Download or read book Calvino and the Age of Neorealism written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1990-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italo Calvino's reputation as one of the great writers of our century rests chiefly on his allegorical fables and fantastic narratives, whose inventiveness, irreverence, and elegant style are universally admired. In this study, the author focuses on Calvino's first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), because in it she discerns a critical point of origin for Calvino's entire 'ethics' of writing. She shows how, in The Path, he challenges the poetics of objectivity of the Italian neorealists movement and offers a complex and ironic representation of the anti-Fascist armed resistance in Italy. Situating Calvino's early work in its historical and cultural context, the author reassesses Italian neorealism in terms of the theories and critical debates about realism of such critics as Lukacs, Sartre, Brecht, Adorno, and Barthes. She analyzes neorealism's narrative practices and cultural and political implications, while setting neorealism in the context of the resistance and the postwar Reconstruction in Italy and giving readings of major neorealist texts (novels by Pavese and Vittorini, films by Rossellini, Visconti, and others) as well as relatively obscure minor ones. The heart of the book consists of readings of The Path from four different but intersecting critical perspectives: formalist-narratological, sociohistorical, psychoanalytic, and Bakhtinian. The readings assess the importance of Calvino's beginnings for the body of his work and incorporate relevant references to his later fiction and critical essays. Out of these multiple readings, the ironic estrangement of the real through the act of writing itself emerges as his key narratological strategy.
Download or read book Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature written by Eugenio Bolongaro and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at five of Italo Calvino's often neglected early novels: The Young People of Po, The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight, and The Watcher, Eugenio Bolongaro argues that these works, written between 1948 and 1963, contain a sustained meditation on the role of the intellectual and on the irreducible ethical and political dimension of literature. This meditation provides an insight into a crucial moment in Calvino's development as a writer, and allows Bolongaro to lay the groundwork for a more 'political' reading of Calvino's later work. Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature firmly situates Calvino within his historical context - the cultural revival of post-World War II Italy - by relating these early novels to Calvino's political and critical writings which played an important role in the cultural debates of the time. This approach provides a key to understanding Calvino's work in a new light, ably demonstrating that Calvino's full literary significance cannot be understood in isolation from the politics and cultural movements of the period. One of the few book-length English-language works on Calvino's early writings, Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literatur will prove to be an indispensable tool to Italianists and literary studies scholars.
Download or read book Italian Neorealist Cinema written by Christopher Wagstaff and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2007-12-29 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of the Second World War saw the emergence of neorealist film in Italy. In Italian Neorealist Cinema, Christopher Wagstaff analyses three neorealist films that have had significant influence on filmmakers around the world. Wagstaff treats these films as assemblies of sounds and images rather than as representations of historical reality. If Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Paisà, and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette are still, half a century after they were made, among the most highly valued artefacts in the history of cinema, Wagstaff suggests that this could be due to the aesthetic and rhetorical qualities of their assembled narratives, performances, locations, lighting, sound, mise en scène, and montage. This volume begins by situating neorealist cinema in its historical, industrial, commercial and cultural context, and makes available for the first time a large amount of data on post-war Italian cinema. Wagstaff offers a theoretical discussion of what it means to treat realist films as aesthetic artefacts before moving on to the core of the book, which consists of three studies of the films under discussion. Italian Neorealist Cinema not only offers readers in Film Studies and Italian Studies a radically new perspective on neorealist cinema and the Italian art cinema that followed it, but theorises and applies a method of close analysis of film texts for those interested in aesthetics and rhetoric, as well as cinema in general.
