Italian Culture最新文献

{"title":"Melita, domi adsum: Sessismo e eteronormatività nelle narrative enogastronomiche italiane","authors":"Fabio I. M. Poppi","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2120249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2120249","url":null,"abstract":"Questo contributo analizza le narrative enogastronomiche prodotte da cinquantuno partecipanti italiani che, in diversi modi, pongono il cibo ed il bere al centro della propria vita professionale e sociale. Considerando il valore culturale e simbolico dell’enogastronomia ed il conservatorismo della tradizione culinaria italiana, l’analisi mette in evidenza i contenuti sessisti e eteronormativi che dominano il discorso sul cibo ed il bere in Italia: anche nelle narrative enogastronomiche si rileva infatti una promozione di valori e atteggiamenti sessisti che pongono le donne in condizioni di subordinazione e che caratterizzano l’omosessualità come una minaccia alla tradizione e alla autenticità della cultura italiana.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"169 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48824357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Flashback, Eclipse. The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s. By ROMY GOLAN. Pp. 311. New York: Zone Books, 2021","authors":"Karen Pinkus","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2111069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2111069","url":null,"abstract":"guage as a synthesis of the dialect that expressed the everyday life of the local people and the Italian (Tuscan) through which a common culture could be formed. Such a synthesis would achieve a language open to regional variations yet responsive to the concrete practices of the people. In this way, the divorce between the high culture of the elites and the popular culture of the masses could be transcended. Francese’s discussion of Padula’s views of the masseria and of its massaro is especially noteworthy and enlightening. Padula’s description of socio-cultural traits such as work ethic, commonsense and probity, that he attributes to the independent farm worker, provides an insight into the problems of the Southern peasantry in Italy. For the social type Padula describes is everything that the peasant is not, and everything that the author wants the peasant to become. This type, what the English and American 17th and 18th century thinkers call the “yeomanry”—independent and autonomous producers— embodies the social, cultural, political and economic requisites necessary to a free civil society and to a free state. Machiavelli in the Discourses denounced the gentiluomini who lived off the labor of others (as did the elites, both lay and clerical), performed no useful work, and did not live a productive life. In their countries and regions (such as the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples), no free society and no republic could be established. This is precisely the problem that Padula tried to remedy when he addressed issues of language and dialects, the condition of the peasantry, the role of elites (both rural and town), and the profound socio-economic backwardness of the Italian South in general— problems which could not be confronted without first resolving the conflicts caused by the absence of the state’s authority and legitimacy—that is, by reducing and ultimately eliminating the wide gulf separating elites from the popular masses. Francese brilliantly and thoughtfully addresses these questions in his new book. It is a work that is well written, lucid in its exposition, sensitive in its close and intimate readings of Padula’s Italian and Calabrian writings. Francese exhibits a profound and remarkable knowledge of the linguistic (dialectal) and social (the patrimonialism and patriarchalism) underpinnings of the Italian South (especially in its Calabrian incarnation). In sum, Francese’s work is an important contribution to Italian studies, specifically to the study of the cultural and social structures of the Mezzogiorno as represented in its Calabrian historical context. It is especially significant in the way it concretely details, through the study of Vincenzo Padula’s work, the intricate and complex problems attendant upon Italian unification. Padula’s work underlines the inherent contradictions of a state that asserts liberalism—equal rights and due process of law—while simultaneously buttressing the parasitic preeminence of Southern el","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"195 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49579037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"For a Jewish Italian Literary History: from Italo Svevo to Igiaba Scego","authors":"S. Ziolkowski","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2088955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2088955","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that recognizing Jewishness as a crucial part of modern Italian literary history offers one path for discussing the current and historical diversity of Italian culture. The first section discusses key twentieth-century Italian authors — Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, and Italo Svevo — not to assess how Jewish they are, but to illuminate the Jewishness of modern Italian literature, which prompts a reconsideration of the construction of Italian identity. The second section, “Jewish, Black, and Italian: The Archival Fictions of Helena Janeczeck, Claudio Magris, and Igiaba Scego,” scrutinizes how these three authors interrogate Italy’s role in the persecution of Jews, racial violence, and colonialism, drawing on historical documents that show the gaps in dominant discourses and asking readers to reflect on how historical narratives have been constructed. Being more cognizant of Jewish Italians, their backgrounds, and their representations in literature contributes to the growing analyses of Italy’s diversity, adding to examinations of Italian literature that focus on belonging, borders, migration, and colonialism.