The Limits of Exactitude

Bruno, N., Dovico, G., Montepaone, O. and Pelucchi, M. 2022. The Limits of Exactitude in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Literature and Textual Transmission. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter., 2022

Modern Language Notes, 2019

Studia Ceranea, 2019

The text discusses in detail the emperor’s constitution concerning the abuses of tax collectors in Africa (CTh, X, 17, 3 = CJ, IV, 44, 16 – a. 391/392), arguing against associating it with the idea of laesio enormis developed in the Middle Ages.

The Limits of Exactitude in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Literature and Textual Transmission, Trends in Classics Supplementary Volume 137, edited by Nicoletta Bruno, Giulia Dovico, Olivia Montepaone and Marco Pelucchi, Berlin-Boston, pp. 83-105, 2022

This paper shows how Lucian's Toxaris, a dialogue about friendship in which the characters tell stories about exemplary friends, integrates the concept of exactitude in the characters' strategies of persuasion. The function of this rhetorical demonstration of exactitude, which builds upon methodological considerations in historiography, is to testify to the validity of the characters' stories. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that this discourse about exactitude is limited in two ways. From an extra-dialogical perspective, the rhetorical display of exactitude signals, through the characters' repeated expressions of disbelief, the opposite of factuality. From an intra-dialogical perspective, the importance of exactitude is limited by the way that the dialogue performs friendship, which builds upon belief and trust, notwithstanding the characters' expressions of doubts about the truthfulness of the stories told. Exactitude and its connotations of factuality thus reveals itself to be an ineffective instrument for the assessment of moral examples.

Jan 2012: Comparative Literature 64(1): 94-109 A recurring problem in much critical writing about the Oulipo is a tendency to homogenize the output of the group’s writers in order to present a universal poetics of constrained writing. Oulipians rightly bristle at these attempts to oversimplify the group’s history. Nevertheless one useful distinction has been made by Jacques Roubaud who notes the widening of the group’s membership which began with himself in 1966, and postulates that a second era—the “Perecquian era”—of the Oulipo began in 1969, when Georges Perec published his infamous novel without the letter e, La Disparition. This paper will look closely at the theoretical writing of Italo Calvino over the six year period from 1967 to 1973—the years between his translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Les Fleurs bleues and his full election to the Oulipo—arguing that, during this time, Calvino’s own poetics underwent a significant change with regard to the perceived relationship between creativity and constraint. The paper will make its case by analogy with two authors often cited by the Oulipo—the medieval theologian Ramón Llull and the Atomist philosopher Lucretius—between whom Calvino draws a parallel in one of his final works, the undelivered lectures, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Instead of a parallel, however, this paper will argue that Llull and Lucretius represent two opposing models of the combinatorics, and that the former encapsulates Calvino’s views at the start of the period in question, while the latter neatly exemplifies his later position. It will suggest too that the trend in Calvino’s thought is germane to the distinction which Roubaud makes—that Calvino’s earlier position is characteristic of the “pre-Perecquian Oulipo,” while his later views are closer to those expressed by some of his peers among the group’s second wave.

2017

2012

This thesis offers an interpretative framework of Italo Calvino's later work (the cosmicomic stories, Le città invisibili, and Palomar), based on the notions of myth, desire, utopia and science. Its aim is to suggest a reading of these texts as a common literary project best described as being deeply influenced by mythological elements and structures, while clearly bearing the mark of enlightened thought. The study exposes both the intellectual implications of such a project, and the aesthetic mechanisms by which it takes its form. The research was informed by Calvino's own relevant critical work, a network of secondary criticism approaching either the texts which were of interest to this particular work or the themes and notions that were to be explored, and a set of tertiary texts, which helped to consolidate pivotal notions. The latter include the work of thinkers who had a major influence on Calvino as it is known from his essays and his letters (like Charles Fourier or Giorgio de Santillana), but also other figures, such as Anton Chekhov or Albert Camus, who emerged as interesting comparative opportunities for our study. The analysis of the cosmicomic stories explores the relationship between myth-making and individual responsibility. It draws parallels between intellectual commitment and literary projection, and defines Calvino's utopian project, including it in a reflection on knowledge, myth and the tyranny of abstract thought. Individual responsibility emerges as a prospective and a retrospective activity, which is explained alongside the idea of 'poetics in the making'. Le città invisibili is studied as an illustration of Calvino's precise poetics using the image of the city. The notions of the episode and the frame are the central concepts around which the inquiry is articulated. Discussing the ideas of desire and the search for the ideal, it is possible to draw solid links with the cosmological project of the cosmicomics and Calvino's idea of utopia and myth. With an examination of characterisation in Palomar and a close analysis of the quest for meaning, this thesis also attempts a definition of Calvino's aesthetics as the 'aesthetics of earthly transcendence'. It moves on to a comparative study of Palomar and Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Albert Camus, in order to suggest an interpretation of the main character, as a man who lives and observes his life in the face of the absurd; the literary consequence being the immediate confrontation between writing and death, and the presence of silence threatening understanding and communication. 157 4.1.4. 'L'universo come specchio', or the tragedy of uncertainty 4.2 Palomar and Sisyphus 4.2.1. Beyond the dichotomy between literature and philosophy 4.2.2. Palomar and the absurd 4.3 Literature facing death 4.4 Palomar, silence and the limits of understanding and communication 171 Conclusion Bibliography This thesis was carried out at the University of Edinburgh. I am most grateful this institution for its generous support. I would like to thank my supervisor Ken Millard for putting me back on track at the beginning of this journey, when guidance was mostly needed. I would especially like to thank my supervisor Claudia Nocentini, who bore with me for four years, teaching me, guiding me, correcting me, reassuring me, and listening to me with kind patience and professional earnestness. I would also like to thank all the staff of the Italian Studies in the Division of European Languages and Cultures for making this journey a convivial one, in particular Mara Mari-Kirkwood, Luana Babini, Davide Messina and Federica Pedriali, who never denied me counsel. Thanks are also due to the administrative staff, especially Kate Marshall, Heather Elliott, and Linda Grieve in the Graduate School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. For helping me with other administrative tasks in the last stages of my research, I thank Alex Thompson and Véronique Desnain. This research was conducted mainly in the city of Edinburgh, between the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh University Library, and the study rooms available for students all around campus. I would like to thank all these establishments for providing a suitable research environment and the staff for helping me find my way around.

This essay proposes a psychoanalytic reading of several works by Italo Calvino. Indebted to Octave Mannoni and Slavoj Žižek for their theorization of fetishism as a logic that binds together a knowledge and a non-knowledge, and in particular to Mannoni's formulation of that logic in the phrase 'Je sais bien, mais quand même', the essay tracks the theme of the 'void' in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, Le Cosmicomiche, and La strada di San Giovanni, and examines the model of desire as 'universal cannibalism' in 'Sotto il sole giaguaro'. It reads the thematization of the 'void' as an attempt to master the constitutive lack that ideological fantasy works to cover over, and argues that the fantasy of reciprocal cannibalism is an attempt to render transparent an opacity in language that the desiring subject cannot know.