The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (Meridian Series) - Softcover

Agamben, Giorgio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804730229 ISBN 13: 9780804730228

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

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 Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the University of Verona. Among his books is Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, 1998).

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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 Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

Aus dem Klappentext

This book, by one of Italys most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertakingnothing 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 Dantes guide.
The book opens with a discussion of just how Dantes 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 Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

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THE END OF THE POEM

Studies in PoeticsBy Giorgio Agamben

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 1999 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3022-8

Contents

Preface........................................................xi 1 Comedy.....................................................1 2 Corn: From Anatomy to Poetics..............................23 3 The Dream of Language......................................43 4 Pascoli and the Thought of the Voice.......................62 5 The Dictation of Poetry....................................76 6 Expropriated Manner........................................87 7 The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure.....................102 8 The End of the Poem........................................109AppendixA An Enigma Concerning the Basque Woman........................119B The Hunt for Language........................................124C The Just Do Not Feed on Light................................126D Taking Leave of Tragedy......................................130Notes..........................................................135

Chapter One

Comedy

1. THE PROBLEM

1. The aim of this essay is the critical assessment of an event that can be chronologically dated at the beginning of the fourteenth century but that, by virtue of its still exerting a profound influence on Italian culture, can be said to have never ceased to take place. This event is the decision of a poet to abandon his own "tragic" poetic project for a "comic" poem. This decision translates into an extremely famous incipit, which one of the author's letters states as follows: "Here begins the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by birth, not by disposition" (Incipit comoedia Dantis Alagherii florentini natione non moribus). The turn registered by these words is so little a question internal to Dante scholarship that it can even be said that here, for the first time, we find one of the traits that most tenaciously characterizes Italian culture: its essential pertinence to the comic sphere and consequent refutation of tragedy.

The fact that even a few years after the author's death the reasons for the comic title appeared problematic and incoherent to the oldest commentators bears witness to the extent to which this turn hides a historical knot whose repression cannot easily be brought to consciousness. All the more surprising is the poverty of modern critical literature on the subject. That a scholar such as Pio Rajna (who so influenced later studies) could reach such obviously insufficient conclusions as those with which his study of the poem's title ends is something that cannot be explained even by Italian culture's lack of contact with its own origins. Even Erich Auerbach, the author of such penetrating works on Dante's style, does not succeed in explaining the poem's incipit in satisfying terms. "Dante," he writes, referring to the ancient theory of the separation of styles, "never freed himself completely from these views; otherwise he would not have called his great work a comedy in clearest opposition to the term alta tragedia which he applied to Virgil's Aeneid." And, concerning Dante's letter to Cangrande, Auerbach writes:

It is not easy to see how Dante, after having found this formula and after having completed the Comedy, could still have expressed himself upon its character with the pedantry exhibited in the passage from the letter to Cangrande just referred to. However, so great was the prestige of the classical tradition, obscured as it still was by pedantic schematization, so strong was the predilection for fixed theoretical classifications of a kind which we can but consider absurd, that such a possibility cannot be gainsaid after all.

As far as explanations for Dante's choice of title are concerned, in a certain sense modern criticism has not progressed beyond Benvenuto da Imola's observations or the suggestions with which Boccaccio ends his commentary on the title of the poem. "What," Boccaccio asks,

will we then say of the objections that have been made against it? On the grounds that the author was a most prudent man, I believe that he would have had in mind not the parts contained in comedy but its entirety, and that he named his book on the basis of this entirety, so to speak. And from what one can infer from Plautus and Terence, who were comic poets, the entirety of comedy is this: comedy has a turbulent principle, is full of noise and discord, and ends finally in peace and tranquillity. The present book altogether conforms to this model. Thus the author begins with woes and infernal troubles and ends it in the peace and glory enjoyed by the blessed in their eternal life. And this certainly suffices to explain how the said title suits this book.

The methodological principle that we follow in this study is that our ignorance of an author's motivations in no way authorizes the presumption that they are incoherent or faulty. We hold that until proven otherwise, Dante, as "a most prudent man" (oculatissimo uomo), could not have chosen his incipit lightly or superficially. On the contrary, precisely the fact that the comic title appears discordant with respect to what we know of the ideas of the poet and his age brings us to claim that it was carefully considered.

2. A precise study of the passages in which Dante speaks of comedy and tragedy demonstrates that this claim is textually founded.

We thus know that to Dante's eyes, the poetic project that gave birth to the great songs of the Rime seemed eminently tragic. In De vulgari eloquentia, he explicitly states that the tragic style is the highest of all styles and the only one appropriate to the ultimate objects of poetry: "well-being, love and virtue" (salus, amor et virtus). A little later he defines the song [canzone], the supreme poetic genre, as

a connected series of equal stanzas in the tragic style, without a refrain, and focused on a single theme, as I have shown when I wrote "Donne che avete intelletto d'amore." If I say "a connected series in the tragic style," it is because, were the style of the stanza comic, we would use the diminutive and call it a canzonetta.

(iaequalium stantiarum sine responsorio tragica coniugatio, ut nos ostendimus cum dicimus "Donne che avete intelletto d'amore." Quod autem dicimus tragica coniugatio, est quia cum comice fiat hec coniugatio, cantilenam vocamus per diminutionem.)

The poem's comic title therefore above all implies a rupture and a turn with respect to Dante's own past and poetic itinerary, a genuine "categorical revolution" that as such cannot have been decided upon without conscious and vital motivation. In a passage of the letter to Cangrande, Dante seems implicitly to affirm such an awareness of reasons for his choice. With a definition that formally repeats commonplaces of medieval lexicography, Dante here introduces a discussion that cannot be found in any of his known sources. "Now comedy is a certain kind of poetical narration," he writes, "which differs from all others" (Et est comoedia genus quoddam potice narrationis ab omnibus aliis differens). This privileged situation of the comic genre, which has no counterpart in either medieval or late ancient sources, presupposes an intention on the poet's part to alter semantically the term "comedy" in a sense that certainly...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804730229
• ISBN 13: 9780804730228
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 164
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande