carocci, 2016). He co-edited, with Christine Ott and Damiano Frasca, the volume "Poesia e nuovi media" (Cesati, 2018); with Benjamin Lewis Robinson, "The Work of World Literature" (ICI Berlin Press, 2021); with Adele Bardazzi and Emanuela Tandello, "A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry" (Legenda, 2022); with Irene Fantappiè and Laura Scuriatti, "Rethinking Lyric Communities" (ICI Berlin Press, 2024). His work has appeared in "Modern Language Notes", "The Italianist", "Italian Studies", "Italica", "Intersezioni", "Strumenti critici", "Between", "Critica letteraria", "California Italian Studies", "Exemplaria", and in many other Italian and international journals.
At Oxford he devised and now coordinates the interdisciplinary research project "Rethinking Lyric Communities", which brings historical poetic practices into dialogue with recent developments in the theory of the lyric and in theories of community. What is it that makes lyric poetry particularly shareable? How is it actually shared in its social, cultural and technological contexts? And what kind of community formation does it enable or envision? "Rethinking Lyric Communities" sets out to explore the relationship between lyric poetry and community formation in both premodern and modern times in a global perspective. The project is jointly funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership, the Christ Church Research Centre, and the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
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Books by Francesco Giusti
Libera espressione di potenti sensazioni o prodotto incosciente della possessione divina? Fra questi due estremi tradizionali si cercano le motivazioni che spingono un 'io' a prender voce per dire l’oggetto del proprio desiderio e il desiderio stesso. Attraverso alcuni momenti della tradizione lirica europea, in cui il soggetto ci parla dell’arrivo della poesia in se stesso, il libro vuol dare risposta a una domanda: al di là dell’ispirazione, del talento innato e della tecnica acquisita, in che modo l’esperienza personale viene ad assumere un ruolo fondamentale per motivare la parola e inizia a essere sufficiente per garantire l’autonomia e l’autorità della voce? La millenaria pratica discorsiva della lirica diventa allora la performance, davanti agli occhi del lettore, di un processo affettivo e cognitivo mosso dal desiderio di comprensione e di rappresentazione, all’interno della relazione che si istituisce tra una soggettività singolare che fa esperienza nel mondo e un oggetto a cui si rivolge una particolare 'attenzione'. Poesia, quindi, non più come espressione di esperienze, sensazioni o verità già conseguite, bensì come incarnazione di un desiderio al lavoro, come il farsi stesso di una soggettività, un conoscere come farsi conoscere.
What is in Orpheus’ voice? Where is Eurydice? There is a genre or subgenre of modern lyric poetry in which the mourning subject attempts to reconstruct order out of his/her scattered memory fragments by arranging them into an organized structure: the “canzonieri in morte”, collections of poems devoted to the poet’s beloved and tragically lost partner. The study investigates how the language of the lyric copes with the hole in meaning opened up in the ‘I’ by the death of the ‘you’ and with the absence of an object of desire that, before becoming discursive content, is a real human being that is part of the poet’s private life. When he/she is translated into poetry, the poet’s senses already miss that body; he/she is already an image in memory. The “work” has thus to deal with a grief that precedes it. What will the subject “make” of and with this bereavement? How can his/her subjectivity still be “practiced”? Could the literary work restore a unity and compensate for the suffered loss? Can words (re)create the intimacy of a dialogue or can they just keep invoking the name? What kind of urge drives the subject to look back and regard (in the double sense of Derrida’s “regarder”) the one who regards him/her? How can the reader, who has not shared that love and is only an external recipient of the utterance, find his/her place within the discourse? Orpheus and Eurydice, the mythic couple of tragic lovers, lead us along a path which starts with Dante’s and Petrarch’s archetypes and reaches the different voices of seven contemporary poets: Eugenio Montale, Milo De Angelis, Ted Hughes, Mark Doty, Douglas Dunn, Gabriela Mistral, and Patrizia Valduga. The inquiry aims to outline a discursive modality which could host the traces of the one who has been lost and a potential poetic and ethical relationship with the now absent singularity.
Edited volumes & Special issues by Francesco Giusti
The volume includes essays by Jonathan Culler, Sabine I. Gölz, Francesco Giusti, Peter D. McDonald, Philip Ross Bullock, Laura Scuriatti, Derek Attridge, Wendy Lotterman, Toby Altman, Hal Coase, and a conversation between the editors and Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo.
