Date/Time
Date(s) - 6 Apr 2016
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
501 Hamilton, Columbia University
Category(ies) No Categories
Department of Italian Lecture by Christian Rivoletti:
Through Words and Images: Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and the Rediscovery of Irony
Wednesday, April 6, 5:00-6:00
501 Hamilton Hall
Columbia University (Morningside campus)
Irony is today considered to be a fundamental characteristic of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Nevertheless, the poem’s irony, which Ariosto used in a deeply conscious and skillful way, was ignored for centuries and was only appreciated much later. Why? When and by whom was it rediscovered and handed down to us? After the presentation of some examples from the Orlando Furioso centered on the psychology of the characters and aimed at illustrating the irony and its relationship to fiction (‘irony of fiction’), the lecture will focus on the visual reception of the poem (how can irony be transposed into images?) and on its modern rediscovery through the theories of the German Early Romantics at the culmination of an extraordinary Ariostean season.
Christian Rivoletti is professor of Romance Philology at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany). He was a member of research groups at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Italy) and a Visiting Scholar at the Collège de France and a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation. He has studied the Italian Renaissance and its reception in European literature and visual arts (Ariosto e l’ironia della finzione. La ricezione letteraria e figurativa dell’Orlando Furioso in Francia, Germania e Italia, Venezia 2014), literary utopias (Le metamorfosi dell’utopia, Lucca 2003), contemporary narrative and poetry, literary theory and history of criticism. He edited two volumes by Erich Auerbach: Romanticismo e realismo (Pisa 2010) and Kultur als Politik (Konstanz 2014).
The lecture is free and open to the public.
Department of Italian, Columbia University