Angeli: Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (La quarta prosa) (Italian Edition)

Giorgio Agamben

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From the Aural to the Read, transl. Anatomy of the Hadith Transmission Network, — Stanford: Stanford University Press; In addition to addressing the texts themselves, the survey has included attention to patterns over time in the reproduction of works, and to paratexts such as transmission certificates and ownership notices. Through detailed presentation of the latter, the article serves in a part as a methodological demonstration. It ends with a call for more complete integration of manuscript studies into the broader field of Islamic historical studies. It is often given as an artifact possessed of an aura of menace, something dangerous to have from a social, legal, or even soterial standpoint.

Special thanks are due to my adviser Alexander Knysh for his patient support of my strange interests, and to many others. For such reasons books of magic are famously flammable as well, as countless literary and historical examples testify. In Acts, the magicians of Ephesus burned their scrolls on magic before the apostle Paul as a sign of repentance for their sorcery,3 and in medieval Florence, the archbishop Antoninus is said to have seized a book of incantations which, when burned, put forth a thick cloud of dark smoke as a result of the multitude of demons residing therein.

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Equally important are the several essays on the subject by Pierre Lory, recently gathered in the volume La Science des lettres en islam. Rosenthal, The Muqaddimah, 3: Many of these scholars have discussed the manuscript corpus briefly, but their investigations of it have been rather limited in scope. In a minority of cases where direct examination of the surrogates or codices was not possible, information has been drawn from catalogs and articles describing members of the corpus.

In this paper these are utilized for evaluating the relative importance of texts during a given century, dating the appearance of certain texts, and assessing some social features of the spread of the corpus. Certain weaknesses are inherent to these wide-angle methods insofar as the number and variety of surviving codices undoubtedly give an incomplete picture of the books that were in circulation and the actors involved, and the conclusions derived from them are liable to alternative interpretations, as well as to revision in the face of further data.

I have found them good to think with nonetheless. It is noteworthy that the teachings of all these men were intertwined with, or at least somehow implicated in the science of letters and other occult praxeis. The date of copying for the set is in the colophon of Noah Gardiner 91 This cluster of paratexts reveals at least two important points. The typical formula for an audition certificate is: See also footnotes 33, 34, and 36 below. It functioned as a means not only of transmitting works accurately, but also of ritually passing on the authority to teach and utilize their contents.

Noah Gardiner 93 century. Hic vir apud Mohamedanos non solum doctrina sed etiam pietate insignis perhibetur, eiusque sepulchrum religionis causa visitatur. Vulgo Sheikh Albouni illum appellant. Within these two works, references are made, in many cases repeatedly, to the three others in the group: As shown in the chart at the end of this paper, the five works comprise a closed inter-referential circuit, i.

The majority of these references occur immediately after a somewhat gnomic statement on one esoteric topic or another, stating that the matter is explained in another of the five works. Indeed, they are typically phrased in the first person, e. The science of letters permeates all of them to varying degrees, but instructions for making and using talismans are included in only two: Many of these early copies are high-quality codices in elegant Syro-Egyptian hands, with the text fully vocalized.

For no other work in the corpus are there such disproportionate numbers of early copies over later ones. The works of the medieval corpus that remain to be discussed contain a good deal more material that can be characterized as occult-scientific with a practical bent, and also boast a greater numbers of surviving copies. It is a point of interest that the two were sometimes conflated.

The notion of three redactions has since been taken up by many modern scholars, beginning with a essay by Hans Winkler see bibliography. I have not seen Tunis MS , and cannot comment on its date or contents. I have no basis upon which to comment on the third, Tunis MS Furthermore, while the colophon indeed does appear to say , the possibility of this being accurate is obviated by an anecdote from mentioned in the text on fol.

The date is written in Hindi—Arabic numerals rather than spelled out in full, as is more common in colophons. Unless this was a particularly clumsy attempt to backdate a codex, it must be assumed to be either a slip of the pen or a peculiar regional letterform for the initial number, which should perhaps be read as an eight or a nine instead of a six. A physical inspection of the codex yields no indication that it is especially old.

The text is copied in an Eastern hand, i. The whole is a remarkable exposition of a cosmos inextricable from the letters of the alphabet and the divine names. As mentioned previously, the remaining three major medieval works are distinguished primarily by their omission from the inter-referential circuit that binds together the other five.

The survey for this project found forty copies of the work, not all of them complete. As with many of the other works, certain of these codices are professionally copied and fully vocalized, suggesting that the work was prized by some. It is in four parts: O my brother, know that the secrets of the letters cannot be apprehended by means of analogical reasoning, such as some of the sciences can be, but are realizable only through the mystery of providence, whether through something of the mysteries of inspiration, something of the mysteries of prophetic revelation, something of the mysteries of unveiling, or some [other] type of [divine] communication.

Whatever strays from these four categories is but self-deception, in which there is no benefit at all. BnF MS arabe , fol. A handful of these earliest codices are definitively located, e. One method of approaching these questions undertaken for this project has been the compilation of a rudimentary prosopography of the human actors auditors, copyists, owners, patrons, etc. There are serious limitations to this approach, insofar as many codices lack colophons, ownership statements, or other paratexts that would be of use in this regard, and because those actors who did leave traces in the corpus most often recorded only sparse information about themselves.

Nonetheless, the compilation of what data exist allows for the deduction of some compelling observations, especially when viewed in relation to literary evidence and other sources. In only a handful of statements did actors label themselves as adherents of a particular order. As a number of recent studies have shown, in late medieval Egypt and Syria the spread and growing social influence of Sufism was facilitated to a significant degree by the championing and financial sponsorship of various individual Sufis and Sufi institutions by Turkish military elites i.

