Books

Massimo Lollini, Le muse, le maschere e il sublime. G.B. Vico e la poesia nell’età della “ragione spiegata”. Napoli: Guida, 1994.

LEMUSE

This book studies Vico’s reflection on the evolution of poetry, poetics and rhetoric from Renaissance to Baroque. Vico believes that poetry, having lost its mythological origins, no longer has any eternal or fixed content. This process was particularly acute in the baroque period. The emergence of the mask as an emblem of Baroque culture testifies, as Vico writes, to the loss of the perception of nature as divine substance, producing a loss both of the constitutive referentiality of language and of its supposed “natural” origin.

[Index]

Massimo Lollini, Il vuoto della forma.Scrittura, testimonianza e verità. Genova: Marietti, 2001.

ILVUOTO

In my second book first I examine the formation of a philosophical and religious idea of testimony in antiquity by focusing on some selected texts from Plato, the Bible and Augustine. Then I study the emergence of the literary notion of testimony by analyzing crucial works by Dante and Petrarch. The modern and contemporary part of the book concentrates on the philosophical notion of testimony developed by Emmanuel Levinas and on the “testimonies” of important writers of the XXth century such as Renato Serra, Luigi Pirandello, Antonio Gramsci, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Paul Celan.

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Massimo Lollini And David Castillo (Eds). Reason and Its Others. Italy, Spain, and the New World. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.

reason_others2

By exploring manifestations of normative and non-normative thinking in the geopolitical and cultural contexts of Early Modern Italy, Spain, and the American colonies, this volume hopes to encourage interdisciplinary discussions on the early modern notions of reason and unreason, good and evil, justice and injustice, center and periphery, freedom and containment, self and other. We still dream early modern dreams (Reason, the Subject, the Nation, the Modern World), and we are still haunted by the void at the center of it all.

[Index]

Massimo Lollini-Norma Bouchard (Eds). Reading and Writing the Mediterranean: Essays by Vincenzo Consolo. Toronto UP, 2006.

Reading_Writing

Vincenzo Consolo is counted by many critics among the most significant voices in contemporary world literature. This volume makes available for the first in English an edited and annotated volume of Consolo’s short stories, essays, and other writings about the diverse cultures and histories of Sicily and the Mediterranean basin.

[Index ]

Massimo Lollini (Ed.), L’autobiografia nell’epoca dell’impersonale. Bologna: Il Mulino, “Intersezioni” (December 2007).

intersezioni

This collection of essays shows how autobiography in the age of the impersonal is characterized by the proliferation of the narrative persons. Autobiography in our time becomes theoretically and practically aware that the psychological self and the first person can no longer come to terms with the complexity of the autobiographical subject. In the introduction, Lollini holds that the proliferation of the narratives persons, the emergence of the other within the autobiographical discourse, and the search for a neutral narrative in the third person are phenomena confirming the difficulty and the new problematic nature of the narrative identity.

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Massimo Lollini (Ed). Humanisms, Posthumanisms and Neohumanisms, “Annali d’Italianistica” (2008).

adi_2008_cover

The main issue at the center of this volume is the ethical question concerning the nature of humanism in its multifaceted expressions. All the essays insist on the problematic and complex reality of humanism, pointing to the emergence of a noble idea of humanitas from the Greek paideia to the Roman philanthropia, from Dante’s, Petrarch’s, and Boccaccio’s “wisdom of literature” to the Quattrocento Humanist revolution based on the ideas of eruditio, charitas, and unitas. The idea of the “dignity” of humankind in the works of Ficino and Pico becomes a moral idea that embraces every human being. This universal idea of humanitas and dignity is put into question by historical tragedies that range from European colonialism to the Shoah, and the pervasive and ongoing consequences of the scientific and technological revolution.

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ISSUES OF HUMANIST STUDIES & THE DIGITAL AGE

2011

Vol 1, No 1 (2011): Francesco Petrarca: from Manuscript to Digital Culture

[MS. Laud. Misc. 156, Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, Bodleian Library, Oxford University]

Proceedings of the International Symposium, “Francesco Petrarca: from manuscript to digital culture,” 3 April 2010.

Issue editors: Nathalie Hester, Massimo Lollini, and Leah Middlebrook

2012

Vol 2, No 1 (2012): The Mobile Text: Studying Literature in the Digital Age

[Detail of Frances Yates’ reconstruction of Giordano Bruno’s memory wheel from De Umbris Idearum (1582), Warburg Institute]

Proceedings of the Symposium, “The mobile text. Studying literature in the digital age,” January 10, 2012.
Issue editors: Francesco Fiorentino and Domenico Fiormonte.