Download or read book Gramsci in the World written by Roberto M. Dainotto and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks have offered concepts, categories, and political solutions that have been applied in a variety of social and political contexts, from postwar Italy to the insurgencies of the Arab Spring. The contributors to Gramsci in the World examine the diverse receptions and uses of Gramscian thought, highlighting its possibilities and limits for understanding and changing the world. Among other topics, they explore Gramsci's importance to Caribbean anticolonial thinkers like Stuart Hall, his presence in decolonial indigenous movements in the Andes, and his relevance to understanding the Chinese Left. The contributors consider why Gramsci has had relatively little impact in the United States while also showing how he was a major force in pushing Marxism beyond Europe—especially into the Arab world and other regions of the Global South. Rather than taking one interpretive position on Gramsci, the contributors demonstrate the ongoing relevance of his ideas to revolutionary theory and praxis. Contributors. Alberto Burgio, Cesare Casarino, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Kate Crehan, Roberto M. Dainotto, Michael Denning, Harry Harootunian, Fredric Jameson, R. A. Judy, Patrizia Manduchi, Andrea Scapolo, Peter D. Thomas, Catherine Walsh, Pu Wang, Cosimo Zene

Download or read book Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy written by Felice Cimatti and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides an overview of contemporary Italian philosophy from the perspective of animality. Its rationale rests on two main premises: the great topicality of both Italian contemporary philosophy (the so-called “Italian Theory”) and of the animal question (the so-called “animal turn” in the humanities and the social sciences) in the contemporary philosophical panorama. The volume not only intersects these two axes, illuminating Italian Theory through the animal question, but also proposes an original thesis: that the animal question is a central and founding issue of contemporary Italian philosophy. It combines historical-descriptive chapters with analyses of the theme in several philosophical branches, such as biopolitics, Posthumanism, Marxism, Feminism, Antispeciesism and Theology, and with original contributions by renowned authors of contemporary Italian (animal) philosophy. The volume is both historical-descriptive and speculative and is intended for a broad academic audience, embracing both Italian studies and Animal studies at all levels.

Download or read book My Karst and My City and Other Essays written by Scipio Slataper and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scipio Slataper is one of the most prominent writers from the Italian town of Trieste. Before the onslaught of World War One, Trieste was a unique urban environment and the largest port in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a financially powerful city and a cosmopolitan centre where Slavic, Germanic, and Italian cultures intersected. Much of Slataper’s oeuvre is highly influenced by Trieste’s cultural complexity and its multi-ethnic environment. Slataper’s major literary achievement, My Karst and My City – a fictionalized, lyrical autobiography, translated here in its entirety – offers a unique example of an Italian modernist narrative, one that is influenced both by Slataper’s collaboration with the Florentine journal La Voce, and by the Germanic and Scandinavian literature that he absorbed while living in Trieste. My Karst and My City, together with the excerpts from his reflections on Ibsen and other critical essays included here, adds a new voice and a different dimension to our understanding of European modernism.

Download or read book Transcultural Italies written by Charles Burdett and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Italian culture stems from multiple experiences of mobility and migration, which have produced a range of narratives, inside and outside Italy. This collection interrogates the dynamic nature of Italian identity and culture, focussing on the concepts and practices of mobility, memory and translation. It adopts a transnational perspective, offering a fresh approach to the study of Italy and of Modern Languages.

Download or read book Elemental Narratives written by Enrico Cesaretti and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past century, the Italian landscape has undergone exceedingly rapid transformations, shifting from a mostly rural environment to a decidedly modern world. This changing landscape is endowed with a narrative agency that transforms how we understand our surroundings. Situated at the juncture of Italian studies and ecocriticism and following the recent “material turn” in the environmental humanities, Elemental Narratives outlines an original cultural and environmental map of the bel paese. Giving equal weight to readings of fiction, nonfiction, works of visual art, and physical sites, Enrico Cesaretti investigates the interconnected stories emerging from both human creativity and the expressive eloquence of “glocal” materials, such as sulfur, petroleum, marble, steel, and asbestos, that have helped make and, simultaneously, “un-make” today’s Italy, affecting its socio-environmental health in multiple ways. Embracing the idea of a decentralized agency that is shared among human and nonhuman entities, Cesaretti suggests that engaging with these entangled discursive and material texts is a sound and revealing ecocritical practice that promises to generate new knowledge and more participatory, affective responses to environmental issues, both in Italy and elsewhere. Ultimately, he argues that complementing quantitative, data-based information with insights from fiction and nonfiction, the arts, and other humanistic disciplines is both desirable and crucial if we want to modify perceptions and attitudes, increase our awareness and understanding, and, in turn, develop more sustainable worldviews in the era of the Anthropocene. Elegantly written and convincingly argued, this book will appeal broadly to scholars and students working in the fields of environmental studies, comparative literatures, ecocriticism, environmental history, and Italian studies.

