Small discoveries can have great consequences in love affairs: the case of "Beauty and the Beast"

A mathematical model is proposed for interpreting the love story portrayed by Walt Disney in the film 'Beauty and The Beast'. The analysis shows that the story is characterized by a sudden explosion of sentimental involvements, revealed by the existence of a saddle-node bifurcation in the model. The paper is interesting not only because it deals for the first time with catastrophic bifurcations in specific romantic relationships, but also because it enriches the list of examples in which love stories are satisfactorily described through Ordinary Differential Equations

Possibilities of Lyric:Reading Petrarch in Dialogue

Opening to passion as an unsettling, transformative force; extending desire to the text, expanding the self, and dissolving its boundaries; imagining pleasures outside the norm and intensifying them; overcoming loss and reaching beyond death; being loyal to oneself and defying productivity, resolution, and cohesion while embracing paradox, non-linearity, incompletion. These are some of the possibilities of lyric that this book explores by reading Petrarch’s vernacular poetry in dialogue with that of other poets, including Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Shakespeare. In the Epilogue, the poet Antonella Anedda Angioy engages with Ossip Mandel’štam and Paul Celan’s dialogue with Petrarch and extends it into the present.A ​“Miscellaneous Enterprise” | 1–15The Shape of Desire: Metamorphosis and Hybridity in Rvf 23 and Rvf 70 | 17–44Openness and Intensity: Petrarch’s Becoming Laurel in Rvf 23 and Rvf 228 | 45–63​“Lust in Action” : Control and Abandon in Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare | 65–84Declensions of ​“Now” : Lyric Epiphanies in Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch | 85–108Extension: Reaching the Beloved in Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch | 111–33Body: Dante’s and Petrarch’s Lyric Eschatologies | 135–62Radure / Clearings | ANTONELLA ANEDDA ANGIOY | 163–84Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden, Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue. With an Epilogue by Antonella Anedda Angioy, Cultural Inquiry, 18 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-18

Petrarch and Boccaccio

The early modern and modern cultural world in the West would be unthinkable without Petrarch and Boccaccio. Despite this fact, there is still no scholarly contribution entirely devoted to analysing their intellectual revolution. Internationally renowned scholars are invited to discuss and rethink the historical, intellectual, and literary roles of Petrarch and Boccaccio between the great model of Dante’s encyclopedia and the ideas of a double or multifaceted culture in the era of Italian Renaissance Humanism. In his lyrical poems and Latin treatises, Petrarch created a cultural pattern that was both Christian and Classical, exercising immense influence on the Western World in the centuries to come. Boccaccio translated this pattern into his own vernacular narratives and erudite works, ultimately claiming as his own achievement the reconstructed unity of the Ancient Greek and Latin world in his contemporary age. The volume reconsiders Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s heritages from different perspectives (philosophy, theology, history, philology, paleography, literature, theory), and investigates how these heritages shaped the cultural transition between the end of the Middle Ages and the early modern era, as well as European identity

