FRANCESCO BENOZZO
HOMO POETA
Le origini della nostra specie
(Edizioni La Vela, Lucca, 2024; ISBN 979-12-80920-37-9; 10 €)
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In questo piccolo libro confluiscono oltre vent’anni di ricerche etnofilologiche e di dissidente militanza poetica di Francesco Benozzo, che mette in relazione la propria rivoluzionaria teoria sulla nascita e l’evoluzione del linguaggio umano con la propria convinzione che la poesia ha salvato e continuerà a salvare le nostre vite. La sterzata evolutiva della nostra specie, la sua vera e propria nascita, è da attribuire, tre milioni e mezzo di anni fa, a quello che Benozzo definisce Homo poeta, scardinando volutamente l’abituale terminologia e cronologia paletnologica. Nella convinzione che Homo poeta preceda addirittura Homo loquens, cioè la comparsa del linguaggio stesso, e che ciascuno di noi sia poeta prima ancora di saper parlare, questo testo visionario diventa anche un invito a una percezione nomade di noi stessi, per riscoprire lo stupefacente potere che ciascun individuo – in quanto creatura irripetibile, unica, libera e parlante – ha dentro di sé di produrre immaginario e creare continuamente nuovi mondi. Un libro che ragiona sulle origini e sul destino della nostra specie e che si pone come un elogio di ogni anomalia e dissidenza rispetto alle leggi evolutive.
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2 SU 70.000
Resoconto di tre anni
di disobbedienza civile
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Il resoconto di tre anni di dissidenza di uno dei due soli docenti universitari sospesi su 70.000 per le norme sul green pass.
LEGGENDE DI GHIACCIAI
(Edizioni La Vela, Lucca, 2022; ISBN 979-12-80920-11-9; 10 €)
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Two hundred years after the first fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen (1822) and one hundred years after the first manuscript drafts of Tolkien's Hobbit (1922), a book for children and adults on the history of glaciers, told through five short legends inspired by oral songs and narrative myths of the native communities of the Arctic Circle. These are fairy tales that are part of a larger mythological cycle, on which the author has been working for some time, entitled Legends of Orogenesis, which narrates the formation of the mountains and continents of the world.
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ROBERT JOHNSON
Mitologia e anarchia del più influente trovatore di sempre
(Castel Negrino, Genoa, 2022; ISBN 978-88-99341-886; € 14.90)
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link to the publisher's website
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The legend of Robert Johnson has taken over his own existence in flesh and blood, and is the most evident image of a dimension suspended between reality and dream, between the artistic creativity of the individual and the demiurgic forces that live before and after. of it. He could not have adapted to any fate: he was made to exist before his birth and after his death, but not during his existence. After some volumes also came out recently related to the reconstruction of his biography and its reception by later musicians, this book stands as the first monograph focused on the overall meaning of his work.
POETI DELLA MAREA
Canti bardici gallesi dal VI al X secolo
Libro + CD
(Forum Editrice, Udine, 2022; ISBN 978-88-3283-322-5; 30,00 €)
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link to the publisher's website
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In the extended high tide that silently covered the lands of poetry throughout early medieval Europe, some rocky plateaus emerged near the coasts of Wales, with new and powerful morphologies, shaped by centuries of poetic tradition. These are the songs of the bards, the wandering singers heirs of the great shamanic tradition that characterized our perception of the world for millennia. The texts that are translated here - which as 'texts' naturally represent only a part of what the oral and sung performances of these Celtic poets were - are characterized by a visionary propensity, strongly linked to the elements of the physical landscape, and by a deep sapiential and animistic yearning, which has no equal in the western world .
A CD is attached to the book in which the author performs and reinterprets some of the translated poems on the bardic harp.
