from theory to practice

Just a note to inform y'all that for the first time I have concretely applied the knowledge acquired in this class to my own academic work (yay!). Last week, I wrote a paper about a poem by Aldo Palazzeschi, titled "La Passeggiata". I have liked this work for quite a while, and was glad to be able to finally discuss it thoroughly. When I picked up a copy of the book it was originally published in (the Futurist collection "L'Incendiario", published in 19o9 by Marinetti himself), I noticed some diffrences with the version I was accustomed to accessing online (which, I would later find out, reproduces the one in Palazzeschi's complete poems, published in the early 90s). This led me to a whole research of the poem's textual history in print, and I discovered that there are three different versions, the one from 1909, one from another collection published in 1930 (which introduces the major variations), and another from the early 70s, shortly before the author's death (which is the one reprinted in the complete works). I pondered the differences carefully, weighing them against the author's biography and the historical situations at the time of publishing (the first version was published at the hight of Futurist fervor, and when Palazzeschi himself was an official member of the movement, the second during Fascism, once the author had long renounced Futurism), and I came up (I hope) with some interesting conclusions. I also feel that the extra time and effort I spent doing my own "textual criticism" helped me gain a more thorough understanding of the poem altogether, and led me to some observations, not strictly related to textual scholarship, which I would not have otherwise arrived to. The point is, whereas in the past I would have just pulled up whatever version of the work and went from there, I think that thanks to my exposure to the ideas and concepts we've been exploring, I wrote a much more informed, and ultimately better paper.