For broader studies of the interactions of military elites and Arab scholars, Sufis, and bureaucrats, see the works by Chamberlain and Berkey listed in the bibliography. Noah Gardiner century can be regarded as one outgrowth of the embrace of these occult technologies by preceding rulers. Noah Gardiner households. Rosenthal, The Muqaddimah, Noah Gardiner orbiting it.

Another example, albeit a very late one, is two complete copies i. Of course, it is also quite possible that some scribes refused to do such work on religious grounds. Many scholars have noted multiple problems of coherence and consistency between the various chapters of the work, particularly in various schema of correspondences between the letters of the Arabic alphabet and sundry astrological forces, e. Of the fourteen undated copies that I have been able to view, none is possessed of any features that suggest an earlier date of production, but rather they are remarkably similar in their mise-en-page, hands, and other features to the dated copies.

A similar degeneration of information as that noted for the previous set of chains occurs here as well. Noah Gardiner Table 2: In reference to the tendency of many edition-makers and readers to ignore the wealth of paratexts and extratextual data found in premodern manuscripts, the Europeanist medievalist John Dagenais noted drily in Noah Gardiner how the conditions of their production and use impacted the perceived epistemological value of their contents, but all too rarely has this scholarship been integrated with the broader study of premodern texts.

Numbers indicate the number of references each work makes to its partners, e. There are obvious exceptions to the critique leveled here, including the works cited previously by Chamberlain, Berkey, Ohlander, and Dickinson, although these do not draw on specific codices so much as they present innovative general explorations of the use of books. A number without parentheses indictates the number of colophonically dated copies. A number in parentheses indicates undated codices that can be assigned to a century with a reasonably high degree of confidence on the basis of certain physical characteristics especially paper , mise-en- page, etc.

In cases where the number in the total number of copies column does not add up to the columns preceding it, this is a result of some number of undated copies for which I have no basis to estimate a date. Some of the copies of works counted here are abridgements or fragments. In each case, if a title is given in the manuscript, then it is noted immediately after the author; a standardized title follows in brackets if it differs from the given title. In cases where no title is given in the manuscript, only the bracketed standardized title is given.

Chester Beatty MS An Introduction to History, transl. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. Editions Besson, , — Brockelmann, Carl, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, 2 vols. Brill, —49 ; 3 Suppl. Chartier, Roger, The Order of Books: Pir Press, , 2: Sufismo y ciencias ocultas Ph. Glossing the Libro de Buen Amor Princeton: A History of Magic Books Oxford: Oxford University Press, Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, Fahd, Toufic, La Divination arabe: The Book of Omens Washington, D.

Smithsonian Institution Press, , — Religion and Magic in the Writings of Ahmad b. Rewriting the Script London: A Vademecum for Readers Leiden: Textes et pratiques magiques en milieu musulman Paris: Karthala, , 17— The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion Leiden: Brill, , — University of South Carolina Press, Kieckhefer, Richard, Forbidden Rites: Pennsylvania State University Press, A Short History Leiden: La science des lettres en islam Paris: Editions Dervy, , 91— Makdisi, George, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West Edinburgh: Routledge, , — Ashgate, , — Abstract Models for a Literary Theory London: Themes, Topics, and Typologies New York: Lang, , — Ohlander, Erik, Sufism in an Age of Transition: Pedersen, Johannes, The Arabic Book, transl.

Georg Olms Verlag, Routledge, , 1: Imprimierie Nationale, — Styers, Randall, Making Magic: Taylor, Christopher, In the Vicinity of the Righteous: P Mensing et al. Walter de Gruyter and Co. These controversies, even though they were connected to specific local JAIS contexts, are significant in a general way because they offer evidence for the spread of private reading among Sufis in the later Middle Ages.

To appreciate the historical importance of this, one should ask how far it is new and whether it is limited to Sufism. The first part outlines key changes relating to Sufi literary output in the 12th and 13th centuries. In particular, it examines the tension between orality and writing within Sufism, and the ways in which the written transmission of mystical knowledge was controlled or repressed. The second part draws attention to shared paradigms of both esoteric and exoteric knowledge as the connection between private reading and innovation, and the preservation of oral symbolism in written transmission.

Finally, the third part re-examines the 14th and 15th-century debates from the angle of the history of reading in medieval Sufism. The arguments exchanged in these debates bear witnesses to changes in reading practice linked to the shifting relationships between authority and knowledge in Islamic cultural history. Per quanto legate a specifici contesti locali, queste due controversie, sorte negli stessi anni ai due estremi del mondo arabo, sono il segno di una sempre maggiore diffusione della pratica della lettura privata in ambito sufi.

Le prime due parti di questo studio cercano di rispondere a queste due domande. La seconda parte mette in ONLINE evidenza alcuni paradigmi comuni alle scienze religiose tradizionali e al sufismo, come il nesso fra lettura privata e innovazione, e la persistenza del simbolismo orale nella trasmissione scritta. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing; R. Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation, 67, , Samuela Pagani equiparabile alle discipline religiose tradizionali.

Per una descrizione sintetica del contesto storico in cui sono nati questi manuali si veda A. Stock, Listening for the Text. Per paralleli nella filosofia e nella mistica ebraica cfr. Si veda anche A. Safi, The Politics of Knowledge, , —5. Cook, Commanding Right, —6. Griffel, Apostasie, e Elmore, Islamic Sainthood, 3, 10, — Ogren, Renaissance and Rebirth, 27—30 e Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation, 33, — Pagani, Il rinnovamento, 53—66 e 95— Idel, Kabbalah, 19—20; E.

