Walking alone: Literary companions from Dante through Ferrante

This talk and the three other ones I am giving as part of the Goggio Lecture Series are all loosely connected under the general rubric “The crisis of solitude.” This is an experience that became uncomfortably familiar during COVID, but it is hardly limited to that; it has very much come to define our modern lives where our interactions are increasingly mediated by machines.  At the same time, the work many of us in the humanities do depends, to no small extent, on our privileged access to solitude.  

How do we make our work, and our lives, less lonely? What responsibilities do we have to making others’ lives less lonely? And especially, how do literature and the arts both often arise from sustained periods of solitude and at the same time strive to formulate new kinds of companionship and conversation? “Walking alone” will focus on differing definitions of solitude as formulated in Italian literary and critical texts: both the emergence of a “privileged” solitude, and other forms of solitude generated by exile, loss, and other events outside of individual control.  Dante, Petrarca, and Elena Ferrante will be the central figures in this narrative. In their generation of something called literature, what role does solitude play, and how does it work both with and against the deep commitment to the themes of friendship and companionship that are so central to their writing?

Future talks will address translation as a form of accompaniment (November 21); companionship among the arts, especially music and poetry (March); and how to make the humanities less solitary (March).

Jane Tylus is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature and of Divinity at Yale.  Her primary interests are in late medieval and early modernity, especially as regards issues of literary ownership, women’s literature, and religious studies. Her books include Who Owns Literature?: Early Modernity’s Orphan Texts (forthcoming, Cambridge’s Elements series); Siena, City of Secrets (2015); Reclaiming Catherine of Siena (Winner of the 2010 MLA’s Howard Marraro Prize for Best Work in Italian Studies); and Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (1993). She recently translated  Dacia Maraini’s Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza for the series “Other Voices in Italian Literature” (Rutgers University Press, 2023); she has also translated the complete poems of Gaspara Stampa and Lucrezia Tornabuoni.  Curently she is co-writing a book with Bruce Gordon tentatively titled “Taking Leave: from Gilgamesh to today.” From 2013-2022 she served as General Editor of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance.

Tylus’s previous appointments were at the U. of Wisconsin-Madison, where she served as Associate Dean of the Humanities and Arts, and at New York University, where she was founding director of the Center for the Humanities and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs.

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This lecture will be livestreamed on the Department's YouTube channel.

All times stated in Eastern time.