Italian CulturePub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2022.2057020
D. Forgacs
{"title":"Buttigieg’s Method","authors":"D. Forgacs","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2057020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2057020","url":null,"abstract":"Joseph Buttigieg’s introduction to his uncompleted edition of the Prison Notebooks is one of the best things ever written about Gramsci’s prison writings. The last section reproduces, with minimal changes, Buttigieg’s 1990 article “Gramsci’s Method,” and it has the same title. That title, however, is misleading, since what Buttigieg reconstructs is not so much Gramsci’s method of writing the notebooks as his own process, as editor, of reading them, which is far from being a factual report of how Gramsci “actually wrote.” It involves, instead, a set of interpretive hunches, which in turn presuppose a prior knowledge of all of Gramsci’s texts, without which it would not be possible to make the connections he makes between different topics or to rank them, to identify some – such as the critique of positivist sociology and the idea of the philosophy of praxis – as more important, more overarching than others. Symptomatic here is Buttigieg’s use of an apparently insignificant note, of just twenty words, “L’ossicino di Cuvier,” generally overlooked by Gramsci scholars, as a point of entry into a set of interconnected notes and from there to the whole intellectual edifice of the Prison Notebooks.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"6 - 15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47152018","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}
Italian CulturePub Date : 2022-03-22DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2022.2040135
Ombretta Frau
{"title":"Feminism, Violence and Representation in Modern Italy. “We Are Witnesses, not Victims”","authors":"Ombretta Frau","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2040135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2040135","url":null,"abstract":"uncontaminated landscapes they once inhabited. The animal’s presence raises questions of whether humans will ever restore the symbiotic equilibrium of the natural world and whether they will balance the scale weighed down by the exploitation of non-human creatures. While these questions remain unanswered by humans, Iovino’s analysis evokes a barren landscape littered with the defiled carcasses of animals. Italo Calvino’s Animals considers the implications of such unresponsiveness and invites humanity to take collective action to prevent the sixth mass extinction before it is too late.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"93 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44786321","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}
Italian CulturePub Date : 2022-03-10DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2022.2040133
M. Di Franco
{"title":"In the Maelstrom of History. A Conversation with Miriam","authors":"M. Di Franco","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2040133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2040133","url":null,"abstract":"To that end, he looks at both the journal itself and Turati’s relationship with Anna Kuliscioff who, especially after Turati’s election to Parliament in 1896, assumed many of her partner’s editorial responsibilities. Sara Boezio — author of “Un ‘Bilancio del Secolo XIX’: resoconti fin de si ecle ne «La Vita Internazionale: Rassegna quindicinale politica, scientifice e letteraria di Ernesto Teodoro Moneta»” —, facilitates the reading of her interesting contribution by providing a useful introduction that sets forth with clarity the main points of her presentation, summarizes her arguments, and ends with a clear statement of thesis. She provides a detailed description of the pacifist journal, especially the “ambiziosa aspirazione multidisciplinare” of the rubric “Bilancio del Secolo XIX,” whose themes ranged from biology to economics, from geology to politics and sociology (114-15). In the final chapter, co-editor Silvia Valisa summarizes the current state of digital preservation of post-Unification journals. She begins by recapitulating the motivation for the volume, that of beginning to examine the entrepreneurial spirit of Milanese publishers along with their quest make their journals economical and accessible to the broadest possible readership. To that end, they employed the new technologies of la carta veloce, thus contributing to the expansion of readership and enabling united Italy’s fourth estate to begin to exercise “una funzione di controllo del potere politico,” while contributing to the creation of “un’opinione pubblica nazionale” (207). Two appendices facilitate further research. The first is a list of the main digital repositories (aggregators and digitization initiatives); the second an index of nineteenth-century Italian periodicals available on-line. Each essay provides a good overview of a specific topic, and so can be read individually. However, as the editors point out, all contributions interlock, which makes the reading of the entire volume an informative endeavor.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"89 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46416773","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}
