https://libri.unimi.it/index.php/AOQU/issue/feed Quaderni di AOQU 2024-01-09T15:19:31+01:00 Michele Comelli michele.comelli@unimi.it Open Monograph Press <p>The "<a href="https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/aoqu/index">Quaderni di AOQU" series originates from a branch of</a> "AOQU. Achilles Orlando Quixote Ulysses. Rivista di Epica" an Open Access journal established in 2020 and operating on the OJS (Open Journal System) 3 platform initiated by the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at the University of Milan.</p> <p>In line with the journal, the "Quaderni di AOQU" are dedicated to the exploration of the epic genre as a system of values, social constructs, and ideologies that, amidst constants and transformations, spans epochs, cultures, languages, and forms.</p> <p>The "Quaderni di AOQU" are structured into two distinct sections: "Studi" (Studies) and "Testi" (Texts). The "Studi" section will feature essays, monographs, and miscellaneous works that can shed light on authors, texts, and forms. On the other hand, the "Testi" section is dedicated to presenting, with annotated editions, fundamental epic texts to better understand the epic dimension of cultures and periods.</p> https://libri.unimi.it/index.php/AOQU/catalog/book/168 L' uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano. E un nuovo saggio sulla «Gerusalemme Liberata» 2024-01-09T15:19:31+01:00 Sergio Zatti sergio.zattixxx@unimi.it <p>In the <em>Gerusalemme Liberata</em> we can recognize an oppositional structure that operates at various semantic and formal levels. The foundational unity of the Christian faith, in contrast to the multiplicity of pagan culture, corresponds to a deeper tension within Christianity between the mission to liberate Jerusalem from Islamic “usurpation” and the individual and conflicting desires of the knights: desires rooted in the free chivalric world but by-now disciplined in a collective mission. Such tension, furthermore, corresponds with multiple oppositions: between a masculine principle of rationality and a passionate feminine one; the strict orthodoxy of late sixteenth century Counter-Reformation doctrine and the diverse and heterodox tendencies of Renaissance humanism; the centripetal pressure of epic against the centrifugal ramifications of chivalric romance; the rigorously regulated world of the <em>Liberata</em> and the tendentially anarchic and pluralistic universe of the <em>Furioso</em>; and eventually, in the representation of Tasso’s own psychic split, the author as the master of his own material and the humiliated courtier in a socially subordinate condition.</p> <p> </p> <p>The consequences and implications of this reading are manifold: the book proposes a structural and semiological model of interpretation based on the de-psychologized version of Freudian “compromise formation” put forward by Francesco Orlando: a model aiming to understand the unresolved conflict that arises in the text between the ideology that structures it and the emotional identification offered to the reader. From the perspective of critical tradition, this reading reconciles the perennial opposition between psychologizing interpretations of Tasso as a tormented soul and the historicized reading of the Liberata as an orthodox epic of the Counter-Reformation, whose contradictions are identified in the text. From the standpoint of cultural otherness criticism, it highlights the ways in which differences in faith, race, ethnicity, and gender serve as illuminating figures of internal divisions within the Western Christian, white, male, heterosexual norm. And from the perspective of literary history, it reveals the historical and ideological tensions between a literature conceived as a domain of the doxa (and contiguous to the society, whose ideas and normative practices are exemplarily transmitted) and a literature conceived as the territory of special and potentially illicit pleasures that threaten its consistency and authority.</p> <p> </p> <p>Three parallel levels establish the opposition between unity and multiplicity: the cosmic war between hell and heaven; the war between opposing religious factions (Pagans versus Christians); and the internal struggle within the Christian camp between Goffredo and the wandering companions. The conflict also reemerges in relation to the historical circumstances of the poem’s composition, especially in the battle of orthodoxy against deviance and heresy. The modernity of the <em>Liberata</em> consists, in this sense, in the unresolved tension between the explicit rejection of the forces of evil – embodied in pagan otherness and particularly in female seduction – and the underground attraction to those same forces, a being “of the Devil's party without knowing it”, as Blake said of Milton.</p> 2024-05-03T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2024 The Author(s)