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"131 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42301059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lettrici italiane tra arte e letteratura. Dall’Ottocento al modernismo","authors":"G. Romani","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2113610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2113610","url":null,"abstract":"“Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse.” Con questo verso, tra i pi u famosi della Divina Commedia, Dante ci consegna l’immagine poetica di Francesca da Rimini come donna adultera, condannata ad essere travolta da una eterna bufera infernale, ma anche come lettrice caduta in disgrazia a causa di una lettura moralmente corruttrice. Il tema della donna lettrice—e dei pericoli in cui incorre la donna che legge—appartiene alla tradizione letteraria italiana sin dal Medioevo, ma e nell’Ottocento che fiorisce come un vero e proprio topos, imponendosi nelle arti dell’epoca, dalla letteratura alla pittura, musica e teatro. Non e un caso, pertanto, che questo volume, dedicato alla figura della lettrice e curato da Giovanna Capitelli e Olivia Santovetti, si concentri soprattutto sull’Ottocento. Gi a nel 1992, Anna Finocchi con il suo Lettrici: immagini della donna che legge nella pittura dell’Ottocento aveva avviato una riflessione sulla rappresentazione della figura femminile nella pittura ottocentesca italiana, ma il volume di Capitelli e Santovetti, che include saggi in italiano e in inglese, si presenta come una vera novit a per il suo approccio interdisciplinare, e per la sua lettura in chiave metanarrativa della figura della lettrice. La tesi avallata dalle curatrici e che s ı gli scrittori e artisti dell’Ottocento hanno voluto con le loro opere rappresentare la donna come simbolo della modernit a e progresso sociale (spesso pi u immaginato che realizzato), ma anche esprimere metanarrativamente la crisi dell’artista che tra fin de si ecle e modernismo comincia a mettere in dubbio il realismo e positivismo in voga in quello scorcio di secolo. Questa innovativa interpretazione della “lettrice” mette in evidenza la “natura polisemica” (7) di questa figura e propone di rivedere i modelli interpretativi del realismo ottocentesco tradizionalmente radicati nell’idea che l’arte rifletteva in maniera naturalistica o impressionistica la realt a circostante. Come le curatrici suggeriscono nell’introduzione: “La lettrice diventa il grimaldello per ragionare quella dimensione autoriflessiva, metanarrativa, dell’arte tra fin de si ecle e modernismo” (9). Il volume include sedici saggi, presentati all’interno di una cornice teorica offerta dall’introduzione e postfazione, scritti da specialisti di letteratura, storia dell’arte e storia del cinema e organizzati in due principali gruppi tematici, il primo intitolato “Lettrici” e il secondo “Letture.” La distinzione tra “Lettrici” e “Letture” non e sempre cos ı chiara, e alcuni saggi potrebbero rientrare tranquillamente sia nell’uno che nell’altro gruppo. Sebbene, come spiegano le curatrici, la seconda parte del volume si distingua dalla prima perch e “composta da commenti, schede critiche e letture approfondite di singoli autori o singole opere” (11), l’impressione generale per o e che manchi una vera distinzione (tematica o strutturale) tra le due parti del volume e che forse il materiale si sarebbe potuto organizza","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"189 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47091957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human","authors":"Derek Alexander Ginoris","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2111073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2111073","url":null,"abstract":"notes, “saw their own enlarged silhouettes projected, as in a shadow theater, on four large screens at ground level” (219) as they wandered around large columns wrapped in black fabric which the designer Sartogo called, with some apparent irony, “fasci.” It's impossible to forget that the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista was held in the same halls, inaugurated by Mussolini in 1932. Golan frames her subjects in a way that recalls—at points—the odd use of the second person singular found in some narrations: you weren’t there, but you are invoked, as indirect subjectivity. You are and you are not a character in a brief or ephemeral mini-drama. Groups of men converse, with wives and other women standing on the margins. Golan’s book does, I think, offer the reader the possibility to imagine a feminist counterhistory to what was, by all appearances, a rather masculine milieu. The fact is that while many of the works she engages with still exist today including within major museum collections, they are equally characterized by a momentariness that is not precisely “located” in the photographs Golan reproduces, but better “dislocated.” She devotes a great deal of time to a phenomenology of Pistoletto’s mirror works. The photographs of certain “characters” (art world personages, but also random visitors) in and around the works suggest possible plots and imaginary relations. Reading Flashback, Eclipse, I was reminded, strangely, of Vanni Santoni’s Personaggi precari (RGB Media, 2007, licensed by Creative Commons), which begins with a preface inviting readers to use its “precarious characters” in their own “plays, stories, short and long films, role playing games, animation, novels, cartoons, radio and film transmissions.” They are “available for major roles or as extras, with shortor long-term contracts” and can be employed “in completely arbitrary ways, even undergoing humiliation or death if they story requires it.” (Santoni 1). Naturally, though, you might also choose to read that book as a novel, from front to back, experiencing the tenuousness of the characters and the full stops that separate one from the next, as an existential condition. Of course, Golan paints a portrait of a world when the roots of “the precariat” are being sown. Her actors may not appear cynical or anxious about labor, the social safety net, or massive planetary disruption. They move about the spaces of an Italy emerging from the war and the subsequent economic boom looking simultaneously outward and inward. The book is punctuated with moments of unadulterated joy, but also melancholy as we measure our distance or proximity to the energy and experimentation of the 60s. It is rare to read such a generous aperture—one that grants the reader freedom to navigate her relation to a past that is moving ever further away. In this regard one might be tempted to call Golan’s style feminist. At any rate it embraces art and politics in all of their messy imbrication.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"198 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42830032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Looking Sideways to Italy in Contemporary World Literature","authors":"E. Bond","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2093946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2093946","url":null,"abstract":"This article sketches a history of how the concept of Italy has travelled worldwide to become a mobile cultural symbol in order to show how, as a signifier, “Italy” has also become increasingly detached from any national parameters of territory. It employs a lateral method of “looking sideways” at literary representations of Italy from “outside” the national canon to show how they can put pressure on what (and where) Italian culture now resides. Analyzing three contemporary works of world literature partially set in Italy (Daša Drndić’s Trieste, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, and Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing), it suggests that we might consider broadening out the canon of transnational Italian literature to include works neither written by Italians nor written in Italian, but that offer sideways insight into Italian history and culture from elsewhere.