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THE RIDGE AND THE SONG
Sailing the archipelago of poetry
(Forum Editrice, Udine, 2022; ISBN 978-88-3283-341-6; 15 €)
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This book is an intense manifesto that boldly proposes poetry as a crucial event in the evolution of Homo Sapiens : a salvific practice, a dissident action and a shamanic exploration of reality. Starting from the prehistoric naming of the world and illustrating the ways in which, for millions of years, leaves, branches, stones and souls have never stopped transforming themselves into words, Benozzo, in a coming and going of images and visions, leads the reader to the knowledge that we were poets long before we were able to speak. While poetry may seem as superfluous and marginal as the molecules and particles that make up matter, its essence is powerful. In fact, only poetry, due to its pre-verbal, pre-mythological and pre-religious nature, will be able to create, today more than ever, a new imaginary, a shamanic practice capable of restoring freedom and beauty to those who are been defrauded of them.
Biopandemismo®
(La Vela Editions, Lucca, 2022; € 18.00)
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This book collects, within chapters intended as a reference map, the writings and initiatives of Francesco Benozzo and Luca Marini subsequent to May 2021, the date of publication of their first four-handed book (Covid. Technical tests of totalitarianism ). With the new publication, the authors intend to denounce the great Covid scam once and for all, so that it becomes clear that the pandemic and the various lockdowns that accompanied it have simply served to disguise totalitarian control strategies hatched by financial, stock exchange capitalism. and speculative which controls, at the same time, scientific, technological, industrial, commercial, political, cultural and media circuits, which scoffs at principles and values such as health and safety, well-being and happiness, and which will not hesitate to trigger new emergencies, to arouse new terror, to push towards new drifts.
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Francesco Benozzo e Fabio Bonvicini
Cronache da un naufragio
Diario di due anni stupefacenti
Libro + CD
(Stella*Nera Editions, Mestre, 2022; handcrafted product not intended for commercial distribution in stores; free and responsible offer)
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link to the publisher's website
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A book of stories, anecdotes, nursery rhymes and critical reflections on the two years of pandemic emergency, which places a satirical and irreverent gaze at the center of the story . In the seven unreleased tracks on the CD, the events of these months of astonishing subjugation are sung in the style of traditional storytellers and in an open and brazen way.
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The CD-book contains reproductions of material paintings by the painter Carlo Sabbadini, photographed by Francesco Ballestrazzi, and is printed with the Stella*Nera anarchist collective of Mestre.
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COVID.
Prove tecniche di totalitarismo
(La Vela Editions, Lucca, 2021; ISBN 978-88-99661-87-8; € 18.00)
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link to the publisher's website
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A book signed together with Luca Marini, which proposes a juridical and philological analysis of what appears to be the clear realization of a form of global biopolitical totalitarianism.
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Luca Marini teaches International Law and Human Rights and Bioethics at the University of Rome "La Sapienza". A scholar of the implications of technological progress, he was a member of the scientific committee of the Italian Society for Bioethics and of the Commission for the study of bioethics of the CNR, director of the Master in bioethics, bio-law and bioeconomy of Sapienza, vice president of the National Committee for Bioethics and delegate to the Steering Committee for Bioethics of the Council of Europe and the Forum of EU Ethics Committees. He is currently president of the European Center for Science, Ethics and Law (ECSEL).
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Review by Franco Cardini
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Memorie di un filologo complottista
(La Vela Editions, Lucca, 2021; ISBN 978-88-99661-82-3; 12.00 €)
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link to the publisher's website
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In its essence, philology is the art of reading and interpreting traces. The philologist's task is to not trust the superficially narrated things, to be wary of slogans and unique and shared narratives. The philologist, by his nature, has the obligation to look for new thresholds of understanding, to put them under consideration, to defend them. In other words, he also has a scientific obligation - once it would have been said that he has a "moral" obligation - to be what today is contemptuously defined as a "conspiracy theorist". With this awareness of philology as a social science as well as a humanistic one, Francesco Benozzo "exposes himself" in these pages on various topics, recounting his vision of things, inevitably almost never aligned with that current. And it does so starting from what at a certain point it defines "a greed for imperfection", combined with a perception, also based on poetry, obsessively disgusted with the seriality of human gestures and thoughts, claiming the fundamentally subversive nature of true science , understood, from Galileo onwards, as an art of doubt and as a libertarian and anti-dogmatic hermeneutic, in opposition to the shameless Scientocracy in progress.
