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In sixteenth and seventeenth century France, Ovid’s works and Ovid himself were the object of discordant aesthetic and moral judgments; moreover, the dynamics of the reception of his works varied considerably depending on the periods and the socio-cultural contexts. Dealing with an ambiguous auctoritas and operating in a complex editorial context, the translators of Ovid were not only careful to claim the merits of their work in their prefatory texts, but also to assert its legitimacy. They aimed to persuade the readers of the interest of the text provided by exalting the qualities of Ovid and the excellence of the translated work, while pointing out the relevance of the choice to translate it and the qualities of the translation given. They also aimed to position themselves in the reception’s context, by indicating their relations with competing translators and their consideration of exegetical and editorial practices, literary vogues and kinds of readers. This paper aims to analyze the rhetorical strategies adopted by Ovid’s translators in their prefaces in order to promote their works, and it focuses on an element which is shared by most of the prefaces, namely the construction of a relationship of special understanding, connivance or friendship linking Ovid, the translator and the reader.

Thierry Jonquet has been one of the greatest writers of detective novels of the twentieth century. It is undeniable that Jonquet expresses, through his works, a heavy and violent criticism to the deformations of society, to the scandals and aberrations that characterize it and that nourish the content of his novels (and that, almost always, Jonquet draws from everyday chronicle). It is also true, however, that Jonquet reveals to be a perfect master of the mechanisms that regulate, in the detective novel, the dialogue between the novel and its reader. Aware of the codes that structure the genre, Jonquet modifies them with remarkable mastery. This helps to keep alive, in original and unexpected ways, the surprise effect that must be aroused in the reader, but above all – playing on the narrative stereotypes expected by the reader – it testifies the perfect awareness (and creative control) of the fact that a detective novel, a crime story, are first and foremost a mechanism whose functioning and whose more or less disruptive effects depend on the active intervention operated by an act of reading.

Alimentando un filone di ricerca inaugurato qualche anno fa nell’ambito dei Seminari Balmas, e che intende esplorare pratiche ed effetti della lettura dei testi letterari, i saggi presentati in questo volume scelgono di collocarsi nel campo d’azione dello scrittore, per osservare le strategie con cui egli attira il lettore in un legame di empatia assai più stringente di una semplice affinità intellettuale. Che sia il complice che sostiene e legittima un’impresa trasgressiva, lo spirito eletto che risponde all’appello di una comunità ideale, o l’essere sensibile che allevia la sofferenza d’un’anima che gli si offre senza reticenze, il lettore amico è il sogno segreto d’ogni scrittore, anche il più elitario e sprezzante, o il più disperatamente chiuso in sé. Incontrare lo sguardo di qualcuno che accoglie, comprende, condivide è fare l’esperienza del perfetto amore: ed è paradossalmente l’atto di lettura – il meno tangibile dei congiungimenti – che può realizzare quest’utopia. Per inseguirla gli autori utilizzano, ciascuno a suo modo – al mutare dei contesti storicoculturali, e dei sostrati biografici in cui la creazione prende forma – gli espedienti di cui è provvista la loro arte: dalle scintillanti seduzioni dello stile alle allusioni nascoste, agli enigmi, ai messaggi criptati; dalle più sofisticate formulazioni retoriche all’invettiva, al grido, all’impudica esposizione di sé stessi.

Starting from the Recherche’s incipit, we investigate how the involvement of the reader’s bodily and kinesics knowledge are central to Proust’s conception of literature as a cognitive tool. Indeed, the epistemological scope which the writing aspires to is translated into a series of metaphors linking knowledge and reading through the reader’s simulation of posture and gestures that are original and unprecedented. Smiling is an example of the reader’s kinaesthetic involvement as a form of both communication and access to otherness. The goal is defining how expressiveness triggers interaction with the reader and how these nombreux souriresoutline the overall bodily atmosphere of the novel while relating to its central issues. Through the analysis of complex metaphors concerning the face expressiveness, Proust’s use of kinesics data is shown as a vehicle for an unusual perspective or posture that the reader is called to share by untie the metaphorical knot. The chosen examples point out the cognitive adventure underlying the Recherche and provide for different levels of interaction with the reader. In the first one, smiling unprecedently recalls the Guermantes’ social parable and the metaphor decoding is linked to a mnemonic operation by the reader; in the second one, smiling is no more a gesture but it becomes a rhetorical figure embodying the Narrator’s lost youth, which is communicated to the reader through a complex perceptive movement combining vitalism and melancholy. In the last example we focus on the dense metaphor of Françoise’s smile, which – in order to be decoding – requires sensorimotor, perceptive and mnemonic knowledge. And it is precisely this relationship of mutual acknowledge, which is express in gestures, that Proust asks of his audience: a bodily and mental effort towards new knowledge, allowed by expressive and gestural communication in reading.

Which reader did Rabelais address? A reputedly “popular” writer, the author of the Pantagrueline fiction often selected his competent reader in a very demanding manner. Rabelais’ “reading friend” is not just anyone, but an alter ego capable of sharing comic and scholarly connivance. The understanding of the Rabelaisian text must be earned, and the discovery of its secrets holds the promise of superior laughter.

Le diverse voci d’autore che, lungo queste pagine, abbiamo sentito levarsi – vibranti, ironiche, sommesse, magniloquenti – dimostrano fino a che punto la scrittura letteraria soddisfi il bisogno di stabilire legami. Anche dietro l’apparente convenzionalità di formule che puntano alla legittimazione del proprio operato (nei paratesti di dizionari, traduzioni, opere trasgressive dei codici e della morale correnti) lo scrittore cela il desiderio più profondo – l’utopia più tenace – che attravers...