Download or read book Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic written by Jo Ann Cavallo and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Italian romance epic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its multitude of characters, complex plots, and roots in medieval Carolingian epic and Arthurian chivalric romance, was a form popular with courtly and urban audiences. In the hands of writers such as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, works of remarkable sophistication that combined high seriousness and low comedy were created. Their works went on to influence Cervantes, Milton, Ronsard, Shakespeare, and Spenser. In this volume instructors will find ideas for teaching the Italian Renaissance romance epic along with its adaptations in film, theater, visual art, and music. An extensive resources section locates primary texts online and lists critical studies, anthologies, and reference works.

Download or read book The Reception of Aristotle s Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond written by Bryan Brazeau and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using new and cutting-edge perspectives, this book explores literary criticism and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in early modern Italy. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters examine the current state of the field and set out new directions for future study. The reception of classical texts of literary criticism, such as Horace's Ars Poetica, Longinus's On the Sublime, and most importantly, Aristotle's Poetics was a crucial part of the intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy. Revisiting the translations, commentaries, lectures, and polemic treatises produced, the contributors apply new interdisciplinary methods from book history, translation studies, history of the emotions and classical reception to them. Placing several early modern Italian poetic texts in dialogue with twentieth-century literary theory for the first time, The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond models contemporary practice and maps out avenues for future study.

Download or read book Milan Undone written by John Gagné and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history of how one of the Renaissance’s preeminent cities lost its independence in the Italian Wars. In 1499, the duchy of Milan had known independence for one hundred years. But the turn of the sixteenth century saw the city battered by the Italian Wars. As the major powers of Europe battled for supremacy, Milan, viewed by contemporaries as the “key to Italy,” found itself wracked by a tug-of-war between French claimants and its ruling Sforza family. In just thirty years, the city endured nine changes of government before falling under three centuries of Habsburg dominion. John Gagné offers a new history of Milan’s demise as a sovereign state. His focus is not on the successive wars themselves but on the social disruption that resulted. Amid the political whiplash, the structures of not only government but also daily life broke down. The very meanings of time, space, and dynasty—and their importance to political authority—were rewritten. While the feudal relationships that formed the basis of property rights and the rule of law were shattered, refugees spread across the region. Exiles plotted to claw back what they had lost. Milan Undone is a rich and detailed story of harrowing events, but it is more than that. Gagné asks us to rethink the political legacy of the Renaissance: the cradle of the modern nation-state was also the deathbed of one of its most sophisticated precursors. In its wake came a kind of reversion—not self-rule but chaos and empire.

Download or read book Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity written by Nardelli Matilde Nardelli and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-04 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Influential, innovative and aesthetically experimental, the films of Michelangelo Antonioni are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key in ushering in its 'new' or 'modern' incarnation around 1960. Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity offers a radical rethinking of the director's work. It argues against prevalent understandings of it in terms of both cinematic purity and indebtedness to painting. Reconnecting Antonioni's aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s and 1970s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity brings into relief these works' crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new, 'impure', art practices - of John Cage, Franco Vaccari, Robert Smithson, Piero Gilardi and Andy Warhol among others - that precipitated the demotion of painting from its privileged position as a paradigm for all the arts. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via cinema, the book replaces auteuristic, if not hagiographic, accounts of the director's work with a new understanding of its critical significance across the modern visual arts and culture more broadly.

Download or read book Danilo Dolci written by Abele Longo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents the multi-faceted opus of Danilo Dolci within the framework of Environmental Education, focusing on his work as a grassroots community educator, nonviolent activist and poet. It illustrates Dolci’s ‘Reciprocal Maieutic Approach’, a dialectic method of inquiry that can be defined as a process of collective exploration, taking as point of departure the experience, culture and intuition of individuals, ultimately directed towards the development of citizenship. Sessions led by Dolci in Sicily from the 1950s to the 1990s gave rise to the development of action plans that aimed to empower individuals, transform communities and, extending far beyond this, towards the planning and implementation of changes that would have a dramatic impact at a global and planetary level.

Download or read book Italian Canadian Narratives of Return written by Michela Baldo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the concept of translation as a return to origins and as restitution of lost narratives, and is based on the idea of diaspora as a term that depicts the longing to return home and the imaginary reconstructions and reconstitutions of home by migrants and translators. The author analyses a corpus made up of novels and a memoir by Italian-Canadian writers Mary Melfi, Nino Ricci and Frank Paci, examining the theme of return both within the writing itself and also in the discourse surrounding the translations of these works into Italian. These ‘reconstructions’ are analysed through the lens of translation, and more specifically through the notion of written code-switching, understood here as a fictional tool which symbolizes the translational movements between different points of view. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation and interpreting, migration studies, and Italian and diasporic writing.