Karamustafa, Sufism, ; M.

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Ohlander, Sufism, —5; M. Karamustafa, Sufism, , n. Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text, —8. Prima ancora di avere esaminato il libro, o di avermi interrogato sul suo contenuto, mi disse: Mi sentivo come paralizzato. Ma lui mi disse: Ohlander, Sufism, —; cfr. Questo ovviamente non significa che uno studente non possa leggere da solo, ma che, per evitare errori, prima di memorizzare un testo, deve verificarne la correttezza con un maestro o con un ripetitore designato da questi.

Su questa formula cfr. Graham, Beyond the Written Word, Su questi passi e altri esempi in proposito: Berkey, Transmission, 26; D. Ayalon, Reading Palestine, —12; E. Non sono dunque la testimonianza del perpetuarsi della tradizione vivente di un insegnamento da maestro a discepolo, ma servono piuttosto a stabilire un legame simbolico con i grandi maestri del passato, e, attraverso di loro, con il Profeta. Sul valore del libro come strumento di perfezionamento nella letteratura filosofica, si veda D. Melchert, The Formation, Si veda anche ibid.

Elmore, Islamic Sainthood, Bori, Ibn Taymiyya, —8. Geoffroy, Le soufisme, , n. Chodkiewicz, Sceau, 80 e Questo procedimento, come commenta E. La tensione fra 66 E. Si veda anche L. Coccia, La trasparenza delle immagini, 3— La tendenza a vedere il libro come una persona ha radici remote che risalgono alla teologia del logos.

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Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text, —68; D. Boyarin, Border Lines, 89— Nicholson, Studies, , — I vari generi della letteratura sufi rispondono alle esigenze di diverse tipologie dei lettori — devozione, edificazione morale o ricerca intellettuale. La diffusione della letteratura sufi si accompagna a sua volta a un incremento della pratica della lettura privata. Si veda anche R. In queste polemiche, il libro ha un ruolo fondamentale. Infatti, lo studioso intelligente: La sostanza della contesa intorno al libro nel sufismo sembra risiedere proprio in questo contrasto. Nella conclusione dice infatti: Samuela Pagani una vita intera […].

Nello stesso testo, 1: Nwyia in uno studio esemplare del La differenza fra i due autori sta essenzialmente nelle letture consigliate: La sua scarsa stima per i maestri contemporanei gli fa peraltro ammettere che la guida dei libri possa dispensare da un maestro vivente. Saenger, Space Between Words, —5. Il sufismo, parte integrante della cultura religiosa medievale, ha contribuito a rafforzare entrambi i poli di questa dialettica. Berlin We , ff. Zohar, the Book of Enlightenment, tr. Fonti secondarie Adang, C. Islam and the Enlightenment Oxford: Printing and Literacy, — Austin: University of Texas Press, Samuela Pagani Berkey, J.

Analisi delle fonti classiche della sua biografia, Suppl. The partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Ergon, in corso di stampa. Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism Austin: Oxford University Press, , — LIT, , 51— Orientations spirituelles et enjeux culturels Damas: Une voie soufie dans le monde Paris: Their Doctrine and their History, tr. Samuela Pagani Graham, W. Fayard, , — Walter de Gruyter, New Perspectives New Haven and London: Yale University Press, The Formative Period, Edinburgh: Indiana University Press, Salerno, , 49— Institut franco-iranien de recherche-Maisonneuve, Essays in Honour of Hermann Landolt London: Harrassowitz , 3— Peter Lang, in corso di stampa.

Flammarion, in corso di stampa. Samuela Pagani Meier, F. The University of North Carolina Press, Verlag der Weltreligionen, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Rome, January 30, , ed. Piemontese, La comunicazione nella storia. Lo sviluppo del pensiero e le forme del comunicare. Their religious beliefs and practices, 3 ed. Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, The Origins of Silent Reading Stanford: Stanford University Press, On the Uses of the Past Baltimore- London: John Hopkins University Press, Samuela Pagani Strauss, L.

La Porta — D. Brill, , 35— Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, , — Yale University Press, , — Giffen, Theory of Profane Love, xiii et xv. Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs, Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge, Monica Balda-Tillier des transmetteurs du matn contenu. In a literary context, however, the notion applies to narration in a more general sense.

Giffen, Theory of Profane Love, Bell, Love Theory, 9. Monica Balda-Tillier B. La citation de ce livre est trop vague pour pouvoir identifier ce dernier ouvrage. Ma Scrivere contro si segnala soprattutto per la coerenza del metodo. Decisamente un ottimo lavoro questo di Paolo Cherchi e Cosetta Seno Reed che proprio nel carattere divulgativo del progetto ha il suo maggior pregio.

Anzi proprio la grande fortuna della gastronomia, secondo quanto ricostruiscono Paolo Cherchi e Cosetta Seno Reed, sembra ricucire quella cesura originaria di due formati, di due culture, di due Italie divise. I vocaboli sono divisi per campi semantici di appartenenza abbigliamento, alcolici, architettura, ecc. Sono fornite anche informazioni sulla specie grammaticale e notizie sulla storia dei termini e sulle eventuali mediazioni o interferenze con altre lingue.