The volume is available in both open access and print version at https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-30
open access: https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/status_quaestionis/issue/view/1676
CONTENTS:
Introduction: Why Mourning in Poetry?
ADELE BARDAZZI, FRANCESCO GIUSTI, EMANUELA TANDELLO
1. The Loss of Poetry: Leopardi’s ‘Coro di morti’
EMANUELA TANDELLO
2. Carlotta’s Ghost
FABIO CAMILLETTI
3. Mourning Over Her Image: The Re-enactment of Lyric Gestures in Giorgio Caproni’s ‘Versi livornesi’
FRANCESCO GIUSTI
4. Giorgio Bassani, The Poet-Ghost, and the Memorial Duty of the Survivor
MARTINA PIPERNO
5. The Space of Mourning: Elettra’s mise en abyme
MARZIA D’AMICO
6. Mourning in Translation: The Sardinian Poetry of Antonella Anedda
ADELE BARDAZZI
7. Madre d’inverno by Vivian Lamarque
VILMA DE GASPERIN
More info can be found at this link:
http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/ip-54
Essays by:
Derek Attridge on the work of translation
Lorna Burns on world literature and postcolonialism
Francesco Giusti on gestural community
Benjamin Lewis Robinson on the world without literature
Rashmi Varma on extractivism and indigeneity
Dirk Wiemann on a literary ethics of commitment
Jarad Zimbler on world literary criticism
With an afterword by Emily Apter on reparative translation
The volume is available in both open access and print version
at https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-19
Il volume raccoglie Interventi di Damiano Frasca, Christine Ott, Caroline Lüderssen, Paolo Zublena, Gian Luca Picconi, Paolo Giovannetti, Alessandro Scarsella, Lena Schönwälder, Emanuele La Rosa, Elisa Unkroth, Bettina Thiers, Katarina Rempe, Katiuscia Darici e Martina Daraio. Il saggio introduttivo è di Francesco Giusti.
Book Chapters by Francesco Giusti
Full text available here: https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-15/giusti_recitation.html
Full text available here: https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-15/giusti_reversion.html
Papers by Francesco Giusti
mistake to be rectified by reason, to 'errare' as difference, the ontological condition to which all living beings are destined. Paying attention to how Leopardi thinks, the article also aims to shed light on the function ascribed to poetry in ‘La ginestra’, in which he resorts to an epistemological corrective in order to move from subjective perception to ontological evidence.
Open Access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02614340.2024.2342633
Libera espressione di potenti sensazioni o prodotto incosciente della possessione divina? Fra questi due estremi tradizionali si cercano le motivazioni che spingono un 'io' a prender voce per dire l’oggetto del proprio desiderio e il desiderio stesso. Attraverso alcuni momenti della tradizione lirica europea, in cui il soggetto ci parla dell’arrivo della poesia in se stesso, il libro vuol dare risposta a una domanda: al di là dell’ispirazione, del talento innato e della tecnica acquisita, in che modo l’esperienza personale viene ad assumere un ruolo fondamentale per motivare la parola e inizia a essere sufficiente per garantire l’autonomia e l’autorità della voce? La millenaria pratica discorsiva della lirica diventa allora la performance, davanti agli occhi del lettore, di un processo affettivo e cognitivo mosso dal desiderio di comprensione e di rappresentazione, all’interno della relazione che si istituisce tra una soggettività singolare che fa esperienza nel mondo e un oggetto a cui si rivolge una particolare 'attenzione'. Poesia, quindi, non più come espressione di esperienze, sensazioni o verità già conseguite, bensì come incarnazione di un desiderio al lavoro, come il farsi stesso di una soggettività, un conoscere come farsi conoscere.
What is in Orpheus’ voice? Where is Eurydice? There is a genre or subgenre of modern lyric poetry in which the mourning subject attempts to reconstruct order out of his/her scattered memory fragments by arranging them into an organized structure: the “canzonieri in morte”, collections of poems devoted to the poet’s beloved and tragically lost partner. The study investigates how the language of the lyric copes with the hole in meaning opened up in the ‘I’ by the death of the ‘you’ and with the absence of an object of desire that, before becoming discursive content, is a real human being that is part of the poet’s private life. When he/she is translated into poetry, the poet’s senses already miss that body; he/she is already an image in memory. The “work” has thus to deal with a grief that precedes it. What will the subject “make” of and with this bereavement? How can his/her subjectivity still be “practiced”? Could the literary work restore a unity and compensate for the suffered loss? Can words (re)create the intimacy of a dialogue or can they just keep invoking the name? What kind of urge drives the subject to look back and regard (in the double sense of Derrida’s “regarder”) the one who regards him/her? How can the reader, who has not shared that love and is only an external recipient of the utterance, find his/her place within the discourse? Orpheus and Eurydice, the mythic couple of tragic lovers, lead us along a path which starts with Dante’s and Petrarch’s archetypes and reaches the different voices of seven contemporary poets: Eugenio Montale, Milo De Angelis, Ted Hughes, Mark Doty, Douglas Dunn, Gabriela Mistral, and Patrizia Valduga. The inquiry aims to outline a discursive modality which could host the traces of the one who has been lost and a potential poetic and ethical relationship with the now absent singularity.