Italian CulturePub Date : 2022-02-22DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2022.2040132
Joseph Francese
{"title":"La carta veloce: figure, temi e politiche del giornalismo italiano dell’Ottocento","authors":"Joseph Francese","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2040132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2040132","url":null,"abstract":"the Euclidian Geometry that Dante draws upon consistently and meticulously throughout the poem. In the case of Music and Astronomy as mathematical arts, the variety of interdisciplinary curricula engagements through ancient and modern Astronomy, Physics, Mathematics, and Musicology are myriad, and the silence on such approaches in a reference volume so recently published about teaching Dante is all the more conspicuous. This lacuna most clearly attests to the limitations of the exegetical paradigm established by Dante’s earliest commentators. Ironically, however, the epistemic inertia of this tradition may owe its glacial persistence to the post-Enlightenment zeal for classification and taxonomy that also segregates and compartmentalizes intellectual enterprise. By systemically disarticulating diverse fields of knowledge that are otherwise integrated in Dante’s poetic conception of the human experience in the cosmos, the postEnlightenment epistemologies that dominate modern pedagogy and pragmatically limit the robust development of interdisciplinary systems of learning and teaching have contributed significantly, visa-vis literary scholarship and education, to intellectually marginalizing scientific branches of study integral to the comprehensive reception and exegesis of decidedly multidisciplinary works like Dante’s magnum opus. The essays in this collection express a common commitment to engaging and cultivating communities of learners through the shared experience of teaching and studying the Commedia. Locating the array of these communities in college and high school classrooms, social service agency facilities, and maximum-security prisons, the contributing writers also identify a host of factors—from time constraints to varying degrees of student preparedness—that limit the options available to instructors in designing and teaching their courses. Even where ostensibly more personal applications of elements of contemporary psychology are intrinsic to the contributor’s instructional perspective, as most notably represented in “Dante, Poet of Loss” by Peter S. Hawkins, the shared experience of reading, interrogating, and discussing the poem plays an important role in the pedagogical approach. The volume is, without a doubt, a useful compendium of current hermeneutics and practical strategies for teaching the poem, and, as such, provides an important instrument both for what it includes and for what it excludes in response to Dante’s Commedia.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"87 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42469289","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}
Italian CulturePub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2022.2057019
Damiano Benvegnù, M. Cangiano, Charles L. Leavitt
{"title":"“A Thickening of the Network”: Joseph A. Buttigieg and “Gramsci's Method”","authors":"Damiano Benvegnù, M. Cangiano, Charles L. Leavitt","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2057019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2057019","url":null,"abstract":"One of the last talks Joseph Buttigieg gave before he became ill was at Dartmouth College, on the occasion of the journal boundary 2 ’ s Anniversary Conference on April 28, 2018. The talk was devoted to “ Lorianism, or the Fragility of Critical Barriers, ” a topic that had already played an important role, albeit less developed, in Buttigieg ’ s pathbreaking essay “ Gramsci ’ s Method, ” originally published in boundary 2 in 1990. In both the article and the talk, what preoccupied Buttigieg was how Gramsci interrogated the cultural work and the political function of historical groups of intellectuals, and how “ shoddy thinking, crackpot theories, critical carelessness, and general intellectual irresponsibility ” can seriously infect any form of political thought, in the early twentieth century as well as today (Buttigieg 1990, 70). Buttigieg ’ s Gramscian trajectory would thus appear to be framed by a reflection on the historical role of intellectuals and the risk of lacking the “ perseverance, intellectual discipline, intense cultural work, and political organization ” (Buttigieg 2009, IX) that intellectual labor should instead entail. This special issue of Italian Culture , entitled “ Gramsci ’ s Method Thirty Year Later, ” is meant to celebrate the scholarship and intellectual legacy as well as to commemorate the loss of Joseph A. Buttigieg, who passed away on January 27, 2019. Formerly William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, as well as a founding member and past president of the International Gramsci Society, Buttigieg was a formidable scholar as well the translator of Gramsci ’ s Prison Notebooks , which he published in a definitive three-volume critical edition (1992, 1996, 2007). Yet, for many of us, Joe – as he preferred to be called – was not just a scholar, but also a terrific","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"1 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44646433","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}