Quali previsioni si possono fare? Quali saranno i prossimi italianismi che entreranno ad ogni diritto nel vocabolario inglese per rimanervi? Se lo chiedono i due autori del volume e non hanno dubbi: Due to these circumstances, the notion of italicity must be expanded beyond the borders of the Italian peninsula to include a transnational network of people who are connected with or interested in Italian culture. Italian Bookshelf According to the author, the catalyst of this movement was the increased possibility of communicating and traveling at a low cost.

The benefit of this new and more inclusive definition of citizenship is that it will allow Italy to claim a more significant role in the international arena and to incorporate into Italian culture the richness of a transnational network of experiences. Notwithstanding the interesting premises offered by Bassetti, however, a question remains unanswered: Does this category include everyone who has ever been interested in Italian culture? Or does membership demand some type of accompanying action?

It should be noted, however, that despite numerous examples throughout the text, a solid definition of the new Italic is absent. Interestingly enough, an Italic shares a passion for Italian culture, as does the readership of the magazine in which these articles first appeared. Despite the necessity of acknowledging the growing importance of Italophiles outside the borders and the increasing interest in Italy culture outside the peninsula, the theorization of this network lacks a real rigor, and thus the category becomes much too broad: If an Italic is simply someone with a strong interest in Italian culture, can we include people who strive to migrate to Italy?

If so, how should those Italics be included? Their inclusion within or exclusion from the paradigm expands the basis for debate, and would have enriched this work significantly. Italic Lessons, when read together with Italici, represents a stimulating introduction to the study of the concept of citizenship in Italy. With the approach of the year-anniversary of Italian Unification, the number of publications regarding this topic has vastly increased. To orient oneself in relation to this vast literary corpus, the two texts constitute a conversational introduction that covers a vast range of contemporary issues in a captivating style.

The publishing house itself was founded in as a non-profit publisher of the semi-annual magazine Voices in Italian Americana, dedicated to Italian American Literature and cultures, as well as the periodical Italiana, devoted to Italian language writing in the United States. The Crossings series was established in to promote works just like this volume by Leonilde Frieri Ruberto. Italian Bookshelf Leonilde Frieri was born in in the small town of Cairano in the Avellino province of Campania.

Having completed the fourth grade, she eventually followed her husband to America with her four children in These memoirs were recorded at the prompting of one of her daughters following the Irpinia earthquake that destroyed more than half of her village. Ruberto, is the principal translator of this memoir, although several family members contributed along the way as well. Also, Ilaria Serra, an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University, wrote the introduction to this work. The preface, composed by Ruberto, explains that Frieri wrote eighty pages over two weeks in while her husband was visiting Cairano and she stayed with her daughters on Long Island.

Written in cursive and in a mix of standard Italian, the Cairanese dialect, and a smattering of English, Ruberto translated these pages between and The introduction by Ilaria Serra provides information on several aspects that are particular to this type of work. First of all she provides some background on the rarity of immigrant biographies, particularly those written by women. Furthermore, she highlights that 14 of the 19 different dates used to situate the events historically are related directly to family events while only 5 are world historical events such as wars.

The text, indeed, does flow like a river. In the 46 pages of prose, there are only 44 sentences and most of those hold no grammatical correctness. In the Italian, which occupies the second half of the book, the reader notices that there are major stylistic and grammatical inconsistencies. For example, there is no standard capitalization of words, many spelling errors since most words are spelled phonetically, no accents, a lack of agreement and a distinct lack of appropriate punctuation.

Similar authors to follow

In the English translation, Laura Ruberto was faithful to the original composition only altering spelling and grammatical correctness to allow the sentences to make sense to the reader. Another particularly interesting element is the emotional detachment that permeates much of the text. The author seems to have very little emotional investment in so many of the events in her life. The majority of this memoir is focused on the daily activities and goings-on of a small rural Italian village.

The only elements about which the reader will note any particular emotional reaction pertain to the family, to which Frieri is fiercely dedicated. Of her life in America, she explains that she did everything a good wife should: It seems that that sadness also defined America for the author since America never held any of the beauty or happiness or familial tradition that Italy held for her. It is written as if a grandchild suddenly turned to her and asked if she too played this game as a child and the response was recorded on paper.

Part of the brilliance of this work is the lack of planning, a lack of attention to what to include and what to omit, and a lack of attention to chronological accuracy. This is an authentic account of life after Italy. Laura Ruberto has produced an incredibly faithful translation of the original text, while Ilaria Serra has created an introduction that provides the necessary background information for a reader to appreciate the nuance not only in the story but in the relationship of this memoir to this particularly genre of literature.

Performing the Life of Black Migrants to Italy. In the preface to his work, Furno provides a broad discussion on how categories of identity, race, migration, and especially intra-ethnic relations shape the work of the Albe performers. Furno also devotes a few paragraphs to making a case for the importance of the work of the Albe. In other words, the stage-work of the company offers migrants the possibility for cultural agency and self-affirmation, empowering them to voice their presence and rights in the destination culture.

Furno argues that whereas up to the Renaissance, Catholicism was generally accepting of black Africans as human beings capable of participating in the grace of God through the evangelical project, during the late Renaissance race became part of a utilitarian policy that legitimated world colonization while justifying racial subjugation. For Furno, this missed opportunity is reflected in the generalized perception towards blackness of contemporary Italian media.

By featuring the black actor Awa Niang in the role of Arlecchino, I ventidue infortuni short-circuits racial boundaries and questions easy constructions of blackness versus whiteness but also of dominating and dominated, central and peripheral, mainstream and marginal. The multiple concerns of this play indicate how in Ruh the connections between Africa and Romagna were still at an embryonic stage. The remainder of the chapter discusses the work of the first Senegalese actors who collaborated with the Albe.

