The knowledge of afterthoughts: a comparative reading of the poetry of Caproni and Sereni

Tibaldo, V

Oxford Thesis Collection

Thesis

The knowledge of afterthoughts: a comparative reading of the poetry of Caproni and Sereni

Abstract:: The present work explores the idea that one of the forms of knowledge literature produces can be understood in terms of afterthought. It focuses on the retrospective attempts to understand that characterise two poetic collections both published in Italy in 1965, Vittorio Sereni’s Gli strumenti umani and Giorgio Caproni’s Congedo del viaggiatore cerimonioso & altre prosopopee. Sereni often laments the long years it takes him to write a poem, the despair he feels, and the shame that follows for caring so much about poetry. This fluctuation between hope and guilt, meaning and non-sense, far from being just a biographical detail, becomes what life and literature seem to have in common, and what his poetry sets out to investigate by using the resources of the ‘parlato-scritto’ (to use Giovanni Nencioni’s term) to create a cohesive and yet open structure. Caproni’s poems combine everyday discourses and poetic form to scrutinise the little we can reach, express, and communicate. The possibility of pointing at reality through deictics, or of connecting words thanks to rhyme, is carefully analysed to verify whether a residue of sense can be found in the structures we rely on to make sense of our lives despite their apparent emptiness. Sereni’s and Caproni’s ideas and texts are studied through a broad set of comparisons, as one of the ways in which the claim that literature can know is explored in this thesis is by using literary works to understand each other. This methodology is outlined through the figure of the critic-reader and aims at exploring a possible response that critical works may offer to the afterthoughts of literature, considering the hypothesis that we may know something better after having read a text in thinking back to certain passages that struck us, comparing them to other ones from that or other books, and to what we have learnt through our experiences.

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APA Style

Tibaldo, V. (2022). The knowledge of afterthoughts: a comparative reading of the poetry of Caproni and Sereni [PhD thesis]. University of Oxford.

MLA Style

Tibaldo, V. The Knowledge of Afterthoughts: A Comparative Reading of the Poetry of Caproni and Sereni. 2022. University of Oxford, PhD thesis.

Chicago Style

Tibaldo, V. 2022. “The Knowledge of Afterthoughts: A Comparative Reading of the Poetry of Caproni and Sereni.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
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