Incipit (explicit) Vita Nova: Dante Alighieri and the book of memory

Abstract

This article verifies, as ciphered by Dante Alighieri already in the first paragraph of Vita Nova, with the drawing of the fragmentary transcript of the “book of memory”, issues and procedures that define the singularity of his work, but which were also decisive for the configuration of the future modern literature, specially (but no exclusively) in its lyric trend. The fundamental issue in this research is what operations – rhetorical, imaginative, institutional – were necessary for the modern lyric to acquire a lyric of the Subject, more than a lyric of the Nothing (as it happened, before Dante, with Guilhem de Peitieu and would happen again with Mallarmé in the closing of the historical-poetical arch opened by Dante).