Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue by Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden

Abstract

Reviewed by: Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue by Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden Valentina Mele Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue. By Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden, with an Epilogue by Antonella Anedda Angioy. (Cultural Inquiry, 18) Berlin: ICI Berlin Press. 2020. vi+227 pp. €24 (pbk €12; pdf & epub free at <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-18>). ISBN 978-396558-015-2 (pbk 978-3-96558-014-5; pdf 978-3-96558-016-9; epub 9783-96558-017-6). A first key to entering this volume, the most recent critical contribution by Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden, is enclosed in the title itself. The notions of dialogue and dialogic process are, in fact, crucial for interpreting the process underlying the entire book. Dialoguing voices, voices echoing one another, voices seeking to interpret or rearticulate other voices seem to constitute the very critical process and ultimate substance of the volume. Possibilities of Lyric is, in fact, [End Page 300] defined as a 'Miscellaneous Enterprise' (p. 1), for it is not simply the result of a conversational, critical reflection between its two authors, as multifarious as are the interlocutors whose voices contributed to expanding dialogues between poets, scholars, and translators even beyond the material boundaries of the page. Dialogue appears as the main methodological perspective adopted in the book. Inspired by Donna Haraway's notion of 'diffraction' (Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium: FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouseTM. Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997)) and by Anne Carson's way of establishing conversations between texts to open up possibilities for new, unexpected, and unprecedented interpretations of them (Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)), Gragnolati and Southerden explore various textual encounters in the book that 'do not erase the differences or specificity of the individual poems, nor do they overlook their histories or context, but they always try to open new avenues of interpretation' (p. 4). As the authors make clear, the dialogic relationships established between texts do not only consider proven or existing relationships between them, nor is the discussion limited by notions such as those of source, intertextuality, or linear genealogy. Seeking to explore new possibilities of interpretation and looking for 'fresh insight into the poems' (p. 4), Gragnolati and Southerden establish textual encounters through a rich and creative mode of comparison. Meticulous close readings and engagement with late twentieth-century and more recent critical theories concerned with the nexus between desire, textuality, subjectivity, and the body are the authors' privileged tool to investigate various poems, mostly (but not only) belonging to the Italian medieval and early modern love-lyric tradition. The book seeks to discuss how these poems articulate a particular dimension of lyric textuality, by exploring some moments of what Gragnolati and Southerden frame as 'lyric in action' (p. 7). Each of the six chapters of the book—'The Shape of Desire' (1), 'Openness and Intensity' (2), 'Lust in Action' (3), 'Declension of "Now"' (4), 'Extension' (5), and 'Body' (6)—is dedicated to one of these moments, while interacting and echoing one another. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the lyric Petrarch, exploring Petrarch's complex form of pleasure, as mirrored in textuality, and Petrarch's overturning of the traditional dynamics of desire. By establishing a textual encounter between Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare, Chapter 3 explores the relationship between will, reason, and passion, based on the three authors' analogous concern with desire. By emphasizing their different articulation of this ineluctable force, Gragnolati and Southerden emphasize ways in which dissimilar articulations result in different lyric textualities. Chapters 4 and 5 both focus on the thematization of the subject's encounter with the beloved lady, in texts by Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch. While 'Declensions of "Now"' discusses representations of this topical epiphanic encounter through recent theories discussing queer forms of temporality, stressing how the three authors articulate different forms of subjectivity, 'Extension' rather focuses on the lyric space, its boundaries and potentialities, as conceived by the three poets. The final chapter comparatively [End Page 301] reads texts by Dante and Petrarch investigating the notions of body, lyric, and eschatology. The Epilogue further expands the book's...