Download or read book Italo Calvino s Architecture of Lightness written by Letizia Modena and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study recovers Italo Calvino's central place in a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics, and literary philosophy in the 1960s. Drawing on his letters, essays, critical reviews, and fiction, as well as a wide range of works--primarily urban planning and design theory and history--circulating among his primary interlocutors, this book takes as its point of departure a sweeping reinterpretation of Invisible Cities. Passages from Calvino's most famous novel routinely appear as aphorisms in calendars, posters, and the popular literature of inspiration and self-help, reducing the novel to vague abstractions and totalizing wisdom about thinking outside the box. The shadow of postmodern studies has had a similarly diminishing effect on this text, rendering up an accomplished but ultimately apolitical novelistic experimentation in endless deconstructive deferrals, the shiny surfaces of play, and the ultimately rigged game of self-referentiality. In contrast, this study draws on an archive of untranslated Italian- and French-language materials on urban planning, architecture, and utopian architecture to argue that Calvino's novel in fact introduces readers to the material history of urban renewal in Italy, France, and the U.S. in the 1960s, as well as the multidisciplinary core of cultural life in that decade: the complex and continuous interplay among novelists and architects, scientists and artists, literary historians and visual studies scholars. His last love poem for the dying city was in fact profoundly engaged, deeply committed to the ethical dimensions of both architecture and lived experience in the spaces of modernity as well as the resistant practices of reading and utopian imagining that his urban studies in turn inspired.
Download or read book Italian Post Neorealist Cinema written by Luca Barattoni and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings to the surface the lines of experimentation and artistic renewal appearing after the exhaustion of Neorealism, mapping complex areas of interest such as the emergence of ethical concerns, the relationship between ideology and representati
Download or read book The Italian Cinema Book written by Peter Bondanella and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE ITALIAN CINEMA BOOK is an essential guide to the most important historical, aesthetic and cultural aspects of Italian cinema, from 1895 to the present day. With contributions from 39 leading international scholars, the book is structured around six chronologically organised sections: THE SILENT ERA (1895–22) THE BIRTH OF THE TALKIES AND THE FASCIST ERA (1922–45) POSTWAR CINEMATIC CULTURE (1945–59) THE GOLDEN AGE OF ITALIAN CINEMA (1960–80) AN AGE OF CRISIS, TRANSITION AND CONSOLIDATION (1981 TO THE PRESENT) NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL APPROACHES TO ITALIAN CINEMA Acutely aware of the contemporary 'rethinking' of Italian cinema history, Peter Bondanella has brought together a diverse range of essays which represent the cutting edge of Italian film theory and criticism. This provocative collection will provide the film student, scholar or enthusiast with a comprehensive understanding of the major developments in what might be called twentieth-century Italy's greatest and most original art form.
Download or read book Italian Neorealist Cinema written by Torunn Haaland and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the roots of neorealist film and draws parallels to neorealist fiction, by surveying the major creative contributions to and critical receptions of this trend in Italian postwar cinema.
Download or read book A History of Italian Cinema written by Peter Bondanella and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema - which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.
Download or read book The Author in Criticism written by Elio Attilio Baldi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Author in Criticism:Italo Calvino’s Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom explores the cultural and historic patterns and differences in the critical readings of Italian author Italo Calvino’s works in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Italy. It considers the external factors that contribute to create recognizable patterns in the readings of Calvino’s texts in different contexts. This volume therefore covers, most notably, matters of genre (science fiction, postmodernism), cultural perceptions and conventions, the (re)current image of the author in different media, academic schools, -curricula and -canons, biographical information (such as gender and background), and translation and the language in which the author speaks (or fails to speak) to us. It traces the influence of these aspects in the academic discourse on Calvino. The Author in Criticism also analyzes Calvino’s various professional roles as writer, editor, essayist, journalist, private correspondent, and public, cosmopolitan intellectual, reappraising their often little acknowledged importance for academic criticism. An important underlying idea is that the preconceived image that every critic has of Calvino before even opening one of his books is often solidified and repeated even in the most refined and complex critical analyses. This volume purposefully foregrounds the textual and non-textual parts that are usually considered peripheral to the works of an author, such as book covers, blurbs, reviews, talks, interviews, etc. In this way, this book provides insight into the reception of Calvino’s works in different countries. Moreover, it forms a broader reflection of and on important constants in the workings of literary criticism, and on the way academic discourses have developed in various cultural contexts over the last decades.
Download or read book Kafka s Italian Progeny written by Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores Kafka's sometimes surprising connections with key Italian writers, from Italo Calvino to Elena Ferrante, who shaped Italy's modern literary landscape.
