Italian pastoral. Cultural codes and literary genres I (Ordinario)

Among the most lasting and constant experiences of Italian poetry of the early modern age – from the Latin collections of Petrarca and Boccaccio (and from the equally fundamental vernacular essay of Ameto) to Marino’s lyrical workshop –, the pastoral interprets a highly conventional and self-referential, developed through the revival of classical models (Theocritus, Virgil, etc.), the elaboration of characterizing elements (setting, characters, narrative situations), and the adoption of ostentatiously experimental expressive methods (prosimetry, polymetry, dialogism, etc. .). A poetic discourse codified in this way lends itself, on a content level, to becoming the literary mask of historical situations or figures, and, on a formal level, it favors hybridization between literary genres. Through a timely and extensive reading of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, the first module of the course intends to provide the essential coordinates relating to the main conceptual junctions and the historiographical, theoretical and philological problems inherent to the study of the literary civilization of humanism and the Renaissance, proposing paths to cross the Sannazarian prosimeter attentive to the narratively structural function of some thematic nuclei, to the conceptually strategic recurrence of some images, and to the stylistic, rhetorical and literary genre specificities.

As Baldassar Castiglione recalls in a famous passage of the Book of the Courtier «being disguised brings with it a certain freedom and license, which among other things means that a man can take the form of what he feels worthy of […] : how would it be for a young man to dress as an old man [...] a knight in the form of a wild shepherd or another such dress» (II, 11). The immediate success of the pastoral module in the society of the courts (starting, above all, from the Ferrara experience of the 15th century) and the natural election of dramaturgical writing as its literary genre of vocation are due to the conceptual and relational dynamics of “disguise”. The second station of the course’s reading path will therefore be dedicated to the texts that led to the full codification of the third theatrical genre (pastoral, woodland, satirical, depending on the definitions attributed to it), namely Torquato Tasso’s Aminta and Giovan Battista Guarini’s Pastor Fido. By bringing the analysis of these two dramaturgical peaks into dialogue with the review of the copious contemporary dramaturgical production with a bucolic setting, we will question above all the reasons and methods that presided over the literary construction of a pastoral kingship and of a just kingdom ideologically transferred from court in the woods, in an idyllic elsewhere where the lords pleasantly reconfigured themselves as new divinities, and with equal superiority and moral freedom.