This book, by one of Italy's most important and original
contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and
ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the
nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among
theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature
initiated by Dante.
The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic
genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain
distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to
appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in
his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian
reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in
his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference.
It is no accident that in the "Commedia" Virgil is Dante's guide.
The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a
"comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of
poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines,
the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of
writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end"
does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature
passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending,
with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise.
Though most of the essays make specific reference to various
authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante,
Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the
confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary
and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius,
the Provencal poets, Mallarme, and Holderlin, among others).
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(1)
