Sumários

Villiers, "L'intersigne"/2

11 Abril 2024, 14:00 • Chiara Nifosi

Today, we continued our reading of Villiers' story "L'intersigne", focusing especially on the way the narrator's account of his stay with the abbé Maucombe is structured. While the chronological coordinates of the story are presented as unreliable, the story plays with the correspondence between setting and characters, particularly in the way the fresh and juvenile image of the house of the abbé and the abbé himself alternate with visions of decay and death. The culmination of this bizarre interference is represented by the narrator's nocturnal terror, where he sees a priest-like figure giving him his coat. This episode functions as a prefiguration of what is going to happen the day after, as the narrator decides to leave to take care of some personal affairs. The death of priest serves, then, as a reminder of the importance of the cultivation of spiritual matters, while also providing perfect closure to the sophisticated pattern of intersigns that characterizes the story. 

Villiers, "L'intersigne"/1

9 Abril 2024, 14:00 • Chiara Nifosi

Today, we started our discussion of Villiers' second story, "L'intersigne". We started by taking a look at the epigraph, drawn from the Meditations by Saint Bernard, which sets the tone for the story that follows and invites to stop worrying about earthly affairs to focus instead on the cultivation of the soul, as earthly life as such has very little importance. While the epigraph indicates what is the major theme that will be developed in the story, the title seems to suggest the methodology of reading requested for this text - a vertical reading aimed at connecting all the signs serving as a prelude to a final spiritual/supernatural revelation. After that, we started commenting the incipit, which provides a frame for the narrative (even though we also noticed that this "boucle" is not really closed, as the story ends when the second and main narrator finishes his account). 

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, "Véra"

4 Abril 2024, 14:00 • Chiara Nifosi

Today, we discussed Villiers' story "Véra", which is generally considered as a sort of French transposition of Poe's "Ligeia" since it develops the main theme of the dead woman who haunts a man from the afterlife. The strong connection between the themes of love and death takes in "Véra" a peculiar turn that involves the most sensual aspect of love itself - Villiers, in fact, stresses the importance of the erotic component of the relationship between the Count and his wife, who dies while they are making love and reunites with her husband in a moment of (delusional) bodily fusion. We also started to discuss the philosophical undertone of the story, announced in the first sentence about the primacy of love over death, an idea of which the text seems to offer a demonstration. While the religious dimension of spirituality is a source of superstition, love seems to be the only real transcendent experience known by the two characters. Finally, we mentioned some important differences between Villiers' and Poe's stories, namely the use of the third-person narrator in "Véra", as well as the neutrality that this choice conveys (cf. Todorov's quote on the story in the slides).

E. A. Poe, "Ligeia" /2

2 Abril 2024, 14:00 • Chiara Nifosi

During the first part of the class, we commented on the final pages of "Ligeia", namely the description of the bridal chamber where she will make her appearance by "stealing" the body of Lady Rowena, and which seems to prolong the presence of Ligeia into the terrestrial world also after her death; the difference between metempsychosis and metamorphosis, the second being the one that applies to the case of Ligeia, who appears in front of the narrator with her own body and not as a spirit in possession of Lady Rowena's body.

In the second part of the class, we discussed some of Baudelaire's choices in his translation of the story, namely: the unstable translation of the word "wild(ly)" into a constellation of words such as "étrange / bizarre / sauvage", and the effect that it has on the perception of Ligeia, to whom "wild" is applied by Poe most of the times (for instance, her will to live and her eyes); the use of the imparfait to translate the past simple in the passage where the narrator describes Ligeia; the difficulty in translating structures that involve multiple adjectives in the original text. 

E. A. Poe, "Ligeia" /1

21 Março 2024, 14:00 • Chiara Nifosi

Today, we finished to discuss the importance of Poe for Baudelaire based on the prefaces that the poet includes in his collections of translated short stories. After that, we tackled "Ligeia" and we highlighted the following points: the narrator's unreliability displayed from the very first line of the story; the structural opposition between the two female characters, Ligeia and Lady Rowena (physical descriptions and name); the description of Ligeia, constantly mediated by the use of verbs that highlight the obsessive nature of the narrator's love for her; the importance of the psychological traits of the narrator as they emerge through the description of Ligeia; the sublime impression that the "person" of Ligeia makes; the use of analogies in her description; Ligeia's will to live, which seems to anticipate the supernatural outcome of the story, and to compete with the more rational explanation that sees her resurrection as a symptom of the narrator's madness.