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This book is a ten-step journey around the thought and poetry of the most sensitive Italian visionary of modernity, Giacomo Leopardi, whose contribution to Western thought has been acclaimed by admirers from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Benjamin. A variety of readings, moving between different disciplines and approaches - including film studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory - shed new light on Leopardi's fascinating and at the same time epistemologically radical compound of poetic imagination and philosophical complexity. An advocate of an ultra-philosophy, which aims to negotiate the fracture opened in Western imagination by the irrecoverable loss of ancient "illusions", Leopardi's thought seems more relevant than ever in the post-human era, offering an (un)timely meditation on desire, suffering, and imagination as the foundational features of humanity.
List of contents
Contents: Daniela Cerimonia: The Making of Leopardi in English - Cosetta M. Veronese: Leopardi and the "Zibaldone" into the New Millennium - Roberto Lauro: Le idee e le parole. Il lessico straniero nello "Zibaldone" - David Gibbons: Philological Cosmopolitanism and European Nationalisms: The Background to Leopardi's Sanskrit References in the "Zibaldone" - Alessandra Aloisi: "L'infinito" come condizione di un'esperienza possibile - Paola Cori: "Time-image" in Poetry and Cinema: Leopardi and Antonioni - Fabio A. Camilletti : Leopardi avec Sade: Impotence and jouissance in "La ginestra" - Emanuela Cervato: Ending the Ancient Covenant: Leopardi and Molecular Biology - Pamela Williams: Leopardi's Atheism and Religious Existentialism - Luca Malici: Giacomo Leopardi's "Zibaldone" of (Queer) Thoughts.
About the author
Fabio Camilletti is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Warwick and Honorary Research Fellow at the Leopardi Centre, University of Birmingham. He has worked extensively on European literature of the Romantic age and has recently completed two monographs on Leopardi and Italian Romanticism.
Paola Cori is Honorary Research Fellow at the Leopardi Centre, University of Birmingham. She completed her PhD at Birmingham and was awarded a Giacomo Leopardi Prize by the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani. She has published articles in leading international journals and she is currently working on two monographs on Leopardi.
