509225 - HISTORY OF LITERARY ITALIAN

The course is devoted to the linguistic reading of Dante’s Vita Nuova, and to the role of this work not only in the history of Dante’s own production, but also in the development of literary Italian. After a general overview of the author and the work (dating, structure, metrical forms and prose forms, meanings, sources, etc.), the course will focus on the specifically linguistic aspects of the text, framed within the context of the language of the period, namely Florentine of the late thirteenth century. This will be approached through the necessary philological study of the manuscripts that have transmitted the work, as well as of the various editions published over the past century, starting with those of Michele Barbi (1907, 1932). The Vita Nuova will be addressed as a complex system of poetry and prose; particular attention will be given to the prose sections, whose phonological and morphological features (examined also through the testimony of various fourteenth-century manuscripts), stylistic-lexical traits, and syntactic structures will be analyzed, always in comparison with the language of the lyric poems. This approach, following the proposed framework of linguistic analysis, will unfold through the complete reading of the libello.