The volume includes essays by Jonathan Culler, Sabine I. Gölz, Francesco Giusti, Peter D. McDonald, Philip Ross Bullock, Laura Scuriatti, Derek Attridge, Wendy Lotterman, Toby Altman, Hal Coase, and a conversation between the editors and Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo.
The volume is available in both open access and print version at https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-30
open access: https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/status_quaestionis/issue/view/1676
CONTENTS:
Introduction: Why Mourning in Poetry?
ADELE BARDAZZI, FRANCESCO GIUSTI, EMANUELA TANDELLO
1. The Loss of Poetry: Leopardi’s ‘Coro di morti’
EMANUELA TANDELLO
2. Carlotta’s Ghost
FABIO CAMILLETTI
3. Mourning Over Her Image: The Re-enactment of Lyric Gestures in Giorgio Caproni’s ‘Versi livornesi’
FRANCESCO GIUSTI
4. Giorgio Bassani, The Poet-Ghost, and the Memorial Duty of the Survivor
MARTINA PIPERNO
5. The Space of Mourning: Elettra’s mise en abyme
MARZIA D’AMICO
6. Mourning in Translation: The Sardinian Poetry of Antonella Anedda
ADELE BARDAZZI
7. Madre d’inverno by Vivian Lamarque
VILMA DE GASPERIN
More info can be found at this link:
http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/ip-54
Essays by:
Derek Attridge on the work of translation
Lorna Burns on world literature and postcolonialism
Francesco Giusti on gestural community
Benjamin Lewis Robinson on the world without literature
Rashmi Varma on extractivism and indigeneity
Dirk Wiemann on a literary ethics of commitment
Jarad Zimbler on world literary criticism
With an afterword by Emily Apter on reparative translation
The volume is available in both open access and print version
at https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-19
Il volume raccoglie Interventi di Damiano Frasca, Christine Ott, Caroline Lüderssen, Paolo Zublena, Gian Luca Picconi, Paolo Giovannetti, Alessandro Scarsella, Lena Schönwälder, Emanuele La Rosa, Elisa Unkroth, Bettina Thiers, Katarina Rempe, Katiuscia Darici e Martina Daraio. Il saggio introduttivo è di Francesco Giusti.
Full text available here: https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-15/giusti_recitation.html
Full text available here: https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-15/giusti_reversion.html
mistake to be rectified by reason, to 'errare' as difference, the ontological condition to which all living beings are destined. Paying attention to how Leopardi thinks, the article also aims to shed light on the function ascribed to poetry in ‘La ginestra’, in which he resorts to an epistemological corrective in order to move from subjective perception to ontological evidence.
Open Access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02614340.2024.2342633
La Nachträglichkeit descritta dalla psicoanalisi moderna sembra essere la temporalità con cui si strutturano i "canzonieri in morte", le raccolte poetiche dedicate alla persona amata e perduta dal poeta. Un simile processo di (auto)interpretazione al contempo retrospettivo e progressivo, infatti, si ritrova molto prima nella poesia lirica europea. L’articolo muove da alcune riflessioni teoriche e da un breve riferimento ai due grandi modelli offerti dalla "Vita nova" di Dante e dal "Canzoniere" di Petrarca, per poi soffermarsi su alcuni esempi tratti da due "canzonieri in morte" italiani contemporanei: gli "Xenia" (in "Satura", 1971) di Eugenio Montale e "Tema dell’addio" (2005) di Milo De Angelis. Si vuole mostrare come la complessa temporalità che Freud chiama Nachträglichkeit possa assolvere diverse funzioni: organizzare il macrotesto lirico; produrre un nuovo significato per poesie composte in precedenza; portare avanti una revisione del passato biografico e poetico; contribuire a modellare una figura di autore. Alcune delle questioni delineate nei canzonieri permetteranno infine di riflettere sulla forma dell’auto-antologia, l’antologia poetica selezionata e organizzata dall’autore stesso.