Download or read book The Literature Machine written by Italo Calvino and published by . This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Understanding Italo Calvino written by Beno Weiss and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlights Calvino's fascination with folk tales, knights, social & political allegories, & science fiction.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies written by Gaetana Marrone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-12-26 with total page 2258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies is a two-volume reference book containing some 600 entries on all aspects of Italian literary culture. It includes analytical essays on authors and works, from the most important figures of Italian literature to little known authors and works that are influential to the field. The Encyclopedia is distinguished by substantial articles on critics, themes, genres, schools, historical surveys, and other topics related to the overall subject of Italian literary studies. The Encyclopedia also includes writers and subjects of contemporary interest, such as those relating to journalism, film, media, children's literature, food and vernacular literatures. Entries consist of an essay on the topic and a bibliographic portion listing works for further reading, and, in the case of entries on individuals, a brief biographical paragraph and list of works by the person. It will be useful to people without specialized knowledge of Italian literature as well as to scholars.
Download or read book Calvino and the Pygmalion Paradigm written by Bridget Tompkins and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2015-06-28 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Calvino and the Pygmalion Paradigm: Fashioning the Feminine in I nostri antenati and Gli amori difficili is the first book-length analysis of the representation of the feminine in Calvino’s fiction. Using the structural umbrella of the Pygmalion paradigm and using feminist interpretative techniques, this book offers interesting alternative readings of two of Calvino’s important early narrative collections. The Pygmalion paradigm concerns the creation by a male ‘artist’ of a feminine ideal and highlights the artificiality and narcissistic desire associated with the creation process. This book discusses Calvino’s active and deliberate work of self-creation, accomplished through extensive self-commentaries and exposes both the lack of importance Calvino placed on the feminine in his narratives and the relative absence of critical attention focused on this area. Relying on the analogy between Pygmalion’s pieces of ivory and Barthes’ ‘seme’ and drawing upon the ideas underlying Kristevan intertextuality, the book demonstrates that, despite Calvino’s professed lack of interest in character development, his female characters are carefully and purposefully constructed. A close reading of Calvino’s narratives, engaging directly with Freud, Lacan and the feminist psychoanalytical thinking of Kofmann, Kristeva, Kaplan and others, demonstrates how Calvino uses his female characters as foils for the existential reflections of his typically maladjusted and narcissistic male characters.
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching the Works of Italo Calvino written by Franco Ricci and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the range of his writing, teaching Calvino can seem a daunting task. This volume aims to help instructors develop creative and engaging classroom strategies. Part 1, "Materials," presents an overview of Calvino's writings, nearly all of which are available in English translation, as well as critical works and online resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," focus on general themes and cultural contexts, address theoretical issues, and provide practical classroom applications. Contributors describe strategies for teaching Calvino that are as varied as his writings, whether having students study narrative theory through If on a winter's night a traveler, explore literary genre with Cosmicomics, improve their writing using Six Memos for the Next Millennium, or read Mr. Palomar in a general education humanities course.
Download or read book The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature written by Rinaldina Russell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1997-07-16 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last 20 years, there has been an increasing interest in feminist views of the Italian literary tradition. While feminist theory and methodology have been accepted by the academic community in the U.S., the situation is very different in Italy, where such work has been done largely outside the academy. Among nonspecialists, knowledge of feminist approaches to Italian literature, and even of the existence of Italian women writers, remains scant. This reference work, the first of its kind on Italian literature, is a companion volume for all who wish to investigate Italian literary culture and writings, both by women and by men, in light of feminist theory. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for authors, schools, movements, genres and forms, figures and types, and similar topics related to Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and summarizes feminist thought on the subject. Entries provide brief bibliographies, and the volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography of major studies. This volume covers eight centuries of Italian literature, from the Middle Ages to the present. Included are entries for major canonical male authors, such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as for female writers such as Lucrezia Marinella and Gianna Manzini. These entries discuss how the authors have shaped the image of women in Italian literature and how feminist criticism has responded to their works. Entries are also provided for various schools and movements, such as deconstruction, Marxism, and new historicism; for genres and forms, such as the epic, devotional works, and misogynistic literature; for figures and types, such as the enchantress, the witch, and the shepherdess; and for numerous other topics. Each entry is written by an expert contributor, summarizes the relationship of the topic to feminist thought, and includes a brief bibliography. The volume closes with a selected general bibliography of major studies.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies A J written by Gaetana Marrone and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2007 with total page 2258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