Ties that Bind: Women and Friendship in Early Modern Italy

This dissertation is a comparative study of literary texts authored by sixteenth-century Italian women that treat female friendship across the genres of epistolary writing, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry. The primary works under consideration include the correspondence between Elisabetta Gonzaga (1471–1526) and Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), the lyric poems authored by women in Lodovico Domenichi’s anthology Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne (1559), and Margherita Sarrocchi’s heroic poem the Scanderbeide (1623). In addition to the long-standing classical and Christian notions of friendship that held strong in Renaissance Italy, the genres of epistolary writing, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry each had a distinct and mostly male literary tradition of friendship. The literary works in this study reveal the various ways early modern Italian women contributed to their respective genres, and moreover, to larger cultural discourses on friendship by inserting the female perspective and experience. Their writings not only illuminate their understandings and interpretations of female bonds but also demonstrate their use of writing to initiate and maintain friendships with other women. Chapter 1 looks at women’s epistolary prose through the correspondence between two princesses who were sisters-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga, the duchess of Urbino, and Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua. Focusing primarily on letters exchanged during the beginning years of their friendship, I show how the two noblewomen relied on letter writing to express and reciprocate sentiments of intimacy. Chapter 2 on the Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne, the first all-female lyric anthology edited by Lodovico Domenichi, analyzes the friendship poems—sonnet exchanges between women to celebrate and form literary friendships and single-authored lyric that depict women’s bonds—present in the collection. Looking at these two types of lyric in tandem, I argue that Petrarchism authorized women’s expressions and representations of female friendship. Chapter 3 focuses on the heroic poem of Margherita Sarrocchi (1560–1617). Drawing from her classical and Renaissance predecessors who in their heroic poems depict and highlight friendships between male warriors, Sarrocchi revises the tradition by portraying and celebrating the bond that develops between two of the poem’s female protagonists, Rosmonda and Silveria.While much has been explored with respect to male friendship in Italian Renaissance literature, the topic of female friendship has remained mostly untouched. With this study, I therefore address this need to uncover women’s discourses on friendship by providing alternative perspectives and new insights on a subject that was traditionally understood in male terms

Milestone 2009

Milestone, the Hope College yearbook, is an annual publication of Hope College. The first yearbook was published in 1905 as a single edition and was titled The Hope College Annual. The yearbooks became an annual publication in 1916, which was also when it was titled Milestone.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/milestone/1097/thumbnail.jp

Natura narrans: Landscape as Literature in Early Modern Italy

This dissertation uncovers literary self-consciousness in the forest settings of early modern Italian narratives, which exploit the symbolic and ecological properties of forest environments to fashion meditations on various aspects of narrative composition. The first chapter presents the etymological associations between woods, words and metaphysical generation solidified by Aristotelian commentators and applies these to the selva oscura of Dante’s Commedia. A reading of the opening forest as reflective of the poem’s still unrealized potential illuminates a sequence of metaliterary settings and throws into relief a character in the forest of suicides who seems aware both of his transformation into a poetic device and of his limited role within Italian literary history. A Dantesque pastiche tinges a haunted pine forest in one of Boccaccio’s novellas that expounds a spirit of inspired opportunism synonymous with the Decameron itself. The other narrative exploitations of the forest treated in the second chapter betray Boccaccio’s understanding of the randomness and believability necessary to hold the literary work in tension between nature and artifice, city and country, safety and danger, as emblematized by that other perennial symbol for the macronarrative, the garden. The final two chapters examine the same features of the forest in later works that imagine literary composition as a far less balanced operation. The plot of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso depends on its forest settings so much that it allows the trees to narrate its most momentous episode. By fully immersing the romance in the rhythms and vulnerabilities of the forest ecologies the author reveals the complexity and, indeed, vitality of literary worlds. Eager to clear the Ariostean woods from the morally legitimate realm of narrative poetry, Tasso devises a highly organized drama in which the forest is exploited for every material, spiritual and narrative functionality that can serve the pious and conservative hermeneutics demanded by counter-Reformation academics. Despite a lexical rigor that views trees as machines, the Gerusalemme liberata still gives room to explore the pathetic, personal potential of trees, especially those that share the poet’s name. While unique to the works containing the various forests, the four studies together trace the use of a particular construction to effect metaliterary commentary and in so doing confirm the general tendencies of early modern Italian literature, especially those concerning the complication of literary communication, through the relatively unexplored subfield of setting

La Salle College Bulletin: Catalog Issue

Issued for La Salle College 1971-1972https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/course_catalogs/1092/thumbnail.jp

La Salle College Bulletin: Catalog Issue 1974-1975

Issued for La Salle College 1974-1975https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/course_catalogs/1101/thumbnail.jp

La Salle College Bulletin: Catalog Issue 1966-1967

Issued for La Salle College 1966-1967https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/course_catalogs/1077/thumbnail.jp