DAVIDE CASTIGLIONE

Poet & professor of stylistics

RESEARCH/RICERCA

I am a stylistician: I analyse literary texts formally, linguistically and cognitively, and I theorise the nature of style, literary reading and literary or aesthetic effects. While the majority of literary scholars nowadays belong to the broadly cultural/hermeneutic camp (e.g., Feminism, Marxism, Ecocriticism, and so on) I see what I do as a continuation and development of rhetoric, poetics, text linguistics, literary semiotics. My leading question is not so much what literary works mean (although I do interpret them too, especially in my non-academic critical activity) but rather how they mean and what they do on readers, based on their observable features.

I graduated at the University of Pavia (Italy) with a thesis on poetry translation, analysing Vittorio Sereni’s translations of poems by William Carlos Williams. Then I moved to Nottingham, where I did a PhD on difficulty in poetry under the supervision of prof. Violeta Sotirova, resulting in a monograph (see list of publications below). From 2016 onwards I have been teaching and doing research at Vilnius University, Lithuania.

My academic mission is to develop the fields of stylistics and poetics by keeping an open mindset towards different frameworks and by creating interdisciplinary networking opportunities. As a lecturer I teach stylistics, introduction to psycholinguistics, creative writing, 20th Anglo-American poetry and lexicology – always striving to spark students’ interest and passion , pushing them out of their comfort zone while remaining approachable and supportive.

Please scroll down and/or refer to my Academic CV below for the list of publications + other academic info, and check out my Research Gate page for the latest publications and projects. If you want to collaborate with me or invite me for a guest lecture or workshop, email me at davide.castiglione@flf.vu.lt

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LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

Monographs

Difficulty in Poetry: A Stylistic Model. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

This book theoretically defines and linguistically analyses the popular notion that poetry is ‘difficult’ – hard to read, hard to understand, hard to engage with. It is the first work to offer a stylistic and cognitive model that sheds new light on the mechanisms of difficulty, as well as on its range of potential effects. Its eight chapters are organised into two thematic parts. The first traces the history of difficulty, surveys its main scholarly traditions, addresses related themes – from elitism to obscurity, from abstraction to intentionality – and introduces a wide array of analytical tools from literary theory and cognitive psychology. These tools are then consistently applied in the second part, which includes several extended analyses of poems by canonical modernists such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, alongside those of postmodernist innovators such as Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein, among others. This innovative work will provide fresh insights and approaches for scholars of stylistics, literary studies, cognitive poetics and psychology.

Edited collections

Sempre vi lascio indietro col vento. Poetica e stile in Annino. Davide Castiglione & Michele Ortore (eds). Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina (SEF), 2024.

Questo volume nasce dalla persuasione che Cristina Annino sia un anti-classico da riscoprire e approfondire: da Non me lo dire, non ci posso credere (1969) al postumo Avatar (2022), la sua opera poetica (cui si affianca una produzione pittorica e narrativa) rappresenta per molti motivi un unicum nel panorama letterario italiano. La stima che le hanno riconosciuto poeti e critici della statura di Pagliarani, Fortini, Porta e Siti è stata inversamente proporzionale alla sua visibilità nel mondo editoriale e accademico. I saggi qui inclusi intendono fare luce sull’opera di Annino mostrandone, attraverso prospettive e approcci diversi, la complessità, la rilevanza e l’irriducibilità alle tendenze dominanti nell’ultimo mezzo secolo di storia letteraria italiana. Le analisi linguistico-stilistiche, metriche, filologiche, intermediali ed ermeneutiche qui presentate hanno l’obiettivo di fornire una prima base di studio e una risorsa bibliografica a chi vorrà dedicarsi, nei prossimi anni, all’esplorazione della sfuggente e illuminante visione di Annino.

  1. Segnalazione di Amedeo Anelli (Il Cittadino, 12/09/2024)
  2. Ricordare Cristina Annino, il coraggio dll’indipendenza, di Matteo Fantuzzi (Strisciarossa, 27/0/2024)
  3. Recensione di Matteo Cristiano (Studi italiani, 71)

Chapters in edited collections

  1. Castiglione, D. (in preparation) Difficulty or obscurity? Addressing a long-standing issue in modernist poetry and beyond. [Accepted for a Palgrave monograph titled Crossing Boundaries: Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Modernism]
  2. Castiglione, D. (forthcoming). Stylistics Aspects of Poetry. Encyclopedia entry article for International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition, Elsevier, Hilary Nesi & Petar Milin (eds.)
  3. Castiglione, D. (2024b). Nelle lenti d’ingrandimento dei paragoni. Conflitto concettuale, trasgressione categoriale e ridescrizione metaforica in Annino. In: Sempre vi lascio indietro col vento. Poetica e stile in Annino. Davide Castiglione & Michele Ortore (eds). Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina (SEF), 87-107.
  4. Castiglione, D, Michele Ortore (2024a). Introduzione. In:Sempre vi lascio indietro col vento. Poetica e stile in Annino. Davide Castiglione & Michele Ortore (eds). Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina (SEF), vii-xix.
  5. Castiglione, D. (2021b). Maria Pia Quintavalla fra Lettere giovani (1990) e Il cantare (1991). In: La poesia italiana degli anni Ottanta. Esordi e conferme, vol. IV [Italian poetry from the 80s]. Sabrina Stroppa (ed). Lecce: Pensa MultiMedia, 171-194.
  6. van Peer, W., Sopčák, P., Castiglione, D., Fialho, O., Jacobs, A. M., Hakemulder, F. (2021a). Foregrounding, In: Handbook of Empirical Literary Studies. Donald Kuiken & Arthur M. Jacobs (eds). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 145-176.
  7. Castiglione, D. (2020). The stylistic construction of verbal imagery in poetry. In Znaki czy nie znaki? [‘Signs or not signs?’] III. Józefina Piątkowska & Giennadij Zeldowicz (eds). University of Warsaw publications, 43-79.