★
Gozzano’s poetry is neither fully ascribable to Modernism nor completely behind it. it intentionally lingers in an intermediate state that will later be reflected by the chrysalis stage described in "Le Farfalle". From this position, Gozzano develops a critical awareness of the irony embedded in history that impedes any candid trust in human authenticity, and leads the speaker to consider himself as a character created by the socio-cultural circumstances in which he has to exist.
Since lyric poetry shows itself as the unfolding of a subject that voices itself and is always involved in an object relation, it can be a privileged field of investigation for this kind of phenomena. Two poets will be taken into consideration: Thibaut de Champagne, a late trouvère who summons up the Provençal tradition, and Charles Baudelaire, one of the modern poets that have most deeply investigated the reality's lack of sense.
«Come se il poema, in quanto struttura formale, non potesse, non dovesse finire, come se la possibilità della fine gli fosse radicalmente sottratta, poiché essa implicherebbe quell’impossibile poetico che è la coincidenza esatta del suono e del senso. Nel punto in cui il suono sta per rovinare nell’abisso del senso, il poema cerca scampo sospendendo, per così dire, la propria fine in una dichiarazione di stato di emergenza poetica».
Agamben arriva a questa conclusione trattando della poesia di Baudelaire, ma il breve saggio fa della non coincidenza tra piano semantico e piano semiotico, che impedisce al testo di compiersi, un tratto generale della poesia. Il filosofo accenna infatti anche a Valéry e Mallarmé, osserva Arnaut Daniel e Raimbaut d’Aurenga, e dedica un certo spazio a Dante.
Pur conservando l’idea dell’incompiutezza come carattere generale della lirica, il contributo non si concentrerà sull’opposizione tracciata da Agamben, bensì sul carattere fallimentare del processo conoscitivo che il testo affronta al suo interno. Al soggetto testuale si potrebbe applicare quanto Rainer Maria Rilke, sia pur parlando della musica, scrive nei "Quaderni di Malte Laurids Brigge" (1910):
«Io, che fin da bambino sono stato così diffidente della musica (non perché mi portasse fuori di me più potentemente di qualsiasi altra cosa, ma perché avevo notato che non mi riportava indietro al punto in cui mi aveva trovato, ma mi lasciava molto più in profondità, da qualche parte nel cuore delle cose
non finite)…».
Se consideriamo "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819) di John Keats come un’incarnazione esemplare del progetto della lirica moderna, è evidente che nel corso del testo non si dà alcuna progressione lineare nella conoscenza effettiva dell’antico cimelio, ma neppure una chiusura del cerchio con un semplice ritorno alla posizione iniziale. La costruzione ad anello, marcata da echi testuali che risuonano tra la prima e l’ultima stanza, segna sì una conclusione formale del testo, ma questa non corrisponde al compimento del desiderio iniziale. Allo stesso tempo, però, un qualche avanzamento deve esserci stato: la posizione finale non coincide perfettamente con quella iniziale. Qualcosa accade nel mentre. Una sorta di progresso ha avuto luogo, non verso l’oggetto specifico, ma sul soggetto stesso come essere umano. L’io matura un’esperienza e comprende una verità relativa, una meta-conoscenza sul suo conoscere: la celebre massima «Beauty is truth, truth beauty».
Riprendendo le riflessioni sulle differenti modalità con cui poesie di epoche diverse marcano la loro conclusione indagate da Barbara Herrnstein Smith in "Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End" (1968), sulla circolarità che il testo lirico innesca nell’atto di lettura proposta da Timothy Bahti in "Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry" (1996) e sul carattere queer che l’incompiutezza può assumere rivendicato in "Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry" (2002) di John Emil Vincent, il contributo vuole indagare, attraverso Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale e Milo De Angelis, in che modo la poesia contemporanea si faccia carico dell’incompiutezza. L’ipotesi è che, se per secoli questa incompiutezza è stata anche un grande tema della poesia – si pensi soltanto all’incongruenza tra la chiusura formale del testo della poesia medievale e rinascimentale e la ribadita impossibilità di una perfetta rappresentazione dell’oggetto d’amore – dal Modernismo in poi la lirica non rinunci a intraprendere il suo percorso, ma assuma consapevolmente su di sé l’errore facendone il principio strutturante del proprio discorso.