The reader learns that they were street vendors who eventually left the company to go back to more profitable work. According to Furno, this episode was a watershed in the public perception of migration inasmuch as Italian culture was forced to acknowledge the reality of migrants and embark on a political debate about racism in Italy and the inhuman living conditions of many immigrants.

Despite the significance of nationally televised broadcasts such as Nonsolonero, Un mondo a colori, Shukran, and the two columns from La Repubblica, Metropolis and Gli altri noi, mainstream media continue to present migration as a temporary state of emergency rather than a reality that demands a reassessment of the Italian juridical system. Furno also dwells at length on the erosion of a social welfare system that widens the gap between the wealthy and the poor. The multiple sites of the performances and the dispersed models of social engagement and solidarity that the play creates in the mind of the spectators are interpreted by Furno as the only strategies to resist a power that, in an era of globalization, has become dislocated and de-territorialized.

Dalle avventure ai miracoli. Massimo Bontempelli fra narrativa e metanarrativa. Fifty years after his death, Massimo Bontempelli remains a somewhat under- recognized figure in the landscape of Italian modernism. While there are several studies that offer a panoramic view of his life and literary production, much still remains to be done when it comes to the investigation of individual works. As she rightly argues, the prose works of this period are characterized by the proliferation of self-referential and meta-narrative devices — something that has been noted in passing by several critics but never seriously analyzed in detail.

The book is divided into six chapters, preceded by a short theoretical introduction on the notion of meta-narrative. In the remaining five chapters, one or more meta-narrative devices or strategies are discussed in relation to a specific work. Indeed, Giordano is at her best when, as here, she engages in the close reading of individual texts. Less convincing, on the contrary, is her use of theoretical material. The subject of chapter four is the novella La scacchiera davanti allo specchio Writing, like the ludic activity of children, involves the construction of a fictional world that interprets and re-invents reality in a creative and playful way.

By identifying in Eva ultima some typical anti-realist motifs of this second kind of magic realism — the carnival spirit, the enchanted journey, primitivism etc. Dalle avventure ai miracoli is not without problems. In places, it reads a bit too much like the doctoral thesis from which it seems to be derived, especially in its over-reliance on secondary sources, profusely quoted at the expense of a more personal elaboration of the material. Finally, the book would have benefited from a more careful editing, as there are numerous grammatical and lexical infelicities as well formal inconsistencies that suggest a somewhat rushed production it is not clear, for instance, why bibliographical references are sometimes given in an endnote and sometimes included parenthetically directly in the text.

On the positive side, this book makes a useful contribution to our understanding of Bontempelli and, more in general, of that middle-brow experimentalism on the border between the transgressive spirit of the avant- garde and the orthodoxy of the realist mainstream that characterizes the s. In other words, far from being an eccentric writer of sophisticated fables, Bontempelli in fact emerges here as a forerunner of much of post-modern fiction, of which he anticipated a number of central themes and concerns.

Image, Eye and Art in Calvino. A questo scopo Martin McLaughlin privilegia Gli amori difficili, raccolta finora fin troppo poco studiata. Margarethe Hagen porta alla ribalta che le Cosmicomiche contengono due racconti che costituiscono una riscrittura del mito di Orfeo da prospettive diametralmente opposte. Si riposizionano in modo irrevocabile la figura del narratore, quella del lettore, ma anche il testo stesso. La parte successiva, dal titolo Arte,contiene tre capitoli relativi alla pittura. Ne testimonia la scelta delle varie copertine che entrano in una dialettica con il discorso narrativo o altro.

Maria Pia De Paulis-Dalembert. Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, Esso fa seguito a un convegno sulla letteratura poliziesca italiana tenutosi nel alla Sorbona, organizzato dal C. Da questi punti di partenza si sviluppano i saggi che compongono la raccolta. Pie Peter Lang, Le storie di De Cataldo offrono dunque spunti talmente interessanti da far pensare che le ipotesi avanzate nella finzione letteraria possano portare a delle utili conclusioni nella vita reale.

Somigli si sofferma sui gialli storici di Loriano Macchiavelli, sottolineando come essi non redimano gli errori del passato ma anzi li presentino come cause principali dei problemi del presente. La De Paulis si sofferma sul modo in cui Corrado Augias ha rappresentato in Quella mattina di Luglio il bombardamento, avvenuto nel , del quartiere San Lorenzo a Roma. Chirumbolo si esprime invece con toni critici nei confronti di chi, come Giampaolo Pansa, negli ultimi anni ha sottolineato il lato oscuro della lotta partigiana.

Per Alessia Risi il problema di trovare una memoria collettiva presenta aspetti di carattere storico, ma anche sociale e geografico. Per De Boer caricare di nuova suspense un fatto passato ne riapre le interpretazioni, svolgendo dunque un ruolo fondamentale nel modo di relazionarsi con la storia. Civitella in Val di Chiana AR: These poets include T. Eliot and Giuseppe Ungaretti, indubitably canonical figures in any discussion regarding text-life relationships.

This book establishes a number of fundamental problems involved in defining autobiographical poetry, particularly in the Italian and English traditions. At the same time, because of its limited space, the volume cannot offer a systematic treatment of the topic, a task that a larger-scale study might aim to undertake. Bulzoni, , is another defining feature of the lyric subject at hand, one to which a broader study on this issue might potentially pay further attention.

