Dr Malcolm Angelucci

Angelucci, M. 2011, Words Against Words: On the Rhetoric of Carlo Michelstaedter, 1, Troubador, Leicester, UK.
View/Download from: UTSePress
View description>>

Words Against Words is the first book to consider the philosophical works of Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910) from a stylistic point of view. It focuses on the links between poetic and rhetoric in Michelstaedter+s major work, La Persuasione e la Rettorica, well known for its original multilingualism, embodiment of subgenres, dialogues, apologues and parables, technical jargons. In the context of the early twentieth century `crisis of language+ in Central Europe, Carlo Michelstaedter, a young Italian speaking Jew from Gorizia who left the Austro-Hungarian territory to study in Florence, articulates one of the most radical examples of `negative thought+, while at the same time struggling to define a way to regain freedom from contingency, unity of meaning, and the absolute state of `persuasion+. Malcolm Angelucci+s book reads La Persuasione e la Rettorica, against itself, demonstrating how it is in the practice of signification, in the `writing+ of a philosophy and a poetic, that the challenge against the inadequacy of words is played out, in one of the most interesting examples of Italian speculation of the period. Angelucci+s post-structuralist approach and analysis of rhetorical figures adopts and reworks the Bakhtinian concept of `dialogism+, in order to demonstrate the peculiar `loss of centre+ of Michelstaedter+s text, and the relativisation of the pretences of the hero/narrator in ways which are coherent with the best examples of early Central European Modernism.

Angelucci, M. 2012, 'Not Enough Of An Artist? Myth, Pedagogy And Rhetoric In Carlo Michelstaedter's Poem I Figli Del Mare', Forum Italicum: a journal of Italian studies, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 342-360.
View description>>

Inside the European crisis of the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the young philosopher, writer and artist Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910) provides one of the most radical and all-encompassing critiques of the inadequacy and rhetorical nature of language and the systems of thought which are based on it; at the same time, however, this critique is articulated inside language, leaving Michelstaedter to face the impossibility of his endeavor. This article starts from this paradox, arguing that the struggle against language should be interpreted also in light of MichelstaedterÔ++s experimentation with different genres and media; in this sense, form and content, style and theories of style and poetics should be read together, as a self-reflexive attempt to put into practice what is affirmed. As an example of this framework, this contribution offers a reading of Michelstaedter's poem I Figli del Mare, which lays bare the series of implicit and conflicting ideas about strategies to overcome the contingency of language that invest the poem at every level, and shows how his thought is complexly caught between Romantic and pre-Expressionist ideas.

Angelucci, M. 2012, 'Persuaders and Rhetoricians: Michelstaedter, Prezzolini and the Problem of Language in Early Twentieth Century Florence', Italica. Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Italian, vol. 89, no. 3, pp. 338-356.
View description>>

Carlo Michelstaedter's La Persuasione e la Rettorica is one of the few works of early twentieth century central European philosophical speculation which has been regarded as interpretive paradigm for the context of its production. Massimo Cacciari, for example, states: [t]re opere, io credo, emergono in questo contesto come opere limite, capaci di "orientarne" la complessiva interpretazione: L'Anima e le Forme del giovane Lukacs, uscito a Budapest nel 1910 e in traduzione tedesca a Berlino l'anno dopo; La Persuasione e la Rettorica di Michelstaedter, le cui appendici critiche furono terminate il 16 ottobre del 1910, il giorno prima del suicidio; il Tractatus di Wittgenstein, terminato, come e noto, a Vienna nel 1918, a pubblicato soltanto nel '22 (lo stesso anno della prima edizione completa della Persuasione), ma le cui idee fondamentali appaiono gia definite intorno al 1012-1913. Gli stessi anni dei primi libri di Kafka (Cacciari 22)