The publication of Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994) coincided with a conference that I co-organised with her called 'Modernity, Culture and "the Jew"' ...(1994). We both expected the conference to be a modest event, but it turned out to be over-subscribed with many hundreds in attendance. In the light of our conference, my essay explores some of the reasons why the 1990s was thought of as an 'age of testimony' which is addressed in Auto/biographical Discourses and subsequent essays by Laura. The essay will then compare the playfulness of the autobiographical genre with the ethical seriousness of Holocaust testimonies and slave narratives. At the heart of the essay is Laura's conceptualisation of autobiography and its connections with those who write testimonial memoirs in extremis.
In this article, I discuss Primo Levi's Holocaust survivor testimonies in Moments of Reprieve, arguing that these stories illuminate a concept I term 'the reprieve'. Using the reprieve as an ...undecidable word I argue that the reprieve is a moment of humanisation in the camps in which our inherent responsibility for one another becomes clear. Though it does not offer freedom or salvation, it does allow for a moment of loosening in the midst of repression and horror.
In 2007, drawing inspiration from her previous experiments on chick embryos, Rita Levi-Montalcini, at the age of 98, proposed a new project, and a research group, in which I was included, was formed ...at the European Brain Research Institute (EBRI). Looking back on this experience, I can say that Professor Levi-Montalcini's approach and the relationships she formed with my colleagues and me, contributed to my growth as a researcher. With her welcoming and warm-hearted disposition, she taught me how to consider other people's ideas without prejudice, to reason and not to exclude any hypothesis. I also learned from her how to overcome those difficulties that are so frequent in the research field, always keeping in mind the starting point and looking toward the objective, with a factual optimism. I was just a young researcher and deeply flattered that a Nobel Laureate, with an incredible career and extraordinary life, treated me as her equal. My experience with Professor Levi-Montalcini has also provided me with a reliable path to follow, and when I encounter difficulties and challenges, I ask myself what would she have done. This approach has always helped me to move forward. Indeed, I believe the best way to celebrate Rita Levi-Montalcini as a woman in neuroscience is to recount how her exceptional example is a constant reminder as to why I have chosen to be a scientist. I hope she will always continue to be a source of inspiration for scientists in the future.
Love, and the different manifestations of it, is a common theme in literature around the world. In Cosmopolitan Love , Sijia Yao examines the writings of D. H. Lawrence, a British writer whose ...literature focused primarily on interpersonal relationships in domestic settings, and Eileen Chang, a Chinese writer who migrated to the United States and explored Chinese heterosexual love in her writing. While comparing the writings of a Chinese writer and an English one, Yao avoids a direct comparison between East and West that could further enforce binaries. Instead, she uses the comparison to develop an idea of cosmopolitanism that shows how the writers are in conversation with their own culture and with each other. Both D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang wrote stories that are influenced by—but sometimes stand in opposition to—their own cultures. They offer alternative understandings of societies dealing with modernism and cultural globalization. Their stories deal with emotional pain caused by the restrictions of local politics and economics and address common themes of incestuous love, sexual love, adulterous love, and utopian love. By analyzing their writing, Yao demonstrates that the concept of love as a social and political force can cross cultural boundaries and traditions to become a basis for human meaning, the key to a cosmopolitan vision.
Primo Levi and the genre of testimony Carter-White, Richard
Transactions - Institute of British Geographers (1965),
April 2012, Letnik:
37, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Following on from spectral geographical studies of the disruptive aspects of memory, this paper further develops recent interest in the nonrepresentational and paradoxical dynamics of witnessing by ...drawing out the possibility of a historiography based on the capacity of testimony to interrupt and suspend representational closure. This possibility is posited in relation to the specific historiographical challenges posed by places and events of atrocity, whereby the extreme nature that makes these events so real threatens at the same time to render them the product of a self-enclosed, alien and absolutely distant world. Through a close reading of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, I argue that the genre of testimony is predisposed towards generating disruptive encounters that force the reader of such works to take co-responsibility in making sense of the text. Focusing upon Levi's famous distinction between ' the drowned and the saved 7 of the camp, and the multiple possible interpretations of this distinction, I further argue that by establishing a space of uncertainty in which audiences must make an interpretive decision about the text without authorial guarantee, the disruptive form of memory that characterises witness testimony has the capacity to cultivate a fleeting recognition of a shared world between witness and reader, past and present.
With neither a colophon nor documentation of its commission, the so-called Barcelona Haggadah (British Library, Ms. Add. 14761) is often dated around the year 1340 on the basis of its artistic style. ...However, the manuscript includes the name of one individual who was alive at the time of its production: the poet Abraham b. Isaac ha-Levi. This article begins with his poem before reconstructing aspects of his biography and oeuvre to prove that the Haggadah could not have been made before 1360; more likely, it was created between 1370 and 1393 in Girona. The manuscript's textual, iconographical, and codicological particularities suggest that the manuscript was commissioned by Abraham b. Isaac ha-Levi, leader of Girona's Jewish community.
Piedmontese, a Gallo-Italic variety with numerous variants and hardly uniform spelling, has produced numerous phraseographic resources that are aimed at describing its rich idiomatic patrimony. It ...has also left some traces in Italian with idioms such as essere un bastian contrario ‘to be contentious’ or fare la figura del cioccolataio ‘to make a fool of oneself’. Currently, digitalized resources such as the DEP – Dizionario Elettronico Piemontese are available online and are undoubtedly valuable, but also printed dictionaries from the past still show their validity, such as the Gran Dizionario piemontese-italiano (1859) by Sant’Albino, which led Piedmont to contribute to the linguistic unification of Italy also thanks to the richness of its phraseology.
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