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Poesia, scienza e dissidenza
Con una premessa di Franco Cardini
(Clueb Library, Bologna, 2020; ISBN 978-88-31365-15-4; € 15.00)
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link to the publisher's website
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Especially in a period like the present one, in which we realize the concrete and often invasive consequences that scientific thought can have on our lives, it becomes necessary to strongly claim the principles on which modern science, from Galileo onwards, is founded: refutability, dialogue, the art of doubt about every truth. As Richard Feynman, the American physicist who won the 1965 Nobel Prize, wrote, "true scientific research is based on irreverence." Through twelve interviews released in the last five years, this book reveals a point of view in which science, poetry and music are intertwined in an articulated and never predictable vision of things.
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Francesco Benozzo - Fabio Bonvicini
Lambrusco & Champagne
(Corsiero publisher, Reggio Emilia, 2020; ISBN 978-88-32116-24-3; € 16.50)
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In the mid-nineteenth century, in a land of Emilia that even the paintings of contemporary painters show us characterized by landscapes in which the wild areas intertwine with those of the extensive and ancient planted vineyards, Antonio Galloni, the enlightened director of the Istituto San Lazzaro - one of the major Italian asylums of the time -, advances to the Reggio Agricultural Society the suggestive proposal to make Lambrusco the wine of the region, with the aim of obtaining a product suitable for export. In his visionary idea, in addition to stemming the growing number of people suffering from insanity due to excessive consumption of wines of different varieties, this operation should create an alcoholic beverage capable of competing with the fine wines from beyond the Alps.
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Mario Alinei - Francesco Benozzo
Falsi germanismi nelle lingue romanze
(Edizioni dell'orso, Alessandria, 2018; ISBN 978-88-6274-877-3; 16 €)
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The Pan-Germanic, racist and Aryan ideology played a crucial role in the genesis of historical linguistics, born in those years of the mid-nineteenth century, which - on the Roman side - not by chance immediately attributed excessive weight to the so-called "Germanisms" in Romance languages: a weight that continues to be slavishly recognized even today, in the various etymological dictionaries and in specific studies, despite the dozens of works dedicated to the close relationship between linguistics and racist ideology, and despite the explicit retractions made by scholars of related disciplines, also born on a scientific basis in those years, such as archeology, historiography and anthropology. The idea that animates this book is to return to take into consideration some of the words commonly attributed to the Germanic superstrate, to verify a possible Latin etymology in the light of their semantics and in compliance with the rules of historical phonetics.
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Liguri, Etruschi e Celti
Popolazioni preromane
tra Ferrara, Modena e Reggio
(Terra e Identità, Modena, 2018; ISBN 978-88-941359-0-9; 14 €)
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A volume dedicated to the linguistic and archaeological evidence of the pre-Roman peoples who occupied Upper Italy before the Romans, with particular attention paid to the new ethnolinguistic syntheses on the genesis of the Etruscans, Celts and Ligurians. The book is composed of essays by various authors, coordinated and introduced by F. Benozzo
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David Bowie
L'arborescenza della bellezza molteplice
[with the CD "Ytiddo BPB" attached]
(Safarà / Universalia, Pordenone, 2018; ISBN 978-88-941359-0-9; 13 €)
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link to the publisher's website
An inspired, obsessed and impregnable life. David Bowie constantly wanted to become what he was before he was, and this is his art. Her multiple beauty, her decadent and solitary elegance, the melancholy and sometimes mournful firmament of her songs, the redundant but impeccable prolixity of her provocations are the sign of a poetic and ironic awareness of death. With his shameless narcissism, with his agitated modesty, with his depersonalizing and authoritative masks, this neoclassical alien, this knight errant in the realms of the ambiguous, has continually created worlds that were not there before. Multiple arborescence is the truth of Bowie's art. He is the perfect heir of Oscar Wilde, who was the first authentic pop star in history, and of his famous statement “man is less himself when he speaks in the first person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth ”.
