(November 7, 2016) Cinema, music, art, literature and more. All in the name of the Italian culture. A rich program of events scheduled this week Italian Institute of Culture in Dublin. Among the most awaited the one with the teacher Renzo Bragantini organized by the IIC in collaboration with the National University of Ireland – Galway. Tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8 at 18:30 – Bargantini will give a lecture entitled “The Betrothed, an European novel”: a reinterpretation and analysis of the Alessandro Manzoni work that will seek to demonstrate not only the European culture of Manzoni as a novelist, but the European nature of its longer (mis)known text. The conference will be introduced by Paolo Bartoloni (National University of Ireland – Galway). “Resubmitting to the German public The Betrothed in 1927, on the occasion of the first centenary of the “Ventisettana” edition of the novel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal remembered the secular nature, like Tom Jones and Wilhelm Meister, and at the same time imbued with post-Tridentine Catholic Christianity” recalls the IIc. “The essay by Hofmannsthal, still to be read carefully, was not only a tribute to his partly Itlian descendants (the paternal grandmother of the poet was in fact Italian, to be precise from Rho); It was, or rather, would have been, if it had been adequately met in Italy, a perfect corrective against the distorting tendency to read in Manzoni masterpiece an apology of the Catholic religion (what has convicted the text, with the compulsory high school reading, to a substantial isolation, and a sterile debate between supporters and detractors). Manzoni – it reads on the website of the IIC – had other things on his mind, and entirely different purposes. A few findings are enough to prove it, one above all: the axis of Renzo essentially unfolds a Bildungsroman (failure), also soaked in picaresque movements, on that of Lucia a resumption of the gothic novel, specifically of the persecuted maiden version. But of course it’s not only this, if one thinks of the robust engagement of a narrative approach characterized by the digression (the latter trait derived from Sterne, that Manzoni knew in the French version); of the glimpses of the novel-essay that The Betrothed exhibit; Finally, the combined novel “. This, and more, will be discussed tomorrow in Dublin. (Red)