Download or read book Dante s Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy written by Nicolino Applauso and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy proposes a new approach to invective and comic poetry in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and opens the way for an innovative understanding of Dante’s masterpiece. The Middle Ages in Italy offer a wealth of vernacular poetic invectives—polemical verses aimed at blaming specific wrongdoings of an individual, group, city or institution— that are both understudied and rarely juxtaposed. No study has yet provided a scholarly examination of the connection between this medieval invective tradition, and its elements of humor, derision, and reprehension in Dante’s Comedy. This book argues that these comic texts are rooted in and actively engaged with the social, political, and religious conflicts of their time. Political invective has a dynamic ethical orientation that is mediated by a humor that disarms excessive hostility against its individual targets, providing an opening for dialogue. While exploring medieval comic poems by Rustico Filippi (from Florence), Cecco Angiolieri (from Siena), and Folgore da San Gimignano, this study unveils new biographical data about these poets retrieved from Italian state archives (most of these data are published here in English for the very first time), and ultimately shows what the medieval invective tradition can add to our understanding of Dante’s Comedy.

Download or read book The Autobiography of a Language written by Andrea Ciribuco and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Autobiography of a Language is an exploration of the deep and powerful ties between language and identity, focusing on an Italian American author and addressing global themes of modern writing. This is the first extensive, book-length work on Emanuel Carnevali (1897-1942), the first Italian American to attain literary recognition. It is a study on how an Italian immigrant to New York became an author and a key figure in transnational modernism; but most importantly a study of contacts between American and Italian literatures in the modernist era, and an exploration of the challenges of writing in a second language. Carnevali's works are almost exclusively in English, even though he spent only eight years in the United States before returning to Italy. Combining literary analysis with some of the latest findings in applied linguistics and the study of bilingualism, this book contributes to a very active debate in the fields of comparative literature and translation studies: the implications of translingual writing. Andrea Ciribuco considers both the linguistic and cultural aspects of writing in a second language, examining its potential and pitfalls. In bringing Carnevali's works in touch with the socio-cultural context, The Autobiography of a Language offers a fresh view of the Italian/American cultural contacts at the time of the great wave of Italian emigration"--

Download or read book The Italian Novella and Shakespeare s Comic Heroines written by Melissa Emerson Walter and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-08-21 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to provide a full treatment of Shakespeare's literary and theatrical engagement with the Italian novella and female agency.

Download or read book Italian Neorealism written by Charles L. Leavitt IV and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to redefine, recontextualize, and reassess Italian neorealism - an artistic movement characterized by stories set among the poor and working class - through innovative close readings and comparative analysis.

Download or read book A Convert s Tale written by Tamar Herzig and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate portrait, based on newly discovered archival sources, of one of the most famous Jewish artists of the Italian Renaissance who, charged with a scandalous crime, renounced his faith and converted to Catholicism. In 1491 the renowned goldsmith Salomone da Sesso converted to Catholicism. Born in the mid-fifteenth century to a Jewish family in Florence, Salomone later settled in Ferrara, where he was regarded as a virtuoso artist whose exquisite jewelry and lavishly engraved swords were prized by Italy’s ruling elite. But rumors circulated about Salomone’s behavior, scandalizing the Jewish community, who turned him over to the civil authorities. Charged with sodomy, Salomone was sentenced to die but agreed to renounce Judaism to save his life. He was baptized, taking the name Ercole “de’ Fedeli” (“One of the Faithful”). With the help of powerful patrons like Duchess Eleonora of Aragon and Duke Ercole d’Este, his namesake, Ercole lived as a practicing Catholic for three more decades. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, Tamar Herzig traces the dramatic story of his life, half a century before ecclesiastical authorities made Jewish conversion a priority of the Catholic Church. A Convert’s Tale explores the Jewish world in which Salomone was born and raised; the glittering objects he crafted, and their status as courtly hallmarks; and Ercole’s relations with his wealthy patrons. Herzig also examines homosexuality in Renaissance Italy, the response of Jewish communities and Christian authorities to allegations of sexual crimes, and attitudes toward homosexual acts among Christians and Jews. In Salomone/Ercole’s story we see how precarious life was for converts from Judaism, and how contested was the meaning of conversion for both the apostates’ former coreligionists and those tasked with welcoming them to their new faith.

Download or read book Roads to Health written by G. Geltner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-08-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Geltner shows, numerous administrative records also offer ample evidence of the concrete measures cities took to ameliorate unhealthy conditions. Toiling on the frontlines were public functionaries generally known as viarii, or "road-masters," appointed to maintain their community's infrastructures and police pertinent human and animal behavior. Operating on a parallel track were the camparii, or "field-masters," charged with protecting the city's hinterlands and thereby the quality of what would reach urban markets, taverns, ovens, and mills. Roads to Health provides a critical overview of the mandates and activities of the viarii and camparii as enforcers of preventive health and safety policies between roughly 1250 and 1500, and offers three extended case studies, for Lucca, Bologna, and the smaller Piedmont town of Pinerolo. In telling their stories, Geltner contends that preventive health practices, while scientifically informed, emerged neither solely from a centralized regime nor as a reaction to the onset of the Black Death. Instead, they were typically negotiated by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood residents, officials, artisans, and clergymen, and fostered throughout the centuries by a steady concern for people's greater health.