Dizionario etimologico-semantico
della lingua italiana
(with Mario Alinei, PM Edizioni, Savona, 2017; ISBN978-88-99565-44-2; 22 €)
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Surname are also words of the common language, the origin of which can be traced following the rules of etymology; and in Italy, although they established themselves in the Middle Ages, most of them date back to ancient history and prehistory. Therefore the semantic categories revealed by the research are largely the same as those that appear in the etymological dictionaries and in those of toponymy. The study of surnames is therefore important not only for linguistics, but also for sociology and for the history and cultural prehistory of their area of formation and dissemination. With some additions, and in a different etymological perspective, the surnames in this book are about 15,000 analyzed in the Dictionary of Italian Surnames by Emidio De Felice. Their rearrangement by semantic area allows us to evaluate the different incidence of the various historical and social components that underlie their formation, suggesting a less anecdotal and more stratigraphic dimension of the life of our words.
Speaking Australopithecus
A New Theory on the Origins of Human language
(Edizioni dell'orso, Alessandria, 2017; ISBN 978-88-6274-727-1; 10 €)
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link to the publisher's website
This book, written with the archaeolgist Marcel Otte, argues for a much greater antiquity of human language than has usually been presumed in recent research (according to which it was born with_cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b- 136bad5cf58d_ Homo Sapiens at the end of Middle Paleolithic - 50.000 years ago - or at the most with some Neandertal evidence archaeological and seeing 200.000 years ago), providing the appearance of Australopithecus , between 4 and 3 million years ago, as the stage of our evolution when the emergence of an articulated language took place.
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Studi di ecdotica romanza
(Aracne editrice, Rome, 2016 ISBN 978-88-548-9725-0 pp .; 16_cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b58d € 136bad5c)
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Modernly understood, ecdotics is not only that branch of philology that studies the means and ends for preparing the edition of a text, but a critical attitude that has to do, upstream of any investigation, with the philologist's responsibility in his ways of approaching literature, intended as a meeting place for texts, authors and readers. The studies in this volume, focused on the Romance tradition (from Occitan troubadours to Arthurian novel, from chivalric literature to early twentieth century poetry) are at the same time examples of applied ecdotics and reflections which, starting from it, aim to show the centrality of philology - of a philology that accepts the challenge of constantly questioning itself and its methods - in the contemporary world.
Il giro del mondo in ottanta saggi
Scritti scelti di linguistica, filologia ed etnofilologia
(Aracne editrice, Rome, 2015, ISBN 978-88-548-9411-2; 574 pp.)
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Eighty essays for an earthly and libertarian philology, conceived as cartography, a journey of exploration, to the detriment of formal and national philologies and to the advantage of a philology of the world, similar in part to the Philologie der Weltliteratur, the "philology of world literature ”, advocated by Erich Auerbach. Among ethnodialectological and ethnophilological investigations, this work intends to testify above all that same voracity and curiosity that animated, at its birth, the great nineteenth-century philological tradition, indicating possible directions of investigation towards territories en plein air_cc781905-5cde- 3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ generally little used by philologists.
Carducci
(Salerno editrice, Rome, 2015, ISBN 978-88-8402-997-3; 304 pp; 16 €)
link to the publisher's website
The multifaceted figure of Giosue Carducci (1835-1907) is studied here starting from a careful analysis of his biography, from his early years in Lunigiana and Maremma to his arrival, still very young, in Bologna, where he taught Italian literature and Romance philology. to the University, passing through his political (or anti-political) positions and his tormented love affairs. Poet, professor, philologist, public man of Risorgimento Italy, he still remains a character more misunderstood than read. The book examines in particular the relationship between his revolutionary, disdainful and solitary nature and the transitional society between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which he lived and interpreted in all its lacerating contradictions, and of which the vast production_cc781905-5cde-3194- bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ poetics and essays represents a kind of open map and in some ways still largely misunderstood. Far from the critical stereotypes that have flattened and museified, starting from the school anthologies, the image of Carducci, and after the "hangover" of the various official celebrations for the centenary of his death, the author returns in these pages the profile of a multifaceted and restless poet, often nocturnal and shadowy, irreducibly anarchic and libertarian, and always current as fiercely out of date: a European poet poised between polemical outbursts and crepuscular reverie, to whom Nietzsche thought of entrusting the dissemination of his polemical and anticlerical, and which, unique among our writers of the time to be immediately translated into several languages, was preferred as a Nobel Prize in 1906 to writers and poets such as Mark Twain, Rainer Maria Rilke, Henry James and Lev Tolstòj.