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"95 - 111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45707317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Points of View: Gramsci and “the Question of the Novel”","authors":"Roberto M. Dainotto","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2060491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2060491","url":null,"abstract":"Perhaps the most essential device for the organization of the novel form is narrative point of view. Mikhail Bakhtin, in “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–1935), maintains in fact that “every language in the novel is a point of view, a socio-ideological conceptual system of real social groups and their embodied representatives. … Any point of view on the world fundamental to the novel must be a concrete, socially embodied point of view, not an abstract, purely semantic position.” György Lukács, too, having discovered the particular Standpunkt of the proletariat in History and Class Consciousness of 1923, would define the novel—for instance The Historical Novel in 1938—as the “conscious and consistent application of … specifically historical viewpoints.” On closer inspection, Antonio Gramsci, only a few years earlier, had touched on similar theoretical issues in a (somewhat cryptic) observation on the Italian novelistic tradition: “the ‘point of view’ of the key cannot be that of the lock.” This observation in turn opened the way to a veritable taxonomy of various ways of representing “the people” in the Italian novel - from Manzoni’s “paternalism” to Dostoevsky’s “con-science.”","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"27 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42599317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Of Horses and Water: On the Power of the Fragment","authors":"K. Crehan","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2060492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2060492","url":null,"abstract":"Joseph Buttigieg’s seminal 1990 article “Gramsci’s Method” argues that the fragmentary nature of the Prison Notebooks cannot be explained simply by the constraints under which they were written. Rather, the notebooks’ fragmentariness is at the heart of an innovative approach to the understanding of history and the mapping of possibilities for change. Characteristic of Gramsci’s innovative approach is what could be termed an ethnographic sensibility, a determination to seek out, and treat seriously, the narratives others use to make sense of the world. A similar ethnographic sensibility is also central to anthropology’s classic methodology of participant observation, developed and popularized by Bronisław Malinowski, one of the founding fathers of Anglophone anthropology. A comparison between these two apparently dissimilar thinkers underlines the value of Buttigieg’s reading of Gramsci’s notebooks, and suggests how a classic anthropological approach might enrich Marxism.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"38 - 48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44967832","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Philological Method and Subaltern Pasts","authors":"Neelam Srivastava","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2058187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2058187","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that Antonio Gramsci should be considered a postcolonial thinker. This is not an exercise in presenting the “legacy” of a European Marxist’s thought in the Third World. The aim here, rather, is to determine how Gramscian thought can be read as anticolonial, and how he related empire to the hegemonic-subaltern dialectic that structured his political theories. I engage with Joseph Buttigieg’s well-known essay “Gramsci’s Method” in order to explore how the philological method adopted in the Prison Notebooks offers several important insights for postcolonial studies, and bears obvious connections to the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, especially in terms of how it is central to the retrieval of subaltern pasts. I further argue that Gramsci’s interest in the national-popular and in forms of progressive nationalism that were grounded in internationalist solidarity suggests strong connections with Third Worldist theories of liberation struggles, such as tricontinentalism and the work of Frantz Fanon. Applying Buttigieg’s way of reading of Gramsci’s anti-dogmatic philological method to Third Worldism allows us to see how it renovated Marxism’s revolutionary aims and emancipatory futures, and ultimately helped to decolonize Marxism.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"49 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44428800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gramsci on Bureaucracy","authors":"F. Antonini","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2060490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2060490","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reconstructs Antonio Gramsci’s account of bureaucracy as it unfolds in his magnum opus, the Prison Notebooks. By adopting the “philological” way of reading this work developed in recent decades by Gramsci scholars and significantly anticipated by Joseph Buttigieg’s “Gramsci’s Method” (1990), I show how the concept of bureaucracy is closely connected to some key elements in Gramsci’s political reflections, such as the categories of “hegemony” and “organic crisis.” While drawing out the “constellation” of Gramsci’s references to bureaucratic apparatuses throughout his carceral writings, I stress in particular their relationship with his investigation of the nature and the role of political parties, as well as with his overall assessment of parliamentarism (and of its degeneration). In this framework, a further pivotal element is represented by Gramsci’s conception of “modernity,” that is, of the features that characterize the contemporary political panorama and to which the issue of bureaucracy is closely related. To conclude, I compare Gramsci’s and Max Weber’s theories of bureaucracy, showing both similarities and differences.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"16 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45682158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}