From the micro to the macro and vice versa, modernity appears to have brought about multiple changes of scale in the way humans measure, map, and make sense of the world. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi offered extraordinary insights into these changes of scale and their implications for the modern world. It is no coincidence that sociologist and cultural historian Paul Gilroy identifies Leopardi’s cosmopolitanism as a precursor to the planetary solidarity he advocates in Postcolonial Melancholia (2004), nor that philosopher Eugene Thacker turns to Leopardi, among others, to conceive a cosmic pessimism of a ‘world-without-us’ in Infinite Resignation (2018). Engaging with Leopardi from the perspective of the shifts in scale implied by these and other concepts sheds new light on his work and brings it into dialogue with current debates on spatial, temporal, and social scales.
In English
10:30 Morning Coffee
10:50 Introduction by Alessandra Aloisi and Francesco Giusti
11:00 – 13:00 Panel I
Chair: Paul Hamilton
Paul Strohmaier
Playing with Time: Temporal Scales in Leopardi
Christoph Söding
Scaling the Past? Memory and Heroism in Leopardi’s ‘Canti’
Enrica Leydi and Gennaro Ambrosino
Scala Naturae or Chthonic Ecosystems? The Scaled Perspective in Leopardi’s Late Production
Paola Cori
Leopardi and Antinatalism
13:00-14:30 Lunch Break
14:30 – 16:00 Panel II
Chair: Bernhard Huss
Francesco Marchionni
Mapping Leopardi’s Cosmopolitanism in Translation
Barbara Kuhn
‘una mobilità che può espandersi in ogni direzione’: Gianni Celati in dialogo con l’opera di Giacomo Leopardi
Frances Clemente
Scales of Creatureliness, Animality, and Ugliness: A Comparative Perspective on Giacomo Leopardi and Elsa Morante
16:00-16:30 Coffee Break
16:30 – 18:00 Panel III
Chair: Michael Auer
Alice Gibson
Vast Spaces, Stoic Perspectives, and the Role of Scale in Giacomo Leopardi’s Ethics of Unity
Luca Costa
On the Insignificance of Man
Andrea Capra
Scaling Weirdness: On Leopardi’s Epistemology
19:00 Discussion
Planetary Solidarity / Cosmic Pessimism
with Alessandra Aloisi, Michael Auer, Paola Cori, Francesco Giusti, and Paul Hamilton
With
Gennaro Ambrosino
Michael Auer
Andrea Capra
Frances Clemente
Paola Cori
Luca Costa
Alice Gibson
Paul Hamilton
Bernhard Huss
Barbara Kuhn
Enrica Leydi
Francesco Marchionni
Christoph Söding
Paul Strohmaier
Organized by
Alessandra Aloisi and Francesco Giusti
In cooperation with Leopardi and Post-Enlightenment Studies at Oxford and the Italienzentrum at Freie Universität Berlin. With the support of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership and the Society for Italian Studies (SIS)
Image Credit © Claudia Peppel, n = Neptune, paper collage on cardboard, 15,0 x 19,2, 2021 (detail)