Italian CulturePub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2022.2058722
Yuri Brunello
{"title":"Gramsci in Latin America between Literature and Society","authors":"Yuri Brunello","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2022.2058722","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2058722","url":null,"abstract":"This article reconstructs the genesis and development of some Latin American conceptions of literature influenced by the thought of Antonio Gramsci. In Argentina, the work of Héctor Agosti is pioneering. It is followed by José Carlos Portantiero’s analysis of realism, where Gramsci is explicitly quoted as one of the main theoretical references. Gramsci’s influence is evident in elements such as the rejection of determinism, the Argentine contextualization of Marxist theoretical postulates, and the critic’s attention to literary form in the context of the relationship between literature and society. The Gramscian presence continues to be felt in Argentine journals such as Pasado y presente and La rosa blindada. The innovative characteristics of Gramsci’s reflections on art and literature have also been appreciated in other Latin American countries. In Brazil, although from a Lukácsian perspective, references to Gramsci’s aesthetic considerations are explicit in the work of Leandro Konder and Carlos Nelson Coutinho. After discussing the cases of Argentina and Brazil, the article takes Mexico into consideration. During the 1970s and 80s, the country was a laboratory for new Marxist literary ideas. The most interesting phenomenon of this new phase of reflection on literature inspired by Gramscian thought is the use of Gramsci not only inside Marxism, but also within contexts that are not strictly Marxist.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"61 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42840545","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}
Italian CulturePub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2021.1976978
Letizia Modena
{"title":"Idee, forme e racconto della città nella narrativa italiana","authors":"Letizia Modena","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2021.1976978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2021.1976978","url":null,"abstract":"siderations on the role of literature, or comparisons with previously examined texts which are often presented as completely new rather than as cross-references. In a future edition, the author could replace the odd occurrence of “articolo” with “capitolo,” remove discrepancies in referencing, and consider committing himself fully to a non-discriminatory language by never using the article “la” with surnames of women writers. In view of its many merits and despite these limits, Parisi’s monograph will be an important source and reference point for future studies and a useful teaching tool for a variety of university courses.","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":"245 - 247"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48303479","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}
Italian CulturePub Date : 2021-09-03DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2021.1976981
A. Giorgio
{"title":"Giovani e abuso sessuale nella letteratura Italiana (1902–2018)","authors":"A. Giorgio","doi":"10.1080/01614622.2021.1976981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2021.1976981","url":null,"abstract":"delle rime petrose dantesche. Nel terzo capitolo i due temi danteschi comuni sono il viaggio e la donna angelicata (Beatrice)—anche se le Occasioni hanno un fondo petrarchista che le allontana da Prufrock: e Gigliucci, sulla scia di Cortellessa, parlerebbe qui di “dantismo delle parole e petrarchismo degli emblemi” (R. Gigliucci, cit., 574). Se la donna angelicata di Eliot, a partire da Ash Wednesday (con i tre bianchi leopardi come le tre fiere del primo canto dellaDivina commedia) e dai Quartetti, e la Vergine Maria, per Montale invece come sappiamo e Clizia, la Cristofora che soffre per tutti (vedi la bella lettera montaliana a Glauco Cambon sul visiting angel, riportata da Livorni a p. 311). Non metteremmo per o in questa trafila Esterina, che sembra semmai “altra” rispetto all’io poetico, vicina agli uomini che non si voltano. Infatti il rovescio dell’angelicarsi e il sacrificio per l’altro, o “per tutti,” Non potendo addentrarci nei tanti luoghi proposti dal critico con sagacia e con verve narrativa, segnaliamo dunque infine—in tal senso—Due destini, breve poesia del Quaderno di quattro anni che la dice lunga sulla fedelt a di Montale al Cocktail party eliotiano: “Celia fu resa scheletro dalle termiti,/Clizia fu consumata dal suo Dio/ch’era lei stessa. Senza saperlo seppero/ci o che quasi nessuno dice vita” (E. Montale, Tutte le poesie cit., p.527).","PeriodicalId":41506,"journal":{"name":"Italian Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":"242 - 245"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42020150","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}