Download or read book Zibaldone written by Giacomo Leopardi and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 2592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking translation of the epic work of one of the great minds of the nineteenth century Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante. (Jonathan Galassi's translation of Leopardi's Canti was published by FSG in 2010.) He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the Zibaldone, or "hodge-podge," as Harold Bloom has called it, in which Leopardi put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading. His comments about religion, philosophy, language, history, anthropology, astronomy, literature, poetry, and love are unprecedented in their brilliance and suggestiveness, and the Zibaldone, which was only published at the turn of the twentieth century, has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture. Its 4,500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now, when a team under the auspices of Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino of the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham, England, have spent years producing a lively, accurate version. This essential book will change our understanding of nineteenth-century culture. This is an extraordinary, epochal publication.
Download or read book Forms of Thinking in Leopardi s Zibaldone written by Paola Cori and published by Italian Perspectives. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fifteen years between 1817 and 1832 Giacomo Leopardi's notebook the Zibaldone grew like an expanding universe, recording the emergence and development of his thought until, on 4 December 1832, on page 4526, it fell silent. Philosophical reflections, private memories, poetry, observations on politics and society are only some of the creative expressions of Leopardi's quest, which both enriched his everyday life and at the same time sheltered him from the tyranny of rationality and the death of illusions which he perceived as intrinsic to modernity. There is no other work in world literature quite like it, and yet, strictly speaking, the Zibaldone is not even a work. Private in character but constantly opening up to virtual interlocutors, it gained readers only on publication sixty years after Leopardi's death. Its importance in Western thought, however, is yet to be fully appreciated, not only in terms of its content but also in terms of its form. In this major new study, Cori follows Leopardi's philosophical journey and traces the origin of a sensibility towards the ephemeral, the hyper-real and the simulacrum, which would only truly be understood during modernity and post-modernity, and which Leopardi is the first Italian thinker to perceive.
Download or read book Why Trilling Matters written by Adam Kirsch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lionel Trilling, regarded at the time of his death in 1975 as America's preeminent literary critic, is today often seen as a relic of a vanished era. His was an age when literary criticism and ideas seemed to matter profoundly in the intellectual life of the country. In this eloquent book, Adam Kirsch shows that Trilling, far from being obsolete, is essential to understanding our current crisis of literary confidence--and to overcoming it.By reading Trilling primarily as a writer and thinker, Kirsch demonstrates how Trilling's original and moving work continues to provide an inspiring example of a mind creating itself through its encounters with texts. "Why Trilling Matters" introduces all of Trilling's major writings and situates him in the intellectual landscape of his century, from Communism in the 1930s to neoconservatism in the 1970s. But Kirsch goes deeper, addressing today's concerns about the decline of literature, reading, and even the book itself, and finds that Trilling has more to teach us now than ever before. As Kirsch writes, "Trilling's essays are not exactly literary criticism" but, like all literature, "ends in themselves."
Download or read book Pensieri written by Giacomo Leopardi and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Moral Fables written by Giacomo Leopardi and published by Alma Books. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alongside his monumental Notebooks and the poems collected in Canti, which make him one of Italy's greatest and best-loved poets, Giacomo Leopardi penned a number of fictional pieces, mostly in the form of gently humorous dialogues, in which he dealt with philosophical ideas and many of the metaphysical questions that preoccupied his restless spirit.First published in 1827 and here presented in a new translation by J.G. Nichols along with Thoughts, Leopardi's own selected pearls of wisdom and gems of social observation, this volume will enchant both those who are familiar with and those who are new to the works of Italy's last great polymath.
Download or read book Evil written by Andrew Chignell and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen original essays examine the conceptual history of evil in the west: from ancient Hebrew literature and Greek drama to Darwinism and Holocaust theory. Thirteen reflections contextualize the philosophical developments by looking at evil through the eyes of animals, poets, mystics, witches, librettists, film directors, and tech executives.
