History of Italian Language - The sense of form in Petrarch's Canzoniere: language and style (Ordinario)

The language of Petrarch's Canzoniere is the culmination of the great lyric tradition of the Origins and at the same time the moment of its stabilization into a paradigm, on which subsequent generations will draw: it amounts in other words to one of the founding experiences of poetic language in Italy. On the one hand, the course will focus on the phonomorphological and lexical components, considered in their diachronic formation and in their reciprocal relations within the system of the Fragmenta, through the focused reading of exemplary texts; on the other, it intends to show how the different components of language are included by Petrarch into a unified and organic conception of style, which manifests itself not only in the choice of lexical materials, in their arrangement along the discursive line or in the continuous rhetorical and tonal variation, but also in the minimal oscillations produced by grammatical polymorphy. All of this contributing to the processes of signification and macro-textual construction of the Canzoniere in its various forms.