La Commedia. Filologia e interpretazione
Today the prestigious branch of philology called ecdotics asks to be called textual criticism, as if the literary critic\’s analysis of the text was not textual criticism too. Also the structuralists, several decades ago, had tried to build a methodology of analysis of the literary text that had similar appearances and substance to those of the exact sciences. Literary criticism has renounced exact science status for some years, while ecdotics seems to be tending to that (supposed) high rank today. Dante\’s works are probably those in whose study the aforementioned dialectic between the two forms of textual criticism it finds maximum intensity in Italy and at the same time the best pacified conciliation.
The contributions collected in this volume derive originating from the acknowledgment that philology and interpretation proceed in unison and mutually support. They then wind along different paths, aimed at reconstruct the extraordinary vitality of the Comedy: from Dante\’s ability to narrate through images, \’the visible talk\’, perhaps due to a shared atmosphere and sensitivity which had as cornerstones Giotto and Francesco da Barberino, at the first diffusion of the poem in Italy, prior to its publication, up to the ability, inherent in its verses, to contain different literal meanings in nuce, so that the translator in another language is almost forced to perceive the oscillations of the \’poetic doing\’ of the artist to make the most exact philological choice.
Maria Gabriella Riccobono graduated in Italian and Comparative Literature at the Università di Pisa and now teaches Comparative Literature at the Università di Milano. She has four main areas of interest: the history of culture and literary criticism; the relationship between the Italian Middle-Ages and modern and contemporary literature; the relationship between Italian and European literature; Dante poet-prophet in the Divina Commedia.
