Rewriting Dante after Freud and the Shoah:Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro

Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt as restless and as passionately in love as the adulterous Paolo and Francesca in the ‘bufera infernal’ of Inferno V, but riding in a black cab to the (Italianized) rhythm of Goethe’s ballad Der Erlkönig; Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline as the three heads of a new Cerberus whose mixed pastiche of English, Norwegian, and French is an incomprehensible noise conveying nothing but hatred of the Jews; Primo Levi as a fallen angel taking the place of Lucifer at the very bottom of Hell: these are some of the surprises awaiting the reader of Giorgio Pressburger’s latest novel Nel regno oscuro (‘In/to the dark realm’), which is a rich and creative rewriting of Dante’s poem.Like all previous prose works by the 1937-born Hungarian Jewish author who emigrated to Italy in 1956, it is written not in his native Hungarian but in Italian. It is the first part of a planned trilogy inspired by the Divine Comedy, integrating the Middle European style of Pressburger’s previous works with the attempt to engage with the first part of Dante’s poem (of which Pressburger’s novel also seems to replicate the canonical apparatus of notes, in this case written by the author himself).Manuele Gragnolati, ‘Rewriting Dante after Freud and the Shoah: Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 235–50 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_14

Analogy and Difference:Multistable Figures in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana

My paper will discuss Pasolini’s preference for the figure of contradiction and his opposition to Hegelian dialectics, as he understood it, from the perspective of multistable figures or Kippbilder. A Kippbild is a figure that oscillates between distinct aspects without mediation or synthesis. My basic questions are whether it is possible to read Pasolini’s insistence on contradictions in terms of multistable figures and what might be gained from such a reading

Openness in Medieval Europe

This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum, Cultural Inquiry, 23 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-23

The Shape of Desire:Metamorphosis and Hybridity in Rvf 23 and Rvf 70

Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden, ‘The Shape of Desire: Metamorphosis and Hybridity in **Rvf/** 23 and **Rvf/** 70’, in Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden, Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue, Cultural Inquiry, 18 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), pp. 17-44 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-18_01

Aspects of the Performative in Medieval Culture

The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume:the role of ritual speech acts the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars

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