Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RTHRIEL (The Rhyme: Theory and History of the rhyme in Italian and European literature)
Reporting period: 2016-11-01 to 2018-10-31
Besides the achievement of these main career development goals, during the fellowship Dr. Di Santo has also improved both his soft and hard skills and fulfilled the dissemination requirements, in accordance with the proposal. This has been carried out through the following measures: a) training-through-research; b) participation in conferences and workshops as a speaker; c) presentation of research results to both specialist and non-specialist audience; d) writing of several scientific essays ; e) ideation, organization and coordination of a workshop attended by both emerging and affirmed international scholars; f) preparation of applications for grants and research funding; g) language courses, with particular focus on German; h) involvement in the organizational and financial management of the project. The dissemination through conferences addressed to a wider public has showed a keen interest of a general audience in the topic of the research, due especially to its marked interdisciplinarity, involving literature, music, folklore and even advertising; more will be done though wikis to be developed with the support of a dedicated structure of the Freie Universität (CeDiS).
The second research line, concerning the quest for the origins of rhyme, may have an even greater impact on scholarship in providing a possible solution to one of the most debated questions in literary studies, that of the origin of vernacular lyric poetry. Rediscovering in early romance poetry a structural relation between the text’s metrical structure (rhyme schemes) and the melodic form (musical phraseology) – which has been so far completely overlooked because it has been hidden by alterations of the melodies due mainly to oral transmission – gives us a potentially decisive clue to trace back rhyme schemes of Troubadour poetry to the Andalusian-Arabic tradition rather than to Medieval Latin poetry, as is generally believed today. This rehabilitates also Dante’s theory of the canzone as exposed in the De vulgari eloquentia, so far considered substantially unreliable for what concerns the relation of the poetic text to the melodic form, and gives an explanation of the function of rhyme and rhyme schemes at the origin of vernacular lyric poetry in close relation to music. Proving the Andalusian-Arabic theory true, besides solving one of the major outstanding literary questions, would also have a wider cultural and social impact, rediscovering a deep connection between Western and Arabic culture even in the field of lyric poetry.