Divided in two sections, the volume could have developed a greater cohesion in its two parts. The study is clearly a stimulating introduction to the topic, so much so that readers might wish for a more in-depth analysis of the myriad reactions of the contemporary interviewees, whose answers display a range of responses, from the comprehensive and incisive e. Certain Italian models of the lyric tradition, such as Dante and Petrarch, constitute a consistent point of reference in the interviews in the second section e.

Notions of performativity and gender such as in the work of Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero might also have been used to greater effect in the volume, which, because of its brevity, cannot deal in depth with questions of gender, race or sexuality, and the implications of these issues for a poetic mode of self-representation.

These theorists, who are mentioned in passing both by Lerro himself in the theoretical introduction, and by a number of the interviewees, are by necessity situated outside the scope of the volume, and yet they might prove interesting critical touchstones for a larger and more exhaustive study. Given the brevity of the volume, one cannot quibble with the limitations of the final bibliography, or the few entries from unexpected sources, including online encyclopedias and dictionaries.

Bulzoni, , and Il testo autobiografico nel Novecento ed. Reimar Klein and Rossana Bonadei, Milano: Guerini e Associati, might have proved stimulating points of reference. Studies in Italian Americana 2. This anthology is the English translation of the Italian book previously published as Quei bravi ragazzi, Il cinema italoamericano contemporaneo Venezia: Marsilio Editori, , edited by Muscio and Spagnoletti.

Its purpose is to study how Italian immigrants and their descendants use film as a means to address issues of identity, and examines the representation of Italian Americans in film, as well as their contributions as directors, screenwriters and actors. She summarizes the cultural history of the children of the motherland as she reviews the different stages of Italian assimilation in the United States: The first group contributed to the world of entertainment through maintaining traditions common to Italian popular theater.

Furthermore, they were granted unrestricted access by immigration officers if they declared themselves musicians and actors. Muscio reviews the conditions that led to the Southern Italian immigration to North America which had different conditions and consequences for the cohort that immigrated to South America , and the negative stereotypes and myths that emerged and labeled them instinctive, passionate, violent, and with ties to the Mafia.

The outbreak of World War II made Italians enemies in their new homeland, and in their self-defense led to the erasure of their cultural heritage. A new generation of directors emerged in the s: Many of these documentaries focus on religious processions and rituals and with their rich anthropological content, form a genre all their own.

Pointing to the achievements of the Italian American community, Muscio quotes statistics from the U. Between Ethnic Identity and the Racial Question. Notwithstanding, nearly three quarters of the U. Grifitth is a name often quoted as responsible for early movies that helped to spread this stereotype in films such as The Cord of Life , At the Altar , In Little Italy , and The Coming of Angelo There are twenty-one essays written by Italian and United States scholars who discuss the primary indicators of Italian-American identity as manifested in its music, religion, food, family and work ethic and how these traits are reflected in film and other arts.

Issues concerning negative stereotyping and defamation of images of Italian Americans in film and racism prompted by widely acclaimed and influential films such as The Godfather and highly rated television series such as The Sopranos problematize the depiction of Italian Americans in the media. The conversation concerning Italian American stereotyping continues, and attempts to redress the gangster images often fail.

I contributi, di autori italiani e stranieri, hanno il pregio di toccare numerose zone del dibattito che, allora come oggi, continua a svilupparsi attorno al principale gruppo culturale del nostro secondo Novecento. In che modo un Gruppo che si vuole avanguardistico costruisce il proprio discorso critico? Rebbecca West, infine, si concentra su una figura ancora molto marginalizzata dalla critica, quella di Giulia Niccolai.

In his work Paratexts: Surrounding and infiltrating the work itself, the paratext, whether located under the same cover as the work or extrinsic to it, informs and contextualizes its reception and, in part, contributes to the generation of its meaning. Amelia Nigro has divided her painstakingly organized study into several large sections, each highlighting a separate strain of Calvinian paratexts.

Nigro correctly notes that the preface, then, is an invaluable record of this process of shedding superfluous elements that leads to the creation of a text. Additionally, by enhancing what has already been written within the text proper, the preface confirms that not all has been said, and that Calvino the Editor could continue to generate text and meaning at will according to what he deemed advantageous to his public reception. Nigro identifies the role of memory as another constant theme. Calvino readily alluded to moments from his past when contextualizing his writing, yet at times — and particularly in several interviews cited by Nigro — he also toyed with the potential authorial pleasure of lying to his audience about the concrete facts of his personal history.

Amelia Nigro concludes her analysis with a clear recapitulation of what she has illustrated, but caps it with an image that, perhaps inadvertently, provokes a due measure of sympathy for the shy, stuttering Calvino. Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorism It includes digressions on critical and theoretical concepts that, while being appropriate to dissertations, are by now part of the scholarly idiom and therefore do not require the lengthy explanations that one often finds here.

That said, this newly published English version of Tragedia includes several expanded treatments of the topic, such as discussions of films by Amelio, Rosi, and more recent directors. The remainder of the preface is devoted to outlining the seven chapters of the book. The chapter concludes with a description of the corpus of films according to categories i.

A second section of this chapter focuses on films that commemorate the victims of the right-wing violence that led to the bombings in Brescia and Bologna in and , respectively. Yet, he finds that the television film Per non dimenticare, by Martelli, overcomes the limits of most commemorative films by providing viewers with portraits of the victims as unique individuals. Thus, the full integration of the trauma of terrorism in the national heritage remains an unfulfilled project.