Il cerchio che non chiude diventa allora una forma specifica della temporalità per la lirica (e per il lettore) che non insegue il successo del percorso lineare, ma accoglie l’errore insito nel suo sforzo per accettare di praticare un’approssimazione infinita e per maturare coscienza della propria pratica. La recollection romantica si chiarisce nella nachträglichkeit psicoanalitica: la riattivazione nel presente di esperienze e sensazioni passate descritta da Wordsworth si definisce nel Novecento come doppio movimento in cui si riconosce il passato come parte integrante del presente e, allo stesso tempo, il presente ridefinisce continuamente il passato. Se la recollection, in altre parole, sembra ancora avere in sé il desiderio del presente tinto di nostalgia del passato tipico della lirica, con la nachträglichkeit il presente si rivela sempre più sfuggente: è un punto di vista provvisorio da cui si osserva il sovrapporsi dei passati in un’operazione potenzialmente infinita, perché riconosce che non soltanto l’oggetto resta opaco all’interpretazione, ma il soggetto stesso muta nel processo.
La non compiutezza della poesia, infine, potrebbe essere proprio quel che assicura la ripetibilità del testo. Partendo dal valore centrale che l’iteratività formale della lirica assume nel recente "Theory of the Lyric" (2015) di Jonathan Culler, nell’ultima parte il contributo tenterà di costruire un’ipotesi sulle ragioni per cui proprio il fatto che la poesia, come artefatto, debba concludersi senza necessariamente compiersi interamente consente al testo lirico di presentarsi come performance ripetibile attraverso i secoli e rinnovabile ad ogni atto di lettura.
The paper will take into account H. D. Thoreau’s 'Walden' (1854), Italo Calvino’s 'Il barone rampante' (1957) and the movie 'In to the wild' (Sean Penn, USA 2007, from the novel by Jon Krakauer, 1996), in order to understand how the displacement of the subject is carried out. It will also try to trace a development of the 'nature alternative' from Thoreau’s short-timed experience of a new possibility of existence, through the fantastic model of the Barone rampante’s one-man revolution, to the tragic, extreme ending of 'In to the wild'. From the middle of the XIX century to our days something is changed in our relationship with the 'otherness' of Nature and in the reasons to choose that 'otherness' against human society, the paper will outline the changes in Western culture which lie behind the differences shown in these three works."
performance that the bereaved subject has to carry out in order to emotionally detach himself from the
loss and the lost object. It is even clearer when the mourning process is mediated by an aesthetic work. The
This workshop aims to focus on the double-edged dimension of community formations, arguing that enabling communities involves internal and external conflicts to circumscribe and exclude other collective formations. The complex dynamics between conflict and assent will be explored through the transnational re-creation or epigonal re-use of traditional forms, the emergence of minorities in the public sphere and in national literary traditions, the transcription and publication of oral performances, and the emergence of queer identities.
In cooperation with: EXC 2020 Temporal Communities; Dahlem Humanities Center; Italienzentrum – Freie Universität Berlin; Oxford Berlin Research Partnership; Center for Italian Studies – University of Notre Dame.
https://www.temporal-communities.de/events/2024/workshop-conflict-and-assent.html
The symposium sets out to explore the ways in which lyric poetry enabled or imagined community formation from the 11th to 17th centuries in both European and Middle Eastern worlds, investigating a variety of topics: the direct exchange of poems; the sharing of poetic codes; forms of collective writing; individual or collective performance; lyric poetry as a collective practice; the construction of collective voices; the practice of commentary for and within specific communities; the composition and circulation of manuscripts and early printed editions; transhistorical and transnational poetic communities; multilingual and homosocial literary relationships; and the role of translation in community formation.
The symposium is part of the "Rethinking Lyric Communities" project and aims to expand the inquiry begun with the two workshops funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership and held at Christ Church (Oxford) on 23 June 2022 and at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry on 5 July 2022, which focused on modern and contemporary poetry.
This is a hybrid event. To receive the link, please write to Nicolas Longinotti by Thursday 15 June 2023: n.longinotti@fu-berlin.de
With the support of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership, the Christ Church Research Centre, and the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame
In cooperation with the EXC Temporal Communities at Freie Universität Berlin
Speakers and discussants include Derek Attridge, Adele Bardazzi, Roberto Binetti, Philip Ross Bullock, Jonathan Culler, Manuele Gragnolati, Karen Leeder, Peter D. McDonald, Emily McLaughlin, Jahan Ramazani, Daniel Tiffany, and Anita Traninger. The Oxford session also includes a conversation with poet Vahni Anthony Capildeo and the Berlin session an evening event with Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Christian Hawkey, and Daniel Tiffany, who will read a selection of their work and offer their reflections on poetry, community, and translation.