Articles in peer-reviewed journals

  1. Castiglione, D. & Spėčiūtė U. (in preparation). Transitivity revisited: Case studies from women‘s poetry.
  2. Castiglione, D. (in preparation). Verbal Image Identification Procedure.
  3. Castiglione, D. (forthcoming). Principles of … stylistics: the centrality of Principles of Literary Criticism to a Theory of Stylistics. To be published in Language and Literature, 2026.
  4. Castiglione, D. (2022). Sapienziale. Forme e usi della sentenza nella poesia italiana contemporanea [Full of wisdom: forms and uses of maxims in contemporary Italian poetry]. Polisemie; III: 41-80.
  5. Castiglione, D. (2020). Nel mondo sensibile: focus descrittivo ed empatia nella poesia italiana contemporanea [In the sensible world: descriptive focus and empathy in contemporary Italian poetry], Enthymema; 25: 423-444.
  6. Castiglione, D. (2017a). Difficult poetry processing: reading times and the narrativity hypothesis Language and Literature; 26(2): 99-121.
  7. Castiglione, D. (2013b). The semantics of difficult poems: deriving a checklist of linguistic phenomena. Journal of Literary Semantics; 42(1): 115-140.
  8. Castiglione, D. (2013a). Sereni e il processo traduttivo: analisi sincronica e diacronica di una versione da Williams [Sereni and the translation process: a synchronic and diachronic analysis of a poem by Williams]. Strumenti Critici, 28(2): 267-288.

Book reviews (academic)

  1. Castiglione, D (forthcoming). Review of Lesley Jeffries, The Language of Contemporary Poetry. A Framework for Poetic Analysis. To be published in Language and Literature, 2026.
  2. Castiglione, D. (2024c). Review of Willie van Peer and Anna Chesnokova, Experiencing Poetry. A Guidebook to Psychopoetics. Language and Literature, 33(4): 272-276
  3. Castiglione, D. (2018). Review of Peter Hühn, with contributions by Britta Goerke, Heilna du Plooy and Stefan Schenk-Haupt, Facing Loss and Death. Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry. Language and Literature, 27(2): 142-145.
  4. Castiglione, D. (2017b). Review of David Nowell Smith, On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation. Language and Literature, 26(3): 268–271.

DATABASES AND RESOURCES

Verbal Images in Literature Database (VILD), 2023

Having received EU Structural Funds (project No 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-19-0204), I am working on a project aimed at developing a stylistic taxonomy of imagery in (prompted by) poetry. This has resulted in an online database, still in progress, that you can find here: https://ideas-block.com/verbalimagesinliterature/

VILD contains 94 manually pre-annotated verbal images from a variety of authors and genres. Each verbal image occupies a row of the database; each column adds relevant contextual information (i.e. the poem, play or novel hosting the image, its genre, author, the critic who noticed it) as well as stylistic information (e.g. the size of the image counted in syllables and words, its location within the hosting text, the presence of metaphor and deixis, and more) (from About page).

Screenshot showing the interface of the database.

NETWORKING & ACADEMIC COMMITTMENTS

  • President of LAUTE (Lithuanian Association of University Teachers of English) (Jan 2024-ongoing)
  • Secretary of the International Association of Literary Semantics, IALS (Mar 2023-ongoing)
  • Founder and leader of the Stylistics Reading Group at Vilnius University (Oct 2023-ongoing) and co-founder of the Stylistics & Discourse Analysis reading group at the University of Nottingham (2013-15).
  • Mentor of Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė‘s LMT-funded post-doctoral project ‘Sensing and Perceiving according to Dante Alighieri: Synaesthesia and Multisensory Perception in Medieval Italian Literature’
  • Member of the editorial or scientific board of Respectus Philologicus (July 2024-ongoing), Polisemie (Sept 2023-ongoing) and Configurazioni (Feb 2023-ongoing)
  • Member and revision leader of the Multiple Labs for Empirical Literary Studies COST-action project and of the Effects of Foregrounding Research Coalition
  • Host and co-organizer of the 9th IALS conference ‘A Game of Theories’ (22-24 Oct 2021)
  • Member of the English Philology MA teaching programme, Vilnius University
  • Member of the English Philology BA and MA thesis commission, Vilnius University
  • PhD external examiner at Huddersfield University, UK (Mar 2018)
  • Peer reviewer for: Configurazioni, English Language Research Journal, Estrema, Journal of Literary Semantics, Language and Literature, Respectus Philologicus, Textual Practice
  • Member of PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association), IALS (International Association of Literary Semantics), IGEL (International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature) and ESSE (European Society for the Study of English).

SUPERVISION

I supervise across various areas of linguistic and literary analysis. Supervised and successfully defended bachelor and master projects include:

  • Award-winning picture books: a multimodal analysis (MA)
  • ASD mindstyle in three contemporary novels (MA)
  • Stylistic representation of Self and Other in postcolonial literature (MA)
  • Deixis in song lyrics (BA)
  • Difficulty of award-winning poems (BA)
  • Gaps as stylistic devices in Joyce’s Dubliners (BA)
  • Metaphors in popular science literature (BA)
  • Representation of gender in break-up scenes from movies (BA)
  • Stylistic evolution in love sonnets from 19th to 21st century (BA)
  • Stylistic representation of women in poetry (BA)
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