Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) ha esercitato la professione di critico letterario per tutta la vita. A partire dal 1920 e poi sino alla morte, Montale ha collaborato con numerosi periodici e con le più importanti riviste letterarie del suo tempo. Nel 1948 viene poi assunto al "Corriere della sera", a Milano: qui diventa giornalista per mestiere e si dedica alla divulgazione della letteratura italiana ed europea, con una particolare attenzione a quelle inglese e francese. La presente ricerca analizza le sue prose critiche, individuandone le linee principali: autori e libri recensiti, temi e questioni culturali che Montale analizza nel corso della sua attività. Alcune figure di scrittori, critici e filosofi (Sergio Solmi, Emilio Cecchi, Benedetto Croce, Roberto Bazlen) rappresentano i confini ideali di un'idea di poesia, che Montale mostra nelle sue prose: dialogando con questi personaggi, egli riflette infatti sui principali problemi della cultura e della letteratura contemporanee. Lo stile critico di Montale si colloca perciò tra il giornalismo e la saggistica. Nell'ultima parte della ricerca si è cercato di individuare alcune importanti intersezioni tra prosa critica, prosa narrativa e poesia, che convivono nell'attività montaliana. / Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) has been a literary critic as long as he lived. Since 1920 till death, Montale worked together with many newspapers and with the most important literary reviews of his period. In 1948 was assumed at «Corriere della sera», in Milan: here he became a journalist as a job and dedicated himself to disclosure Italian and European literature, with a particular attention for English and French ones. This essay analyzes his critical proses, identifying their main themes: authors and books reviewed, themes and cultural issues which Montale wrote about as long as he wrote. Some figures of writers, critics and philosophers (Sergio Solmi, Emilio Cecchi, Benedetto Croce, Roberto Bazlen) represent the ideal boundaries for an idea of poetry, which Montale points in his proses: communicating with these figures, he reflects upon the main issues of contemporary culture and literature. Montale’s critical style can infact be placed between journalism and literary criticism. In the last part of this essays it has been tried to find out some important junctions between literary essays, narrative proses and poetry, living all together in Montale’s activity.

Part I of this thesis has been written with a view to exploring the relevance a text over 2500 years old has for contemporary ars poetica. From a detailed study of ‘The Book of Job’ I highlight three main tropes, ‘cognitive dissonance’, ‘tĕšuvah’, and ‘dark saying’, and demonstrate how these might inform the working methods of the contemporary poet. In the introduction I define these tropes in their theological and historical context. Chapter one provides a detailed examination of ‘Job’, its antecedents and its influence on literature. In chapters two and three I examine in detail techniques of Classical Hebrew poetry employed in ‘Job’ and argue for a confluence between literary technique and Jobian cosmology. Stylistically, the rest of the thesis is a critical meditation on how the main tropes of ‘Job’ can be mapped onto contemporary ars poetica. In chapter four I initiate an exploration into varying responses to cognitive dissonance, suggesting how the false comforters and Job represent different approaches to, and stages of, poetic composition. A critique of an essay by David Daiches is followed by a detailed study of Seamus Heaney. In chapter five I map the trope of tĕšuvah onto contemporary ars poetica with reference to the poetry of Pilinszky, Popa, and to the poems and critical work of Ted Hughes. The chapter concludes with a brief exploration into the common ground shared between the terms tĕšuvah and versus as a means of highlighting the importance of proper maturation of the work. Chapter six consists of a discussion of how the kind of ‘dark saying’ found in ‘Job’ 38-41 impacts on an understanding of poetic language and its capacity to accelerate our comprehension of reality. I support this notion with excerpts from Joseph Brodsky and a close reading of Montale’s ‘L’anguilla’. Chapter seven further develops the notion of poetry as a means of propulsion beyond the familiar, the predictable or the clichéd, by examining the function of metaphor and what I term ‘quick thinking’, and by referring to two recently published poems by John Burnside and Don Paterson. In chapter eight I draw out the overall motif implied by a close reading of ‘Job’, that of the weathering of an ordeal, and map this onto ars poetica, looking at two aspects of labour, which I identify as ‘endurance’ and ‘letting go’, crucial for the proper maturation of a poem or body of poems. The concluding chapter develops the theme of the temple first discussed in chapter one. I argue for a connection between Job as a temple initiate, who has the capacity to atone for the false comforters, and poetry as a form of ‘at-one-ment’. This notion is supported by reference to Geoffrey Hill and Rilke. Part II of the thesis consists of a selection of my own poems, titled ‘Bedrock’.

Rispetto agli altri studi sulla ricezione dell’opera drammatica di Shakespeare, questa tesi sulla fortuna del Julius Caesar nel teatro italiano dal 1949 al 2012 si spende innanzitutto per promuovere una rivalutazione, in senso positivo, dell’apporto degli adattamenti drammaturgici alla conoscenza del Bardo inglese in Italia. Avvalendosi di documentazione a stampa e archivistica coeva, nonché di interviste agli artisti del nostro teatro contemporaneo, lo studio ha verificato come nel realizzare le proprie messinscene del Julius Cesar i registi e gli attori che nel passato recente vi si sono cimentati abbiano perseguito tanto la ricostruzione filologica del dettato shakespeariano originale, quanto la propria ricerca stilistica personale, spesso e volentieri avvalendosi della collaborazione con eminenti esperti, al fine di presentare al pubblico allestimenti sempre esteticamente e filologicamente rigorosi, oltre che pertinenti e significativi. Pertanto, interrogandosi in generale sulle sfide e i compromessi insiti nella prassi ermeneutica, in definitiva questa ricerca sull’interpretazione del Julius Caesar nella scena italiana contemporanea tenta altresì di “demistificare” entrambe le mitologie shakespeariana e cesarea al fine di auspicare nuove pratiche di indagine drammaturgica e registica che permettano al nostro teatro di superare la crisi che attualmente attraversa. Ricostruendo i caratteri dei quindici allestimenti contemplati dal nostro studio, infatti, si è cercato di trarre dalla storia del nostro teatro e dei nostri studi shakespeariani degli utili spunti che possano infondere nuova linfa vitale alla dialettica tra la ricerca accademica e quella teatrale. / This dissertation on the reception of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Italian theatre from 1949 to 2012 calls for a positive consideration of theatrical adaptation practices, which only recently have been appropriately valued in Italian critical discourse on Shakespeare’s staging desiderata. Based on thorough archival research and interviews with contemporary theatre directors and actors, it also questions how much, and with what results, Italian theatre and academia have cooperated in the last seventy years so as to offer to the Italian audience "compromise stagings" of the Bard’s Roman tragedy that pursue both philology and innovation in theatrical work. While focusing on the history of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar hermeneutic practice, this research may also be read as an investigation into the myths surrounding both the historical figure of Julius Caesar and that of Shakespeare. This is achieved through an historical reconstruction of different critical approaches to textual analysis in the study of both subjects, which indirectly yet daringly tackles the question of why Italian theatre practitioners prefer Shakespeare’s plays to new dramaturgy in Italian. Through the study of a set of 15 Julius Caesar Italian productions, I thus aim to assess the “liveliness” of Italian theatre and present solution to its current “crisis” by learning from the past and suggesting new ways for active cooperation between theatre and academia.