UNGARETTI ET APOLLINAIRE Saccone, Antonio
Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France,
02/2021, Volume:
121, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Il s’agit d’analyser les rapports intenses qu’Ungaretti établit avec Apollinaire, au point de considérer le poète français comme l’un de ses dieux tutélaires et d’associer les Calligrammes à son ...Porto sepolto. Apollinaire marquera la carrière intellectuelle d’Ungaretti pendant toute la vie de celui-ci.
We analyze the intense relationship that Ungaretti developed with Apollinaire, to the point that he considered the French poet one of his tutelary deities and linked the Calligrammes with his Porto sepolto. Apollinaire left his mark on Ungaretti’s intellectual career throughout the latter’s life.
The essay examines the relationship between the onomastics of anthroponyms in La Coscienza di Zeno and analyzes the profound meaning of the text. In particular, it will be shown that in the plot of ...the novel, the onomastics supported by textual clues and by a psychoanalytic interpretation, reveals through the investigation of the genotesto (Kristeva) the specularity between the ineptitude of the protagonist and the existential crisis of the man of Twentieth century.
Offering a new approach to the intersection of literature and philosophy, Modernist Idealism contends that certain models of idealist thought require artistic form for their full development and that ...modernism realizes philosophical idealism in aesthetic form. This comparative view of modernism employs tools from intellectual history, literary analysis, and philosophical critique, focusing on the Italian reception of German idealist thought from the mid-1800s to the Second World War. Modernist Idealism intervenes in ongoing debates about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century resurgence of materialism and spiritualism, as well as the relation of decadent, avant-garde, and modernist production. Michael J. Subialka aims to open new discursive space for the philosophical study of modernist literary and visual culture, considering not only philosophical and literary texts but also early cinema. The author’s main contention is that, in various media and with sometimes radically different political and cultural aims, a host of modernist artists and thinkers can be seen as sharing in a project to realize idealist philosophical worldviews in aesthetic form.
Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three canticles: ...Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that beg to be explored, this is the first time that the approach has been pursued in a systematic fashion across the poem. This collection in three volumes offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante. The volume has its origin in a series of thirty-three public lectures held in Trinity College, the University of Cambridge (2012-2016) which can be accessed at the Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy website.
At the heart of contemporary data science and any discussion of the algorithms it employs stands modern probability theory. The modern theory of probability is usually dated to the second half of the ...seventeenth century; its emergence is attributed to the famous PascalFermat correspondence of 1654, and its completion is heralded in Jacob Bernoulli’s Ars Conjectandi (published in 1713 but written and discussed long before). Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability famously proposed that the sudden growth of the theory of probability happened then and so rapidly because of a profound conceptual change in the way people thought about chance and evidence (1975 2006). In short, the modern theory of probability emerged when it did because only then did anyone possess the modern concept of probability. Others, notably Garber and Zabell, argue against Hacking’s view, showing that many of the concepts that he believes constitute the core of the modern notion of probability were present long before the mid-seventeenth century. They instead favor a psychological or sociological explanation for the heightened interest in games of chance at that time (1979). Only with the development of the mathematical theory of games of chance, along with the natural extension of the concept of probability to include these mathematical theories, did the rigorous and numerical theory of anything probabilistic emerge. I will not take a stand on this fascinating historical debate. Rather, I wish to argue that a more original and profound innovation was at work. It is found not in the new and visibly successful theory of one kind of probability that moved games of chance from the fringes of the notion of probability to its center, but in the radical new philosophical teaching on Fortuna and Virtu first adumbrated in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli and then in the works of the youth movement he inspired, modern philosophy. In short, the spirit of algorithmic judgment is nothing algorithmic, mathematical, or even scientific, but rather “a wholly new” moral and political teaching that bewitched at first a few minds, then nations, and eventually the whole world.
This book examines the theater of narration, an Italian performance
genre and aesthetic that revisits historical events of national
importance from local perspectives, drawing on the rich
...relationship between personal experiences and historical accounts.
Incorporating original research from the private archives of
leading narrators-artists who write and perform their work-Juliet
Guzzetta argues that the practice teaches audiences how ordinary
people aren't simply witnesses to history but participants in its
creation. The theater of narration emerged in Italy during the
labor and student protests, domestic terrorism, and social progress
of the 1970s. Developing Dario Fo and Franca Rame's style of
political theater, influenced by Jerzy Grotowski and Bertolt
Brecht, and following in the freewheeling actor-author traditions
of the commedia dell'arte, narrators created a new form of popular
theater that grew in prominence in the 1990s and continues to gain
recognition. Guzzetta traces the history of the theater of
narration, contextualizing its origins-both political and
intellectual-and centers the contributions of Teatro Settimo, a
performance group overlooked in previous studies. She also examines
the genre's experiments in television and media. The first
full-length book in English on the subject, The Theater of
Narration leverages close readings and a wealth of primary
sources to examine the techniques used by narrators to remake
history-a process that reveals the ways in which history itself is
a theater of narration.