While the study would have benefited from a more thorough revision of the Italian version, it surveys an impressive corpus of films and, for the most part, makes convincing arguments. As such, this volume will be a useful title to film and cultural studies scholars alike.

Polemiche novecentesche, tra letteratura e musica. Franco Casati Editore, A dieci anni di distanza dalla pubblicazione del suo primo lavoro I generi letterari nella critica italiana del primo Novecento. Servono ancora i generi artistici? Da qui in avanti, abbandonata la musica, Pennings si concentra esclusivamente su fenomeni letterari. In Il paradosso di una retroguardia: Its focus is the impact of films, theatrical, and television programs on Italian political and cultural debates on the Holocaust.

What kind of public discussion have such works stimulated and produced? Historical debates and reception of works divide the book matter into eight chapters, the first being the introduction while the last bears the conclusive remarks and ideas for a follow-up. The other six chapters periodize the history of reception of separate works. Il Generale Della Rovere set in Genoa ranked 8th among the highest-grossing films of the season. He decides to be shot, and he chooses his own punishment for no atonement is possible for his misdeeds and misconduct due to the sin of card games to which he has lost not only the lives of those who were then sent to the camps but also his own soul.

They share a renewed sense of the event. It is only with the mids that a wider debate starts in Italy about Italy. The shift of historical discourse from Resistance to Holocaust is the topic of Chapter six. Perra has successfully accomplished several tasks at once: In the process, works are divided into three discrete categories depending on the proximity of their subject to the Holocaust Subjective choices are made about under what category works should fall.

If you wish to reach a good understanding of media and film production reception through an educated and brilliant reading of recent history and culture and how all that Perra unravels is relevant to Italy and Italian historical and cultural discourse, his book is a must. Il vasto campo di azione di The Revolt of the Scribe include, tra gli altri, il Manzoni del Cinque maggio, le liriche di Diego Valeri, Attilio Bertolucci e Amelia Rosselli, lo Svevo meno frequentato degli scritti postumi e la cronaca pratoliniana del Quartiere.

Nella sezione novecentesca spicca tra gli altri il saggio dedicato alla poesia di Bertolucci. Qui lo scriba si riallaccia alla tradizione e la rivolta risiede nella non aderenza ai canoni formalisti ermetici. Vita di Goliarda Sapienza. Villaggio Maori Edizioni, Vita di Goliarda Sapienza, prima biografia della scrittrice nata a Catania nel e morta a Gaeta nel La presentazione di questo volume richiede una breve presentazione della stessa studiosa. Maria, inoltre, condivise la sua fede politica nel socialismo con Mussolini e Turati.

Bisogna arrivare a pagina 52 per leggere degli inizi di Goliarda: La biografa ritiene necessario introdurre qui, come antecedente alla nascita della scrittrice, il personaggio di Modesta: In questa parte il racconto della vita di Goliarda riparte dal Poi subentreranno le crisi che la porteranno al suicidio: Providenti si lascia talvolta andare ad un discorso intimo con Goliarda e crea immaginarie conversazioni tra la scrittrice ed altri protagonisti della sua vita.

Per il futuro attendiamo una versione ampliata dalle nuove scoperte che sicuramente emergeranno dal materiale ancora inedito. While the volume does not provide a comprehensive panorama of multicultural literature, it is an important addition to the current bibliography on the topic. In the introduction to the volume, Lucia Quaquarelli discusses the idea of the border as an increasingly porous concept before moving to a presentation of migrant writings in Italy, from the early works of the so-called first generation authors, namely, Pap Khouma, Mohamed Bouchane, Nassera Chohra, Salwa Salem, and Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque, to the many other writers who have emerged since the late s.

Quaquarelli notes that the initial success of these early authors was not matched by successive generations whose works seldom reached a national audience. The remainder of the introduction is devoted to a brief presentation of the contributions that follow. Drawing upon the work of Kay Schaffer, Sidonie Smith, and Giorgio Agamben, among others, she contends that in the writings of migrant authors as well as in the readership that they establish lies the possibility of creating communities with a transformative potential, that is to say, capable of bringing about social and cultural change.

That is why, adds Quaquarelli, the work of Stuart Hall on subjectivity as a constant practice of negotiation with multiple affiliations is very productive. From these premises, Quaquarelli approaches migrant writings as a laboratory of identity-negotiations that she illustrates in her discussion of works by Igiaba Scego, Laila Wadia, Gabriella Ghermandi, Cristina Ali Farah, Gabriella Kuruvilla, and Amara Lakhous.

Canto lungo la strada , the spaces inhabited by the migrants are either non-spaces, that is, stations, parks, public gardens, and so on, or parallel urban realities. Pezzarossa devotes some interesting pages to the gendered spaces that emerge in the writings of Laila Wadia, Gabriella Kuruvila, and Igiaba Scego, and concludes by reflecting on language as another form of space to be inhabited.

Since this is primarily a domestic labor, female migration to Italy inscribes a paradox: It enables the emancipation of Italian female workers but reaffirms the division of labor of traditional gender structures. In subsequent pages of her article, Contarini explains how migrant women, who often come from pre-industrial and pre-modern cultures, are subject to an exclusion that renders their experience unique. It is for this reason, she argues, that the writings of migrant female authors are important, because they render legible an experience of profound diversity.

She notices a reticence to address violence against women, such as the practice of female genital mutilation, or to examine the sexism of the cultures from where many female migrants originate. Nuove italiane crescono stands out amidst the rest of this production as the narrator examines the limits of both feminist and pre- feminist societies alike, inscribing a female subjectivity that encompasses both Eastern and Western affiliations.

