History of Italian Language - Language and technique in early Montale: poetic language and forms of text (Ordinario)

Language and technique in early Montale: poetic language and forms of text

Montale's linguistic experience occupies a very central position in the twentieth-century tradition. A centrality that stems not only from the excellence of his achievements, but also from his historical function as a collector and systemizer of the formal path of earlier poetry, which through him comes to compose itself into a new alphabet for subsequent generations, with a long-lasting effect that is still felt today. The course will focus especially on the first collection, Ossi di seppia (1925), and will present the progressive construction of his poetic language through the reading of exemplary texts, considering lexical, syntactic-discursive, and metrical aspects, but also the stabilization of a phonomorphological system that is now beyond the language of tradition. These components will be observed both in diachrony, as an outcome of the crossing of previous poetic experiences, and in synchrony, as constitutive features of a modern formal system, functional to a new model of representation of reality.