Introduzione I dizionari sono libri di consultazione dove la prospettiva individuale dell’autore e quella collettiva dei lettori si fondono. Nei bilingui è l’identità linguistica ad essere rimessa in gioco dalla percezione dell’Altro, attraverso la traduzione di morfosintassi, lessico, terminologie, varietà di registro, esempi d’autore ed esemplificazioni in svariati ambiti e con svariate modalità di vesti tipografiche e formati. Su tutto ciò si è riflettuto e si continua a riflettere. Non è ...

In his texts, Stendhal is used to call the reader, central actor in the performance of the writing. This paper will list the different ways the reader is called, trough a typical profile based on the different occurrences in the texte and will analyse the issues of reception in the light of this internal figure of the reader. In return, the process of co-construction of the text will be considered as well as the way the fictional exigent reader works out the writing.

Questo volume raccoglie i contributi in presenza dell’XI Seminario Balmas che avremmo dovuto presentare nel corso del tradizionale Convegno di Gargnano, previsto dal 1 al 3 ottobre del 2020. La situazione sanitaria ha compromesso la possibilità di un incontro, non certo l’occasione intellettuale di confrontarci, criticamente, intorno al tema prescelto: esprimiamo qui e innanzitutto la nostra gratitudine agli studiosi italiani e stranieri che hanno risposto con resiliente entusiasmo a questo d...

This essay offers an analysis of the readerly presence in the text Ô vous frères humains(1972), part of the so-called autobiographical works by Albert Cohen. The novel is highly influenced by the Biblical writings of the Prophets; the addressees are therefore called to a deep engagement with the text. Since the very title, the reader becomes party to the book as well as a character in it, playing the different roles of accomplice, defendant, or heir. The narrative alternates between two contrasting time frames; one features the writer, now an elderly and famous novelist, and the other portrays the boy he once was: a ten-year-old in love with France, son of Jewish immigrants. The writer tells of an incident he suffered as a child, when he got insulted, slapped and chased away as a “dirty Jew” by a street vendor and the approving bystanders. The child is therefore forced to become aware of his Jewish identity during a dreadful wander. The penchant for literary writing burgeons in him, together with a prophetical calling, in a regal route alongside the Jewish Jesus and following Moses with the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The two times frames alternate in an intertwinement often consisting of beautiful prose poems. From a thematic point of view, such poems are dominated by semantic isotopies of literary writing, anti-Semitism and death. Most importantly, they constantly call on the addressees (employing the features of prophetic writings).Sometimes the discourse is addressed to anti-Semites (with a lucid awareness of the evil they have caused with the Shoah, which is recalled in touching passages), but then it moves on to address all Christians, whose professed love for their neighbour has become pure hypocrisy. Finally, the discourse addresses every human and declares a universal brotherhood that arises from our common mortality. As a result, the book proves to be a memoir and a testament for future generations, a ‘useful book’ begging the human brotherhood to transform hatred into “tendresse de pitié” – a deep empathy that enables us to recognise even the worst of enemies as brothers in death; a humble prayer for justice in the face of mankind’s common and inescapable fate.

Thierry Jonquet has been one of the greatest writers of detective novels of the twentieth century. It is undeniable that Jonquet expresses, through his works, a heavy and violent criticism to the deformations of society, to the scandals and aberrations that characterize it and that nourish the content of his novels (and that, almost always, Jonquet draws from everyday chronicle). It is also true, however, that Jonquet reveals to be a perfect master of the mechanisms that regulate, in the detective novel, the dialogue between the novel and its reader. Aware of the codes that structure the genre, Jonquet modifies them with remarkable mastery. This helps to keep alive, in original and unexpected ways, the surprise effect that must be aroused in the reader, but above all – playing on the narrative stereotypes expected by the reader – it testifies the perfect awareness (and creative control) of the fact that a detective novel, a crime story, are first and foremost a mechanism whose functioning and whose more or less disruptive effects depend on the active intervention operated by an act of reading.

Dom Bougre aux États généraux (1789) is the first in a series of pamphlets published during the revolutionary period, offering different visions of contemporary events. Its main character is taken from L’Histoire de Dom Bougre by Gervaise de La Touche, an 18th century libertine bestseller. By exposing the depravity of the clergy, the corrupt ruling classes, and the ineffectiveness of the political reforms, the pornographic Dom Bougreis placed within the social and political debate. While keeping in mind the contextual and intertextual references in the pamphlet, I will analyze the role of the reader in decoding the political message and the strategies adopted by the anonymous author to guide the interpretation of the text.

The aim of this contribution is to shed light on the complexity of the poet-reader relationship in Mallarmé’s oeuvre. Starting from an alleged Mallarméan “obscurity”, whose truths and false myths will be discussed briefly, I intend to verify Pascal Durand’s following hypothesis: the reader should be able to decipher Mallarmé’s poetics more easily in the cases of poems considered “difficult”, while the “simpler” poems allegedly offer a more radical closure to dialogue. By comparing some of the direct appeals in Prose (pour des Esseintes) and in L’Après-midi d’un Faune, I intend to show how Mallarmé traces a communicative path towards an ideal reader in the first poem, traditionally considered complex and impenetrable, whereas the appeals in L’Après-midi, apparently easier to read, are addressed to the poetic ego only.