Tra Cinque e Seicento: Tradizione e anticlassicismo nella sintassi della prosa letteraria by Sergio Bozzola

Abstract

86o Reviews humanity's potential for sinful self-annihilation but also for self-transcendence, in ontological patterns respectively labelled 'reiteration' and 'recursion'. The three remaining essays identifypatterns not onlywithin Dante but in theCom media's relationships toother texts. Armour surveysmedieval typological thought and shows how theEpistle to Can Grande provides appropriate tools forunderstanding the Commedia's literary and theological structures, especially its relationship to biblical texts.Picone's examination of 'The Classical Context of theUlysses Canto' overturns Romantic pictures of theepisode's originality, uncovering a dense pattern ofOvidian allusions that renew the classical grandeur of a hero whose storyhad been diminished by vulgarized retellings. The volume closes with Grayson's musings on theRoman de laRose, theFiore, and theCommedia: the essay lucidly argues Dante's authorship of theFiore, but itsmain intent is to demonstrate thepoet's intimate knowledge of theRose from an early stage, and to show that theCommedia is deeply, and deliber ately, saturated with reminiscences of the French poem. The position of this essay prompts a finalnote on pattern: with reverse symmetry, the collection ends with the Fiore, potentially one ofDante's earliest works, when itopened with theEgloge, his last. Such incidental yet satisfying editorial patterns, togetherwith the rich diversity of topics and approaches in the essays themselves, illustrate the fruitfulness of the chosen theme and make Patterns inDante a rewarding volume. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON CATHERINE KEEN Tra Cinque e Seicento: tradizione e anticlassicismo nella sintassi della prosa letteraria. By SERGIO BOZZOLA. Florence: Olschki. 2004. viii+ i68 pp. E21. ISBN 978 88-222-5344-6. This book deals with the traditional opposition between classicismo and anticlassicismo in Italian culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its innovative aspect lies in theapplication of these categories toprose. Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua (I 525) provided twomodels for Italian literature and language, Petrarch forpoetry and Boccaccio forprose.While thepoetic model was clear in itsapplications (to lan guage and grammar), theprose model was unavoidably ambiguous and complicated, extending itsprescriptions to syntax,which required much more structural rigidity. Bembo thereforeprescribed a concentric structure for Italian prose, to be realized principally bymeans of repetition (ripetizione) and expansion (dilatazione, including inversion of normal word order-hyperbaton-and insertion of parentheses). Chap ter i ('Poesia e prosa nelle Prose') describes Bembo's attempt to establish models for both poetry and prose, concluding thathe denied thehistorical dimension of language in favour of a perspective of regularity, which meant more rules and less vitality.This assumption exposes thedifficulty forBembo of dealing with Boccaccio's text,which, based as itwas on oral language, is almost irreducible to a strictgrammar. Bozzola's aim is todemonstrate the failure ofBembo's theory in the fieldof prose. The true structures of Italian literary prose were, he argues, completely different from the patterns advocated by Bembo. The main prose structures are not concen tric,as Bembo recommended, but progressive, built up per saltus (without links),per brevitatem, or through improvisation, and are therefore linear rather than complex. Hence theparadox of Italian literaryprose: thatwhereas aRomantic paradigm might lead one to equate 'classical' with 'ordered' and 'anti-classical' with 'complex', in Renaissance Italy the anti-classical model ismuch more linear than the classical one. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 ('La struttura della frase', 'La sintassi del verbo nel discorso riportato', and 'Asimmetria e deviazione') deal with the practice of prose writing in authors such as Tasso, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Speroni, Brignole, Sarpi, and Tas soni, who all deviate in the same direction from theparadigm proposed by Bembo. MLR, I02.3, 2007 86i We can therefore recognize twomain paradigms in sixteenth-century Italian prose: Bembo's, with its concentric structures, and Tasso's, with its linear structures-as Bozzola had already pointed out in his previous book, Purita e ornamento di parole: tecnica e stiledei 'Dialoghi'del Tasso (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, i999). Boz zola underlines thathis choice of exemplary authors isnot homogeneous because he aims only to identify the large number of stylistic options which were extraneous to Bembo's model. In other words, this is not a group operating against Bembo, but simply a practice which goes in a differentdirection in respect of his grammar. Chapter 5 ('La sintassi nominale nella prosa di Daniello Bartoli...