In cooperation with ICI Berlin, Bard College Berlin and the EXC Temporal Communities
With the support of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership
For Culler, the very fact that a lyric poem is meant to be repeated by different readers in a variety of contexts implies that it can be put to quite different uses and enlisted in conflicting ideological projects. On the other hand, poetry seems to play a peculiar role in French and French-oriented political philosophy, especially in reflections on community formation, exemplified in the famous exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy begun in the 1980s. This event will discuss the possible relationships between lyric and society and question whether lyric poetry could contribute, if not to the reformation of society, at least to the formation of (minority, resistant) communities based on the enactment and reenactment of particular poems.
An ICI Event in cooperation with the
‘Re-’ Interdisciplinary Network (CRASSH, Cambridge)
The work of Derek Attridge demonstrates the critical and theoretical potential of the encounter between world literature and literary theory. In 'The Singularity of Literature' (2004), Attridge insists that the book is complemented by his work in literary criticism on to the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, published the same year, 'J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading'. It is as if the theory of literature – of literature in general – emerges out of a particular literary encounter, in this instance with a postcolonial writer pre-occupied with geopolitical, historical, and ethical limits – not least the limits of literature itself. And it is no coincidence that, while Attridge is critical of an oversimplified mapping of politics onto literature, his theory of literature involves politically charged terms such as singularity, otherness, exclusion, response, responsibility, as well as justice and hospitality.
Responding to Attridge’s recent 'The Work of Literature' (2015), a group of scholars will reflect on the correspondences between world literature, literary theory, and the world writ large. The symposium sets out to explore the limits but also the liminality of literary theory and the historical, geopolitical and theoretical frameworks that inform and perhaps also tacitly delimit world literature.
With
Derek Attridge
and
Refqa Abu-Remaileh (Freie Universität Berlin)
Lorna Margaret Burns (University of St Andrews)
Francesco Giusti (ICI Berlin)
Benjamin Lewis Robinson (Universität Wien)
Rashmi Varma (University of Warwick)
Dirk Wiemann (Universität Potsdam)
Jarad Zimbler (University of Birmingham)
Programme
Thursday, 20 June 2019
19:30 Keynote by Derek Attridge
'Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature: A South African Example'
Friday, 21 June 2019
Workshop
10:30 Morning coffee
10:45 Introduction by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Robinson
11:00–13:00: Panel I
13:00–14:30: Lunch break
14:30–16:30: Panel II
16:30–17:00: Coffee break
17:00–18:30: Derek Attridge’s response and final discussion
The day-long symposium includes a morning workshop on the last text Agamben added to the single-volume edition, well after the individual publication of its last book 'Stasis' — a fourteen-page ‘Note on War, Play, and the Enemy’, in which Agamben takes a newly measured distance from Carl Schmitt’s understanding of the political as resting on the possibility of violent conflict. After two panels with short presentations and time for discussion, the symposium will conclude with an evening event with Bettine Menke and Francesca Raimondi, a discussion revolving around the relationship between Agamben’s project and its historical context, the urgencies and catastrophes he sought to address, as well as alternative modes of addressing them.
With
Christiane Frey
Francesco Giusti
Damiano Sacco
Filippo Trentin
Katrin Trüstedt
Tom Vandeputte
Facundo Vega
Arnd Wedemeyer
Evening event with
Bettine Menke and Francesca Raimondi
This workshop — an event showcasing work by the current cohort of ICI fellows, who have worked collectively on the ICI core project ‘ERRANS, in Time’ over the past two years — will explore and explode questions of time and temporality.
Working across, between, and against disciplines and engaging with a diverse array of objects encompassing film, literature, psychology, philosophy, visual art, and critical theory, the speakers will address questions related to temporal errancy in conversation with invited discussants.
Aiming at bringing to a halt understandings of time as merely developmentalist, linear, and/or progressive, the event will investigate different forms and aesthetics of temporal errancies and their political implications.
Engaging with Barthes’s politics of in/visibility in a broad sense, this workshop will interrogate the centrality of the margins in Roland Barthes’ works and explore their underlying visual universe. Acclaimed for his decipherings of everyday mythologies, Barthes not only developed a wide set of tools and concepts to deconstruct the ideologies governing the visible: his critique of cultural stereotypes, his new approach to literature and the arts always go hand in hand with a reflection on the margins and a commitment to minorities.