This dissertation focuses on the story of a film character that Italian cinema has brought to the fore, particularly by the neorealist film movement. The automaton of Italian cinema is a marginal, ...alienated character who apparently does not possess an individual consciousness and will but is subjected to those of others. Combining Aristotle’s notion of the automaton with anthropologist Clara Gallini’s discussion of the urbanized population in late nineteenth-century Italy, I focus on the automaton not as the machine that imitates the human but as the human in flesh who imitates a machine that imitates the human, through bodily and psychological automatisms. In this way, I define this figure as a “flesh automaton,” in which the Christian and phenomenological notion of the “flesh” meets with the automatic kind of event brought by cinema. As a philosophical figure that can be described from time to time as an aesthetic figure and/or a psycho-social type, but is not reducible to either of them, I also define the flesh automaton as a Deleuzian cinematic conceptual persona.In my study, I complicate the notion of humanism usually associated with Italian cinema, in the filmmakers Cesare Zavattini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Elio Petri, by showing the weight of automatisms both at the gestural and cinematographic levels. I argue that understanding the interplay between event and habit, and human and non-human provides deeper understanding of the subjects portrayed in these films. I combine archival research, theoretical reflection, and textual analysis to explore the automatic body in this cinema and to show how themes elaborated by Italian literature and culture, and expressed through acting and cinematographic productions, anticipated contemporary transnational mediatic developments and posthumanist theories of agency and performativity.My research develops in three directions: first, a genealogy of the automatic body in Italian theatrical magnetism and the influence of French psychiatry and theatre on it; second, the use of non-professional actors in the cinema, particularly neorealism in the early 1940s; third, the filmmakers’ peculiar relationship with the marginal automatic body. The Automaton of Italian Cinema shows how authors such as Zavattini and Pasolini either use cinema to “reanimate” the automatic body, thereby releasing it from its destiny of repetition, or to show its inherent negative charge and another possible outcome towards the grotesque, as reflected by Petri. Ultimately, I discuss how, by forming an enunciative assemblage with these filmmakers, the flesh automaton questions the monolithic male bourgeois subjectivity of the postwar Italian Marxist and humanist intellectual.
My dissertation “Spectacular Capital(ist) City: Wanderings through Rome from 1870 to the Economic Miracle” analyzes modern Italian cultural production that investigates the city’s singular role in ...forging Italian national identity through monuments and urban plans and reflects on the effects that these modifications had in the daily lives of the capital’s inhabitants. My work includes chapters on heterogeneous texts such as Altobelli’s photo of the breach of Porta Pia and articles chronicling Rome’s conquest and its urban transformations (De Amicis, Imbriani, Faldella, D’Annunzio), novels depicting the daily life in the capital (Serao’s La conquista di Roma, D’Annunzio’s Il piacere e Le Vergini delle Rocce, and Morante’s La Storia) and politicians’ speeches (Crispi, Mussolini), post-neorealist films (Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and Fellini’s Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio) and urban plans.The texts under consideration reveal that the Italian state’s at times frantic, superficial, and spectacular modifications to the capital’s urban structure reveal the nation’s frustration with its perceived “backwardness” or “belatedness” with regard to European modernity. Indeed, the process of national unification cannot be detangled from the desire of transforming Italy into a more productive, industrialized, capitalist country. In the texts analyzed, the authors isolate different agents that transformed Rome’s appearance: the State, which regulated internal migration, segregated the working poor in the city’s outskirts, erected new monuments, and planned new bourgeois districts; land speculators who destroyed green areas and attracted thousands of underpaid workers; and, more in general, the explosion of capitalism. These texts demonstrate how social and cultural homogenization, the expulsion of the deviant, and the spectacularization of the society through architecture and media are at the base of capitalist nation formation.
This dissertation centers on the understudied and yet very representative auteur comics magazine Orient Express; it aims at casting light on its role as a training ground for a new generation of ...Italian comics authors and as a foreteller of a new comics season in Italy. Not only is Orient Express worthy of scholarly attention in itself; it also represents a case study that illuminates the art of making a (comics) magazine and provides the means for understanding the complex dynamics that rule the relationship among publishers, editors, staff, authors, and the market.Auteur comics magazines appeared in late 1960s and thrived in the following two decades, mainly re-publishing works from Anglo-Saxon, Franco-Belgian, and Hispanic authors. Among the competitors, Orient Express distinguished itself for its carefully planned editorial line, its emphasis on quality storytelling, and its commitment to showcase Italian authors, many of whom were not acknowledged auteurs yet. Moreover, the way in which Orient Express blended auteur-comics and popular-comics formats into the so-called popolare d’autore anticipated a tendency that became gradually more frequent and successful in the late 1980s and 1990s, as this format proved more able to adapt to the change in the cultural and medial context.This dissertation is composed of two parts. Part I provides a historical and cultural contextualization of the Italian comics environment in the period preceding and following Orient Express’ publication, focusing on the phenomenon of auteur comics from a theoretical standpoint, as well as identifying and detailing major auteur comics magazines that were active between 1965 and the mid-1980s. Part II presents the outcomes of my archival research on Orient Express; it contributes an all-encompassing understanding of the magazine’s aesthetics, content, and positioning in the market through the in-depth analysis of non-comics elements (paratext and editorial content) and comics elements as well as the predominant modes and genres of the period, and its most representative authors. The last chapter expands the scope of this research into the field of comics readership; combining both traditional and digital methods (including close readings, text analysis, concordancing, and data visualization), I examine the letters to the editor to gain an insight into the kind of readers the magazine had. In Part II I propose a method to study comics magazines that can be applied effectively to other forms of periodical products.
