Subproject 05
Giambattista Marino, Adone, frontispiece edition 1623, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid
...formar modelli nuovi... Marino’s Poetics of the ‘New’ and the Structure of Literary Baroque in Italy
Prof. Dr. David Nelting (Romanisches Seminar, Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Based on research done during the first funding period concerning Tasso’s poetic practice and his poetological reflexions, the subproject seeks to investigate ‘old’-‘new’-relationships in G.B. Marino’s poetics of imitation, conceptualising these processes of literary production as period-specific indicators of ‘baroque’ literature in Italy. In Tasso’s case, strong tendencies towards the hybridisation of generic and stylistic boundaries became evident. Tasso’s theoretical justification of these hybridisations rests on two pillars: a ‘subjectivistic’ approach via individual concetti, and the argument that they are both appropriate and convincing. Reminiscent of contemporary homiletics in terms of their basic systematic layout, Tasso’s notions are taken a step further by Marino: the latter’s massive upward revaluation of auctorial ingegno all but eliminates the normativity of traditions. What replaces it is the principle of free combination, following the individual poetic capriccio rather than the supra-individual consensus of humanist rules of discourse. Tasso’s hybridisations were geared towards the integration of variance and difference, towards the construction of a ‘new’ semantic and aesthetic model largely consistent with the formal horizon of the ‘old‘ one. Marino’s modelli nuovi, on the other hand, may not unfold as ‘innovation‘ in the modern sense, referring as they do to ‘old’ repertoires in a manner familiar from humanist poetologies and poetic practice. They do, however, attempt to eradicate the differentiating qualities and traditional semantics of their reference points, especially in the generic shift from the poema eroico to the poema di pace (for example, Tasso’s references to Virgil were clearly marked with ostentatiously displayed quotations and evoked certain notions of epic Classicism; by contrast, Marino’s rearrangement of the ‘old’ obscures his references). Against this backdrop, the project proposes to expand the research group’s overarching concept of hybridisation with the descriptive category of ‘amalgamation’ in order to allow for a pointed description of the ‘old’-‘new’-relationships in Marino. Not only does the project derive its main impetus from the group’s joint research interests – it also provides an analysis of a historical constellation that is unusual, even singular, within the research group, a constellation in which the category of the ‘new’ is established simultaneously with a pronounced devaluation of the ‘old’ as a period-specific dispositif for the manufacturing of authorial validity.