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Philology
An International Journal on the Evolution of Languages, Cultures and Texts
(Peter Lang Publisher, Berne, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, 2016, ISSN: 2297-2625; 314 pp.)
The journal founded and directed by Francesco Benozzo, dedicated to philology understood as subversive and omnivorous "indiscipline", beyond the specializations and formalistic drifts of today's philology. The magazine contains articles and essays on texts and ethno-texts of different traditions, from the Arctic to the Australian ones, from the ancient French medieval texts to the shamanic ethno-texts of the Central Asian area, without ignoring the traditions that have left and are leaving traces thanks to different sign systems from the alphabetic ones
Le origini sciamaniche
della cultura europea
(Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria, 2015, ISBN 978-88-6274-590-1; 496 pp )
The essays collected in this volume, at the intersection of ethnophilology, cultural anthropology and phenomenology of perception, address the problem of the substantial millennial continuity of our tradition, identifying in shamanism a crucial image for understanding some aspects. Taking for granted the intense debate of the last thirty years on the nature and origins of the shamanic phenomenon (a debate that still does not appear to be able to get out of the opposition, which has proved to be fundamentally sterile, between diffusionism and evolutionism), they are analyzed, with reference to different, those structural and load-bearing elements that allow us to attribute to the "professional of the word" a crucial role, from the Palaeolithic to today, in the construction of our imagination. The basic hypothesis is that, when we reflect on the origins of Europe, understood in its broader geocultural meaning, rather than with the themes and forms of Christianity, Islam, the Carolingian civilization, the Hellenistic Alexandrian civilization, the various state and meta-state apparatuses that, as machines of enslavement, have segmented and segment their territories, we are forced to deal, since prehistoric times, with a different and more rooted hypothesis: perhaps it is precisely in Homo poeta , and not in the various stages of cultural, technical and social evolution of Homo sapiens ( faber , religiosus, politicus, laborans, oeconomicus, ludens, aestheticus, technologicus ) that we must recognize the (shamanic) secret of our civilization.
Dizionario etimologico-semantico
della lingua italiana
(Pendragon editions, Bologna, 2015, ISBN 978-88-6598-593-9))
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Where do the words we use come from? Why have many of them radically changed their original meaning? What are the ways in which words are transformed over the centuries and sometimes during the millennia of their evolution?
This book by Alinei and Benozzo wants to answer these and other questions clearly, making the acquisitions, discoveries and methods of etymological research available to the reader, even non-specialist.
Following a periodization that starts from prehistory and, through the Roman age and the Middle Ages, reaches the words born in recent years, the authors accompany the reader in the fascinating and often unpredictable events that characterize the history of the terms of our vocabulary, starting from from the recognition of the main areas of meaning that have propitiated its origin and evolution (words derived from hunting and gathering activities, words of agricultural or pastoral origin, words coming from weaving, ceramics, pre-Christian or Christian religion, ancient conceptions, from personal names, from place names , etc.).
Anarchia e Quarto Umanesimo
Un'intervista su irriverenza, scienza e dissidenza
(Bologna, CLUEB, 2012, ISBN 978-88-491-3690-6, 48 pp., 11.00 euro)
A reflection on science as an act of conscious rebellion, as an anti-dogmatic practice and as a form of irreverence. In this interview Benozzo talks about the need to recognize a new humanism, earthy and nomadic, able to interpret the challenges of multiculturalism, neo-evolutionism and neuroscience, to meet individuals and faces before texts and traditions, and to reconcile the passion of acquaintance with an anarchist world view.
