SPECIAL EVENT: Presentation of a new volume of essays on the occasion of Paolo Cherchi’s 75th birthday: Erudizione e leggerezza. Saggi di filologia comparativa, ed. Giuliana Adamo (Rome: Viella Editrice, 2012).
Erudizione e leggerezza will be presented by Giuliana Adamo (Trinity College Dublin), Zygmunt Baranski (Notre Dame), & Theodore Cachey (Notre Dame) at 4:30pm in Special Collections in the Hesburgh Library.
Erudizione e leggerezza. Saggi di filologia comparativa is a collection of essays presented to Paolo Cherchi for his 75th birthday, and it has been introduced and edited by Giuliana Adamo. This selection of his essay highlights two outstanding aspects of Cherchi’s distingushed scholarship, namely his unusual learning and its equally unusual lightness or elegance in presenting it. Paolo Cherchi vast research spans from Medieval to modern times in several areas, mostly Romance Languages to Modern literary Theory. His approach is unique in that he often leads his philological research to comparative literature conclusions: for example showing how Petrarch quotes his sources and haw can a philologist trace them; how a Spanish mythographer Villena uses Italian chronist Guido da Pisa and how this source has an impact on his way of understanding a mythological story; how the New-Provençal poet Mistral translates Petrarch; how France and Italy experience their querelle des anciens et des modernes; or how Anglo-American textual criticism differs from the Italian one and what they both share. The essay collected in this volume deal with some of these topics and at every step they give a sample of how philological research can be fascinating and enjoyable even for today’s young students.
Paolo Cherchi, Professor Emeritus of Italian and Spanish Literatures at the University of Chicago, focuses on the literature of the Middle Ages and late Renaissance. His interests include: Romance philology; Textual criticism, and comparative literature. His books and edited collections published in the last decade include: Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love (University of Toronto Press, 1994); La metamorfosi dell ‘Adone (Longo Editore, Ravenna, 1996); ed. of Tomaso Garzoni, La Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Turin, Einaudi, 2 vols., 1996); Polimatia di riuso – Mezzo secolo di plagio (1539-1589) (Bulzoni Editore, "L’Europa delle Corti", 1998); L’alambicco in bilioteca: distillati rari (Ravenna, Longo, 2000); Ministorie di microgeneri (Ravenna, Longo, 2003); and Il re Adone (Palermo, Sellerio, 1998). In the same period he has also edited three volumes of the Susan and Donald Mazzoni Seminar, and published one hundred fifteen essays and book reviews.
Giuliana Adamo, Lecturer of Italian at Trininty College, Dublin, focuses on 19th and 20th century Italian poetry and literature, the history of the Italian language, the history of Western and Italian novels, the history of food, as well as textual and linguistic analysis. Her recent publications include L’ultimo dono di Quetzalcoatl. Viaggio intorno al cioccolato e divagazioni (Pavia, Monboso, 2001), Premio Speciale Cesare Angelini 2002); Metro e ritmo del primo Palazzeschi (Salerno, Roma, 2003); La parola scritta e pronunciata. Nuovi saggi sulla narrativa di Vincenzo Consolo, which Adamo edited, (San Cesario di Lecce, Manni, 2006).