Magali Nachtergael will guide our discussion of pre-circulated texts. By confronting some of Barthes’ central concepts with the visual universe that innervates them, Nachtergael will help us ask how what is left in the margins can sometimes crucially shift perspectives on the reception of these concepts.
Programme:
16:00-18:00 Workshop
19:30 Evening Keynote by Magali Nachtergael
Barthes, Queer Before Queer? A Journey Into Barthes’s Visual Culture
Followed by a roundtable discussion with Julie Gaillard, Francesco Giusti, and Dirk Naguschewski
Return, then, is an uncanny thing, with a distinctive temporality that conjoins recollection, satisfaction , and frustration. It plays an important role in shaping many kinds of medieval cultural artifact. Return is a basic component of pseudo-Dionysian (and later, Thomistic) theories of intel-lection; for Boethius, it is inherent to the process of spiritual transcendence. Return also shapes literary texts: for instance, romance heroes desire to return to their homeland, but the obstacles placed in their path, or the digressions they undertake, are the basic preconditions of the stories in which they find themselves. In such cases, only a deferred return can satisfy; and is not inevitably satisfying, even when accomplished— it can also be a frustrating repetition of a well-trodden path. This is true of lyric texts as much as narrative ones: medieval lyric poems are often concerned with the human inclination to go back to an unfruitful site of pain, loss, or even dangerous enjoyment.
Return is also embedded in the very texture of medieval poetic and musical forms: the sestina, the refrain, and the terza rima all embody different kinds of recursivity. Dante's re-use of rhyme sounds in the unfolding of the 'Divine Comedy' — a poem that, at various crucial points, thematizes return as a transcendent symbol — performs a spiraling movement that combines repetition and progressive ascent. Reiteration can disrupt linear and teleological progress, but also empower it. How does medieval culture cope with this ambivalence?
The conference will explore the ways in which medieval literary, artistic, musical, philosophical, and theological texts perform, interrogate, and generate value from the complexities of return, with particular reference to its formal and temporal qualities.
As the first presentation of the collaborative work undertaken as part of the ICI’s Core Project ERRANS, in Time, this workshop seeks erratic temporalities in which sequences are agitated, teleologies unsettled, and time unhinged. Taking various instantiations of re- as its points of departure, current ICI Fellows will present an errant glossary in order to provoke reactions, resonances and responses.
How can one think of the relationship between the definitiveness of conversion, the teleological reconstruction of the past, and the integrity of the self? What are the implications in terms of subjectivity, gender, and desire? Is conversion a process that can be narrated or rather something constituted through the performance of narration itself? Can the paradox that conversion appears as both the condition and the performative product of self-narration be resolved through conversion’s teleological temporal structure? To what extent is an irreducibly complex experience reduced by being unfolded in such a linear temporality and at what cost for the self and for others? And finally, if Western paradigms not only of autobiography but of narration as such have arguably become inextricably bound up with conversion and its temporality, how can one think of (narrative and textual) forms that propose other articulations of time and subjectivity?
This workshop will problematize the concept of conversion by looking at the interactions between theological discussions and literary re/presentations. It will also question conversion’s temporal structure by considering contemporary critiques of teleology, normativity, and futurity.
With
Phil Knox (Cambridge)
Jonathan Morton (KCL)
Francesca Southerden (Oxford)
Elizabeth Eva Leach (Oxford)
Jennifer Rushworth (Oxford)
Irene Fantappiè (HU Berlin)
Laura Ashe (Oxford)
Marco Nievergelt (Warwick)
Daniel Barber (Pace U)
Marisa Galvez (Stanford)
Christoph Holzhey (ICI Berlin)
Almut Suerbaum (Oxford)
David Bowe (Oxford)
The seminar aims to bring the investigation of historical poetic communities into dialogue with recent developments in the theory of the lyric and in theories of community. While discussing a variety of poetic phenomena in modern European poetry that have been at the center of the critical and philosophical debate — the poetics of the fragment, the unworking or désœuvrement of the work, the obscurity or polysemy of language, a change of aesthetic regime — the workshop will also explore the lyric, in its longer history and transnational features, as a particular discursive mode that may offer alternative models of community formation.