Breviario di Etnofilologia
(Lecce-Brescia, Pensa MultiMedia, 2012, ISBN 978-88-8232-989-1, 274 pp., 16.00 euro)
One hundred years after the publication of Breviary of Aesthetics of Benedetto Croce (1912), and in the centenary of the birth of Gianfranco Contini - the author, in response to Croce, of the Breviary of Ecdotica (1986) - this book intends to act as a further step in a reflection for a philology that is finally able to leave its own self-referential procedures and deal with both verbal signs and signs non-verbal, updating itself with respect to the acquisitions that have emerged from the intense epistemological debate of recent years among specialists in the cognitive sciences, neurosciences, anthropology, archeology, genetics .
Within what Benozzo proposed to define as the "Fourth Humanism", ethnophilology considers itself not as a discipline, but rather as an indiscipline, as a cartography in the making, as a set of possibilities implemented to to know human beings starting from their words and the texts they produce. In its way of feeling an active part of the tradition, it proposes an approach and a resonance with the yearnings of anarchist thought, conceiving itself as an earthly and libertarian philology, which is not concerned only with manuscripts, attributive problems and critical apparatuses, but with mountains, fires set in prehistoric times and nocturnal washerwomen. In this vision of the tradition made up of saints-shamans and lords of animals, of guiding spirits and petrified creatures, of troubadours-songwriters and drinking on the banks of the river, even the authors and their texts, more than faceless professionals of a literary art , are similar to wanders encountered in the fresh air of summer evenings.
Appello all'UNESCO
per liberare Dante dai dantisti
(Alessandria, Edizioni dell'Orso, 2013, ISBN 978-88-6274-432-4, 16)
A provocative appeal to UNESCO to intervene a liberate Dante from the philologists and critics who study him. A further way to reflect and dialogue on the possible future of contemporary humanities, and to think about them in more smiling and less frowning ways.
Etnofilologia.
Un'introduzione
(Naples, Liguori, 2011 ISBN 978-88-207-5045-9, 376).
A passionate book born from years of field investigations, conceived for freedom of thought and against the authoritarian drifts of the philological method: a reflection on the possibilities of interpreting the European tradition freeing it from the distorting aristocratic and 'high' image inherent in the elitist nature of the claims written. Benozzo hopes for the birth of a philology that looks at itself as a social science and in step with the times, a 'walking' philology that becomes the spokesperson for concrete experiences of uprooting. In this nomadic and libertarian approximation, philologists could give up their usual goals (manuscript rooms and libraries), to return to places, among the people, taking the first steps towards a reconciliation with the community from which they seem to have gradually become little distance away.
Cartografie occitaniche
Approssimazione alla poesia dei trovatori
(Naples, Liguori, 2008, ISBN 978-88-207-4239-3)
The tradition of medieval troubadours is approached here with a cartographic and archaeological look, to safeguard the multiplicity of layers and finds that make it similar to an excavation field. The idea that emerges from this innovative survey is that Provençal poetry as we have always studied it has never existed: there is no proof of the existence of most of the troubadours; there are no real dates to refer to; their alleged leader has never composed poems; the "courtly love" understood as a code of behavior is an invention of modern philologists. What remains, however, is a map that cannot be geometrized into historical-literary categories, whose beauty, made up of voids and discontinuities, of a disjointed and unconscious millenary poetic memory, is more similar to the acentric and anarchic geology of a rocky structure than to the reassuring forms of a landscape painting .
«This cartographic book opens and leaves the map open: it is an intruder resting on the excavation ground, and allows himself to be recognized as an intruder. As such, however, it does not resemble an archaeologist´s pickaxe left on the ground by accident, but a stratigraphic survey probe left there deliberately. If it rains heavily, mud covers it. The texts continue to live around, below and above it ».