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Ariosto Today: Contemporary Perspectives
Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso is one of the masterpieces of the Renaissance, a work which, many argue, signalled the apogee of Renaissance fancy on the precipice of irony and decline. This collection of essays brings together twelve noted Italian and American scholars to provide a complete picture of Ariosto and all his works, covering topics such as historical criticism relating to Ariosto's place and time; philological investigations into the varying literary styles of the author, especially outside of the Furioso ; Ariosto's extrinsic relationships with other literary traditions; and formal and thematic excavations of the immanent aesthetics of the Furioso . Each essayist acknowledges the fact that Ariosto's creations are charged with allusions and allegiances variously inviting recognition or demanding the status of record. This reading of his works reveals that Ariosto was not a writer who believed, as it was previously thought, that literature is something escapist or fantastic in nature, but one who, in writing and re-writing his works, tried to re-interpret literary tradition while incorporating the new literary instruments that were available to him at the Ariosto's literary production is an integration of tradition and invention. This new reading of his work will be essential to any Italianist's library.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published April 30, 2003
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July 9, 2024
Not just extremely useful (I took a ton of notes), but also, somehow, inspirational? Left me feeling hopeful about Ariosto, a writer too often ignored in the anglosphere.
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January 29, 2018I didn’t read all of this but it’s due back to ILL so I will write a quick review of what I did read.It’s a compilation on articles on various aspects of Orlando Furioso (OF below) and a couple on modern works derived from it. (Sorry for typos in the following; I have to rush off.)
I got the most out of the article The Advertising of Fictionality in OF. Author Daniel Javitch examines the various ways that Ariosto breaks up the narrative to emphasize both its fictionality and his role as author. These include repetition of a plot episode with different characters, jumping between threads, change of register, quotidian detail to counter the epic or romance trope, etc.
Some quotes:
On varying the register (comparing the rescues of Angelica and Olimpia from the Orca) “In short, the modified repetition of the same rescue serves to remind readers that what may look like the particular ‘truth’ of a reported event is almost completely determined by the author’s quite deliberate artistic choices and is therefore open to potentially endless variation.”
On variation in pacing similar types of events: “Ariosto emphatically reveals that what he represents is not determined by any reality outside his poem, but consists of fictional constructs shaped by his quite arbitrary choices.”
On the allusions to classical predecessors, and sometimes to one of the classical authors alluding to a prior author himself (Ariadne by Ovid and Catullus): "as the literate reader recognizes the subtexts and their affiliations each other as well as to Ariosto’s surface text, he or she is quite distracted from the representation or referential function of the Italian text...serves to foreground its literary origins, and thereby to remind us that his text refers as much to other, prior fictional constructs as to the actions and events it ostensibly signifies.”
Javitch then discusses the moral role assigned to fiction at the time. Its only excuse for existence was to serve as a representation of behavior to emulate or avoid. But Javitch says Ariosto was trying to undermine this restriction. “By exaggerating the gaps between his fiction and the real world, he sought to inhibit what might be called transitive readings of his poetry. That is to say, he wanted to block the pragmatic reflexes of readers conditioned to transfer fictional representations directly to their actual lives...[and]to undermine the humanist poetics of education by mimetic examples.”
And finally: “The Furioso depicts human existence to be so unstable, so beset by error and deception, that what it regularly illustrates is the difficulty, even the impossibility of reaching reliable judgments.”
An article by Elissa B Weaver “A Reading of the Interlaced Plot of the Orlando furioso: The Three Cases of Love Madness.” She writes in the introduction: "The poet, appreciating the difference between the plot(s) and the literal, sequential text of the poem, avails himself of the opportunity to create meaning by manipulating narrative space. Through the ordering of his stories, which I would call spatial, since it relies on separation, juxtaposition, and parallelism, Ariosto succeeds in adding to his literal, explicit narrative another narrative that is implicit.”
Other articles cover his lyric poetry, Ariosto and the Classics in Ferrara, The Orlando Innamorato and the Genesis of the Furioso, The History of the Furioso, Ariosto and the Este Court, Ariosto Landscape Artist, and The Theater of Ariosto. The last two articles discuss Luca Ronconi’s theater piece, and Italo Calvino’s use of the OF.
I got the most out of the article The Advertising of Fictionality in OF. Author Daniel Javitch examines the various ways that Ariosto breaks up the narrative to emphasize both its fictionality and his role as author. These include repetition of a plot episode with different characters, jumping between threads, change of register, quotidian detail to counter the epic or romance trope, etc.
Some quotes:
On varying the register (comparing the rescues of Angelica and Olimpia from the Orca) “In short, the modified repetition of the same rescue serves to remind readers that what may look like the particular ‘truth’ of a reported event is almost completely determined by the author’s quite deliberate artistic choices and is therefore open to potentially endless variation.”
On variation in pacing similar types of events: “Ariosto emphatically reveals that what he represents is not determined by any reality outside his poem, but consists of fictional constructs shaped by his quite arbitrary choices.”
On the allusions to classical predecessors, and sometimes to one of the classical authors alluding to a prior author himself (Ariadne by Ovid and Catullus): "as the literate reader recognizes the subtexts and their affiliations each other as well as to Ariosto’s surface text, he or she is quite distracted from the representation or referential function of the Italian text...serves to foreground its literary origins, and thereby to remind us that his text refers as much to other, prior fictional constructs as to the actions and events it ostensibly signifies.”
Javitch then discusses the moral role assigned to fiction at the time. Its only excuse for existence was to serve as a representation of behavior to emulate or avoid. But Javitch says Ariosto was trying to undermine this restriction. “By exaggerating the gaps between his fiction and the real world, he sought to inhibit what might be called transitive readings of his poetry. That is to say, he wanted to block the pragmatic reflexes of readers conditioned to transfer fictional representations directly to their actual lives...[and]to undermine the humanist poetics of education by mimetic examples.”
And finally: “The Furioso depicts human existence to be so unstable, so beset by error and deception, that what it regularly illustrates is the difficulty, even the impossibility of reaching reliable judgments.”
An article by Elissa B Weaver “A Reading of the Interlaced Plot of the Orlando furioso: The Three Cases of Love Madness.” She writes in the introduction: "The poet, appreciating the difference between the plot(s) and the literal, sequential text of the poem, avails himself of the opportunity to create meaning by manipulating narrative space. Through the ordering of his stories, which I would call spatial, since it relies on separation, juxtaposition, and parallelism, Ariosto succeeds in adding to his literal, explicit narrative another narrative that is implicit.”
Other articles cover his lyric poetry, Ariosto and the Classics in Ferrara, The Orlando Innamorato and the Genesis of the Furioso, The History of the Furioso, Ariosto and the Este Court, Ariosto Landscape Artist, and The Theater of Ariosto. The last two articles discuss Luca Ronconi’s theater piece, and Italo Calvino’s use of the OF.
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