The last two essays of the collection are by Daniele Comberiati and Ugo Fracassa, respectively. But Comberiati also makes a case for the inclusion of authors from other regions besides Africa that were impacted by Italian colonialism, such as the Dodecanese islands and Albania, while calling for a comparison between Italy and other colonial cultures. In his view, it is crucial to relate the Italian colonial and postcolonial experience with that of France, Belgium, England, and especially Portugal, where the loss of colonies forced a return-migration comparable to that of thousands of Italians who were forced to leave Libya.

The remainder of the article is devoted to exploring the work of some postcolonial authors as well as of Italian narrators and historians who, since , have been addressing the topic of colonialism.

Legacy Libraries

In this fictional and historical production, Comberiati locates not only a revisiting of the history of Italian colonization but also the reassessment of concepts of nation, homeland, and national literature. To Fracassa, this category implies a return to biography. While he acknowledges the predominance of works that narrate life experiences, he also points out that recent generations are experimenting with a number of other genres while entering in an intertextual dialogue with the Italian national canon, its literary language, and even the dialects and regional variations of Italian.

This definition would encompass migrant authors but also autochthonous writers. While the inclusion of more contributions would have provided a more comprehensive panorama, its six essays are, by and large, well-informed and theoretically sophisticated.

Publishing Translations in Fascist Italy.

Peter Lang AG, Rundle premises his work on the assertion that, in light of a new market for pulp fiction, publishing houses began to see translation as an ideal way in which to turn novels into a profitable medium. Translations were, as he illustrates throughout the book, of the utmost importance in the development of a modern Italian publishing industry. In the five primary chapters that compose this volume, Rundle uses a primarily historical approach based on extensive archival work and statistical analysis to examine the role of translations in exposing Italians to foreign literature and challenging fascist rhetoric on the necessity of cultural autonomy.

The censorship of translations is a running thread throughout the text. The second section examines institutions created to aid in the construction of a uniquely fascist culture and the intellectual debate on the concept of a revolutionary fascist culture. Though much useful background information is included here, the scope is perhaps too large for a thirty-five page chapter. The Italian data are compared to data on French and German translations in order to determine if, and how, Italian trends varied from trends pertaining to the other two major producers of translations.

Rundle focuses on issues directly stemming from the large number of translations in Italy and relatively small number of translations from Italian circulating abroad , examining both the campaign for translations waged by publishers with large profits at stake and the campaign against translations spearheaded by some intellectuals and politicians. On a technical level, it should be noted that the book contains a significant number of distracting grammatical errors and awkwardly phrased sentences.

Such missteps could have easily been avoided by careful editing and detract from the readability of the volume. Still, these oversights notwithstanding, with this book Rundle has made an important contribution to the study of the publishing industry in fascist Italy. Cesare Pavese — Renato Poggioli. A Meeting of Minds.

Introduzione di Roberto Ludovico. Tale dedizione non rappresenta una condizione esclusiva di Pavese e Poggioli. Vale a dire, questo carteggio si presenta sia come un tassello necessario della letturatura pavesiana che come documento di notevole spessore per chi ritiene che la fine della Guerra Fredda domandi una riconsiderazione della storia letteraria novecentesca che al contempo recuperi e vada oltre la Guerra Fredda. Difatti, quando Pavese, il 6 febbraio del , scrive per la prima volta a Poggioli per invitarlo a collaborare con Einaudi, lo fa con una frase che riassume un intero sistema di pensiero, se non addirittura una filosofia della cultura: Affermazione prontamente recepita e condivisa da Poggioli, che il 16 marzo risponde: Scrive il critico fiorentino a Pavese: Poggioli segnala anche un libro su Sacco e Vanzetti di G.

Contemporary Jewish Writers in Italy: With some 27 authors covering topics ranging from gender to science fiction to Ottoman multiculturalism, the scope of this volume is quite broad.

It is particularly exciting to see alongside such expected names as Italo Svevo, Primo Levi, Edith Bruck, Giorgio Bassani, and Elsa Morante, those of a younger generation of authors such as Alessandro Piperno, attesting to both the continued vibrancy of Italian Jewish literature and its criticism. Several essays in Contemporary Jewish Writers in Italy: Aspetti della scrittura ebraica della letteratura italiana del Novecento.

Questa raccolta di saggi si focalizza sui mutamenti nel paesaggio autoriale e commerciale del cinema italiano del nuovo millennio. La raccolta si concentra su una serie di tematiche interconnesse che abbracciano cinema, critica e politiche sociali, cercando di far emergere elementi innovativi assieme a segnali di nuove direzioni intraprese dai giovani autori. Da Aprile a Il caimano Moretti si rivela in grado di soddisfare sofisticate istanze artistiche ed espressive.

E denuncia, giustamente, una certa emarginazione del genre da parte di critici, storici e giornalisti.

Malgrado le matrici neorelistiche, il cinema di Crialese si distingue per quelle pause oniriche, per quei momenti di sospensione magica e di silenzio, per molti versi inediti nel cinema italiano contemporaneo con la dovuta eccezione di Giuseppe Tornatore. Il rigoroso saggio di Jean-A. Completano il volume le interviste con Nanni Moretti su Il caimano e con Nicola Giuliano sul nostro cinema indipendente.

Questi saggi offrono importanti contesti storici e concettuali e sollecitano il lettore verso le possibili direzioni che gli studi filmici prenderanno negli anni a venire. Il noir dunque come genere impegnato: Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography. Learn more at Author Central. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg.

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