The seminar is the fourth instalment of a series of events with the same title: the workshops held at Christ Church (Oxford) on 23 June 2022 and at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry on 5 July 2022, and the panel at the congress of the European Society of Comparative Literature in Rome (5-9 September 2022).
Possible topics include:
- the direct exchange of poems
- sharing of poetic codes
- forms of collective writing
- individual or collective performance
- lyric poetry as a collective practice
- the construction of collective voices
- the practice of commentary for and within specific communities
- transhistorical and/or transnational poetic communities
- translation and community formation
- the use of poetry in episodes of political resistance
- the use of poetry on social media
- lyric poetry and human-nonhuman communities
- poetry and environmental awareness
The seminar sets out to explore the relationship between lyric poetry and community formation in both pre-modern and modern times. Paper proposals focusing on non-Western poetic traditions are particularly welcome.
Papers can be submitted here: https://www.acla.org/rethinking-lyric-communities
Progress, Process, and Repetition in Medieval Culture
International Conference
29-30 September 2017
Organized by
Francesco Giusti and Daniel Reeve
Keynote speaker
Elizabeth Eva Leach (University of Oxford)
The conference will explore the ways in which medieval literary, artistic, musical, philosophical, and theological texts perform, interrogate, and generate value from the complexities of return, with particular reference to its formal and temporal qualities. Reconsidering the practical and theoretical implications of return — a movement in time and space that seems to shape medieval culture in a fundamental sense.
Papers will be given in English, and will be limited to 30 minutes. Please email an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short bio-bibliographical profile (100 words maximum) to theshapeofreturn@ici-berlin.org by 15 April 2017. An answer will be given before 1 May 2017. A full programme will be published on the ICI Berlin website (www.ici-berlin.org) in due course. As with all events at the ICI Berlin, there is no registration fee. We can provide assistance in securing discounted accommodation for the conference period.
The event will be hosted by the international online seminar Lirica&Teoria, coordinated by Francesco Giusti (Bard College Berlin) and Christine Ott (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt). The seminar Lirica&Teoria brings together a group of scholars based in different countries to discuss questions of lyric theory as well as new approaches to the lyric, with a particular focus on the Italian poetic tradition. On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, the seminar will also host events open to the public and related to Dante’s lyric poetry.
Felski, who is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (where she leads a large research project on “The Social Dimensions of Literature”), has brought the conceptual tools of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) into literary studies. Such re-orientations in critical and creative vocabularies are becoming increasingly visible in academic discourse, and Felski has been at the forefront of these transformations, a position that will only be further cemented by her new book, "Hooked: Art and Attachment," forthcoming in fall 2020.
This conversation, which took place via email, addresses the main arguments and aims of Felski’s scholarly work in the context of current trends in literary and cultural criticism.
Il seminario si svolgerà prevalentemente in lingua italiana e ospiterà anche eventi aperti al pubblico: incontri con critici e teorici, presentazioni di pubblicazioni recenti e progetti editoriali e di ricerca. Nel 2021 gli eventi pubblici proporranno inoltre un focus sulla produzione lirica di Dante in occasione delle celebrazioni per i 700 anni dalla morte del Sommo Poeta.
Featuring:
Adele Bardazzi
Fabio Camilletti
Marzia D’Amico
Vilma de Gasperin
Francesco Giusti
Peter Hainsworth
Martina Piperno
Emanuela Tandello
Organised by Adele Bardazzi and Emanuela Tandello
With the support of Christ Church, the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages of the University of Oxford, the Society for Italian Studies, and in association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities
A Seminar Series at the Department of Italian, Trinity College Dublin
In Collaboration with Interdisciplinary Italy Network
Co-ordinated by Dr Adele Bardazzi
This series of research seminars at the Department of Italian at Trinity College Dublin is dedicated to modern and contemporary Italian poetry and is in collaboration with Interdisciplinary Italy Network .
Poetry’s engagement with other media is far from being a recent phenomenon. Yet, as this seminar series seeks to highlight, Italian poetry seems to be a particularly reactive literary scene in which from the 20th-century onwards poets have increasingly engaged with a wide range of media in such a way as to further extend the experiments of avant-garde movements. From this viewpoint, this seminar series will not be limited to the works of poets belonging to avant-garde movements such as Futurism or cases of visual and concrete poetry, and will include investigations of some of the most interesting examples of intermediality in modern and contemporary Italian poetry. In addition, attention will be given to defining possible theoretical frameworks and methodologies that can be helpful in approaching intermedial poetic works and, most importantly, what do we mean by ‘intermedial poetics’.