Antonio Arnieri

Position

PhD student

Student

Ph.D. programme in Foreign Literatures, Languages and Linguistics - 34° ciclo (September 1, 2018 - September 30, 2021)

Academic sector

- - -

E-mail

antonioarnieriunivrit

Ph.D. programme in Foreign Literatures, Languages and Linguistics - 34° ciclo (September 1, 2018 - September 30, 2021)

Doctorate research program

Sound and Identity in Shakespeare

The relationship between Shakespeare’s dramatic characterization and Sound is at the core of my dissertation. It can be traced, first of all though not exclusively, in an independent, autonomous, and strongly metaphorical language which works in Shakespeare’s plays as a vehicle of meanings and, at the same time, as an instrument to question epistemological concepts, used in the early modern age to understand and interpret the connection between macrocosm and microcosm, man and power, man and love. Shakespeare's awareness of the aural dimension of reality unveils a process of appropriation and re-elaboration of the theory and lexicon connected to sound and music. Indeed, his specific use of rhetorical elements directly linked to Sound, establishes a connection between his characters and the space that surrounds them – and this space is to be meant both in a largely phenomenological sense, and in a more specifically social/political sense. The precise orchestration of voices, sounds, and noises, which reverberates through the theatre, may be seen as playing an effective role in their dramatic impact.
 
In investigating the relationship between Shakespeare's theatrical text and Sound, my project aims to reveal the possible mechanism employed by the playwright in its creation. It will be focussed on a selected number of plays and it will make an interdisciplinary use of critical tools developed in the field of Sound Studies, not least that of soundscape. More broadly, however, the focus will be on the selected plays’ dramaturgic rhetoric of sound, as it were, and, so, on the hermeneutic implications of the sound rhetoric informing their uses of sound with a view to character building. As a matter of fact, Shakespeare's characters are always identified and characterized by a specific compendium of sounds which reveals something more about them, about their identity, their Bildung, their rises and falls in the dramatic plot.
 
This research has a second, parallel, nature, owing to its sharing in the methodologies and aims of the Digital Humanities. Not only will the textual analysis/processing of the selected plays substantially avail itself of the support of specific digital tools, but all the processed/collected data will constitute also an unprecedented DH source. An important final step in this project, in fact, will include the creation of a digital space, having both a scientific and a didactic aim, making available the digitalized texts informed by the focuses and results of the research. This double nature of the project, in particular the DH phase, lends itself to be extended to the material field of Shakespearean performances ─to the major, or more interesting, productions of Shakespeare's plays as they may be available on record ─, being, thus, open to further investigation that hopefully will be carried on in the future.