Download or read book Milieus of Minutiae written by Elizabeth Brogden and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2024-12-19 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long history of tiny matter(s) in the sciences, thought, and culture From catastrophic weather and steady warming caused by the accumulation of carbon particles in the Earth’s atmosphere to societies brought to a standstill by microscopic viruses, the new millennium has reminded us of how the minutest of phenomena can have outsized effects. This notion is one that has preoccupied the European and Anglo-American cultural imaginary since at least early modernity. Milieus of Minutiae brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to investigate various forms and appearances of minutiae prior to and beyond the advent of magnification. The collection illuminates connections between the empirical practices and technologies with which minutiae have come to be associated and the broader, more diffuse discourses—from the philosophical to the artistic—that have attended theories of smallness before and after Hooke’s Micrographia. Placing essays on Renaissance poetry, Romantic fiction, and matters of punctuation alongside essays on early modern germ theory and the optics of microscopic technology, this rigorously framed volume extends from sixteenth-century pathology to twentieth-century architectural theory, natural science to literature and art.
Download or read book Mapping Leopardi written by Emanuela Cervato and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are you curious about the private laboratory of Giacomo Leopardi, Italy’s greatest modern lyrical poet? Interested in using expert maps to explore it, while deepening your acquaintance with one of the most creative materialist thinkers? This collection of essays makes very original use of the new translation of Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri and investigates its connections to all his other works. Whether your primary interest lies in Italian literature and criticism, linguistics and poetics, the origins of genres such as the fantastic, or in philosophical queries regarding materialism and hedonism, this collection offers original research that will challenge the reader to view this outstanding intellectual in a new light. Offering some of the earliest reflections against anthropocentrism, championing the artist’s interest in the natural sciences, and questioning humanity’s purpose(s) in this world, Leopardi’s work is presented in this volume as an indispensable tool to understand the complexity of Italy’s cultural transformations between the 18th and the 19th centuries.
Download or read book Realpoetik written by Paul Hamilton and published by . This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Realpoetik considers the relationship between literary and political ideas in the thought of key European writers of the Romantic period examining how the main historical events of the period encouraged a re-imagining of the political shape of Europe which also changed the way we think about imagination itself.
Download or read book The Book of Disquiet The Complete Edition written by Fernando Pessoa and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time—and in the best translation ever—the complete Book of Disquiet, a masterpiece beyond comparison The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa’s greatest literary achievement. An “autobiography” or “diary” containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Costa. Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. A monumental literary event, this exciting, new, complete edition spans Fernando Pessoa’s entire writing life.
Download or read book Archaeology of the Unconscious written by Alessandra Aloisi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-10 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In reconstructing the birth and development of the notion of ‘unconscious’, historians of ideas have heavily relied on the Freudian concept of Unbewussten, retroactively projecting the psychoanalytic unconscious over a constellation of diverse cultural experiences taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between France and Germany. Archaeology of the Unconscious aims to challenge this perspective by adopting an unusual and thought-provoking viewpoint as the one offered by the Italian case from the 1770s to the immediate aftermath of WWI, when Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno provides Italy with the first example of a ‘psychoanalytic novel’. Italy’s vibrant culture of the long nineteenth century, characterised by the sedimentation, circulation, intersection, and synergy of different cultural, philosophical, and literary traditions, proves itself to be a privileged object of inquiry for an archaeological study of the unconscious; a study whose object is not the alleged ‘origin’ of a pre-made theoretical construct, but rather the stratifications by which that specific construct was assembled. In line with Michel Foucault’s Archéologie du savoir (1969), this volume will analyze the formation and the circulation, across different authors and texts, of a network of ideas and discourses on interconnected themes, including dreams, memory, recollection, desire, imagination, fantasy, madness, creativity, inspiration, magnetism, and somnambulism. Alongside questioning pre-given narratives of the ‘history of the unconscious’, this book will employ the Italian ‘difference’ as a powerful perspective from whence to address the undeveloped potentialities of the pre-Freudian unconscious, beyond uniquely psychoanalytical viewpoints.
Download or read book Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film written by Enrica Maria Ferrara and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As humans re-negotiate their boundaries with the nonhuman world of animals, inanimate entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed. Through twelve thought-provoking, scholarly essays, this volume analyzes works by a range of modern and contemporary Italian authors, from Giacomo Leopardi to Elena Ferrante, who have captured the shift from anthropocentrism and postmodernism to posthumanism. Indeed, this is the first academic volume investigating narrative configurations of posthuman identity in Italian literature and film.
