Barocco e Neobarocco

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course investigates the literary, cultural, and ideological facets of seventeenth-century Italian baroque and their role in twentieth-century Italian literature. We will analyze Marino's ekphrastic poems La galeria, Adone and the genre of "visual poetry" (poesia figurata) through a close reading of Guido Casoni's La passione di Cristo. To enlighten the baroque's emphasis on verbal/visual contamination, we will read passages from Emanuele Tesauro's Il cannocchiale aristotelico and Panegirici, particularly those dedicated to the Holy Shroud of Turin, which the baroque saw as an exceptional hybrid (representation made with Christ's blood). We will read the first chapter of Marino's Dicerie sacre (La Pittura. Diceria prima sopra la Santa Sindone), selections from Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti, and Torquato Accetto's Della dissimulazione onesta. From the modern Neo-baroque, we will read texts that reflect the concepts and rhetorical strategies we found in the seventeenth-century texts. We will analyze crucial novels such as Gadda's La cognizione del dolore, Ortese's Il cardillo addolorato, Manganelli's Dall'inferno, Discorso dell'ombra e dello stemma, and Centuria. We will focus on Sanguineti's Laborintus and Zanzotto's La beltà, which is a key text of Italian poetic canon. During the course we will discuss essential secondary literature such as Benjamin's The Origins of German Tragic Drama, Calabrese's Il neobarocco, and Harrison's Reflections on Baroque.