Izvorni znanstveni članak
“The Occasion for My New Theme”: The Bistable Transformation of Dante’s Canzone Ladies Who Have Intelligence of Love in La Vita Nuova
Morana Čale
; Sveučilište u Zarebu
Sažetak
Composed prior to La Vita Nuova, Dante’s canzone—the poet’s “personal favourite,” as Teodolinda Barolini has aptly observed—occupies a privileged position in the author’s self-reflexive narration of his poetic development. Within the prosimetrical architecture of La Vita Nuova, as well as in the De vulgari eloquentia and in Purgatorio XXIV, Dante repeatedly underscores the poem’s status as a decisive turning point in his oeuvre. According to the narrative-commentary framework of the youthful libello, the canzone inaugurates a “new theme” and a corresponding “style of praise,” through which Dante reconfigures the discourse of earthly love by elevating it to a theological and spiritual register. While scholarship has persuasively emphasized the thematic dimensions of this “new theme” — including the poet-protagonist’s moral transformation and psychological regeneration, his departure from inherited vernacular lyric conventions, the sacralization of Beatrice’s soul through Christological analogy, and the foreshadowing of her future role as the pilgrim’s angelic guide in the Commedia — the present article proposes an alternative, complementary reading. Drawing on critical approaches that foreground the metaliterary texture of Dante’s early prosimetrical work, on Paolazzi’s account of Horace’s Ars Poetica within Stilnovist poetics, and on Manuele Gragnolati’s thesis that poems retrospectively embedded into La Vita Nuova acquire a bistable or diffractive valence within their newly constructed narrative framework, this study advances the hypothesis that the canzone functions as a bistable textual construct. Its traditionally received meaning remains intact, yet operates simultaneously with a self-referential allegory in which the poem—explicitly personified only in its final stanza, in keeping with Romance lyric conventions—anthropomorphically stages its own performative agency. Within this reading, the poem’s dynamics unfold inside a symbolic system governed by Amor, understood not merely as the allegorical figure of love but as the emblem of language itself, or more precisely, of lyrical discourse in its transcendent sovereignty.
Ključne riječi
Dante Alighieri; La Vita Nuova; Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore (Ladies Who Have Intelligence of Love); metatextual reading; bistability
Hrčak ID:
342300
URI
Datum izdavanja:
22.12.2025.
Posjeta: 405 *