Download or read book The Atheism of Giacomo Leopardi written by Cosetta Veronese and published by Troubador Publishing. This book was released on 2014-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leopardi’s atheism has always been and remains a contentious issue. It has been condemned, denied, and vindicated in equal measure. This volume of essays is the first in English to address the issue directly by examining the development and complex nature of Leopardi’s atheism in the context of the religious beliefs as well as the atheism of his age. There are chapters on the shift in his writings from religious believer to atheist, from an early draft of ‘Christian hymns’ to the later draft of a hymn to Ahriman, god of evil, and on the biblical language Leopardi continued to use in fashioning his first-person voice; on his empiricism, materialism, and relativism, key philosophical themes of significance to religious belief; comparative chapters on Leopardi and Shelley, who was in many ways a kindred spirit, and on Leopardi and the religious revival in Germany through the filtering lens of Madame de Staël; and finally a chapter on Cesare Luporini whose critical studies have been a focus for contemporary debate on Leopardi’s atheism. The first English translation of Leopardi’s satire I nuovi credenti, written in response to the revival of philosophical spiritualism in Naples, appears in an Appendix. Leopardi’s distinct identity as a poet-philosopher has attracted a good deal of attention in Italy although he is virtually ignored outside Italian culture. In the last 20 years he has been increasingly recognised as a key figure of modern western culture, as witnessed by the number of translations of his notebooks, the Zibaldone di pensieri. This study of Leopardi’s atheism appears alongside a new complete English translation of the Zibaldone. It provides, from the perspective of his atheism, an understanding of the complexity and intellectual lucidity of his thought and of the questions all his writings continue to pose for 21st-century readers.
Download or read book Flower of the Desert written by Antonio Negri and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2015-10-26 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, offers in this book a radical new interpretation of the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. For Negri, Leopardi is not the bitter, idealistic individualist of conventional literary history, but rather a profoundly materialist thinker who sees human solidarity as the only possible solution to the catastrophes of history and politics. Negri traces Leopardi's resistance to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Hegel, with its emphasis on reason's power to resolve real antagonisms into abstract syntheses, and his gradual development of a sophisticated poetic materialism focused on the constructive power of the imagination and its "true illusions." Like Nietzsche (who admired him), Leopardi provides an alternative to modernity within modernity, expressing a force of rupture and recomposition—a uniquely Italian one—that is as relevant now as it was in the nineteenth century, and which connects to the theory of Empire as the political constitution of the present that Negri has elaborated in collaboration with Michael Hardt.
Download or read book Leopardi written by Giacomo Leopardi and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These translations of the major poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837) render into modern English verse the work of a writer who is widely regarded as the greatest lyric poet in the Italian literary tradition. In spite of this reputation, and in spite of a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century translations, Leopardi's poems have never "come over" into English in such a way as to guarantee their author a recognition comparable to that of other great European Romantic poets. By catching something of Leopardi's cadences and tonality in a version that still reads as idiomatic modern English (with an occasional Irish or American accent), Leopardi: Selected Poems should win for the Italian poet the wider appreciative audience he deserves. His themes are mutability, landscape, love; his attitude, one of unflinching realism in the face of unavoidable human loss. But the manners of the poems are a unique amalgam of philosophical toughness and the lyrically bittersweet. In a way more pure and distilled than most others in the Western tradition, these poems are truly what Matthew Arnold asked all poetry to be, a "criticism of life." The translator's aim is to convey something of the profundity and something of the sheer poetic achievement of Leopardi's inestimable Canti.
Download or read book Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature written by Fabio A Camilletti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1816 a violent literary quarrel engulfed Bourbon Restoration Italy. On one side the Romantics wanted an opening up of Italian culture towards Europe, and on the other the Classicists favoured an inward-looking Italy. Giacomo Leopardi wrote a Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry aiming to contribute to the debate from a new perspective.
Download or read book The Aphorism and Other Short Forms written by Ben Grant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aphorism captures a huge amount of truth, meaning or wit in a very short statement. It has been used and studied from classical times to contemporary theory and takes on a new relevance when we look at today’s communication media such as text messages and twitter. This concise guide offers an overview of: The history of the aphorism to the present day Its relation to other short forms, including the fragment, the proverb, the maxim, the haiku, the epigram and the quotation The use of the aphorism by authors such as Heraclitus, Bacon, La Rochefoucauld, Chuang Tzu, Blake, Schlegel, Emerson, Nietzsche, Wilde, Woolf and Barthes The interdisciplinary nature of the aphorism, bringing together science, philosophy, literature and religion Exploring all the key aspects of the form, Ben Grant guides readers through this large and lively area in a wide-ranging and critically informed study of the aphorism.
