Presentation of Davide Castiglione's newly published monograph
Institute of English, Romance and Classical studies kindly invites you to the presentation of Davide Castiglione's newly published monograph on difficulty in poetry, to be held in K. Donelaitis lecture hall on November 30, 3 PM
The book theoretically defines and linguistically analyses the popular notion that poetry is ‘difficult’ - hard to read, hard to understand, hard to engage with. It is the first work to offer a stylistic and cognitive model that sheds new light on the mechanisms of difficulty, as well as on its range of potential effects. Its eight chapters are organised into two thematic parts. The first traces the history of difficulty, surveys its main scholarly traditions, addresses related themes – from elitism to obscurity, from abstraction to intentionality – and introduces a wide array of analytical tools from literary theory and cognitive psychology. These tools are then applied in the second part, which includes several extended analyses of poems by canonical modernists such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, alongside those of postmodernist innovators such as Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein, among others. During the presentation, the author will introduce the main elements of the model and show how difficult poems both hinder and enhance our meaning-making processes.