Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2221056
Michele Maiolani
ABSTRACT The relevance of Calvino’s anthropological readings, often overlooked by scholars, is particularly evident in his autobiographical project Passaggi obbligati. The structure of the book, consisting of a selection of crucial turning points in the author’s life, is modelled on the theories presented by Arnold Van Gennep in Les Rites de passage. Considering ‘La poubelle agréée’ as a case study, I will highlight Calvino’s shaping of his autobiography according to Van Gennep’s ritual frame, which can be described as a hybrid form of autobiography and ethnography, and which I define as ‘self-ethnography’. The influence of Mary Douglas’ reflection on impurity and garbage in her book Purity and Danger will then be considered as a further crucial theoretical reference for Calvino’s construction of his self-ethnographic narrative.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2220539
Marzia Beltrami
ABSTRACT This article reassesses the view of Calvino as an eminently cerebral author by recognising the experiential and embodied dimension of his work and dismantling the false dichotomy between abstraction and bodily experience. I describe Calvino’s imagination as spatial (a) because it is grounded in an embodied experience of space, and (b) because he tends to manipulate the material of imagination – ideas, structures, images – as if they were spaces with which narrators and characters interact. Focusing on ‘Dall’opaco’ (1971), I show how the Ligurian landscape impacted Calvino’s cognitive style by inspiring some privileged patterns in making sense of experience. Then, I illustrate how image schemas derived by embodied experience shape narrative structures and strategies of readerly engagement in the cosmicomical tales. My hypothesis is that the lens of enactivism – which understands imagination as manipulation and holds subject-cogniser and the world as entangled and co-constitutive – may highlight some neglected aspects of Calvino’s work.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2221058
D. Savio
ABSTRACT L’articolo intende sviluppare alcune considerazioni sul rapporto tra il mito identitario delle radici e l’opera di Italo Calvino, nel contesto della modernità letteraria e in particolare del ventesimo secolo. L’analisi si concentrerà su testi come ‘La speculazione edilizia’, ‘La strada di San Giovanni’, ‘Dall’opaco’ e ‘Il museo dei formaggi’. Cercherò di mettere in luce la postura di Calvino in relazione al territorio ligure da cui proviene, e più in generale proverò a dimostrare come l’autore sia immune a qualsiasi nostalgia consolatoria o regressiva. L’idea di fondo è che Calvino non trasformi il passato in un mito di appartenenza etnico-geografica: il suo metodo archeologico cerca invece di processare la ‘diversità contemporanea delle culture umane’ (Marc Augé), prendendo atto di come la modernità abbia cancellato ogni illusione di permanenza e di stabilità antropologica.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2221136
C. Dellacasa
spazio alternativo e fruttuoso e di scardinare il limitante dualismo tra il romanzo neotradizionale – quello che Gian Carlo Ferretti ha chiamato il ‘romanzo di successo di qualità’ – e l’antiromanzo della neoavanguardia, rappresentando altresì l’estrema antitesi, nelle sue massime propaggini degli anni Settanta, alla crescente autoreferenzialità e al ‘disimpegno’ ludico tipici del romanzo postmodernista.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2221525
Frey Kalus
I had not seen ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. Charlotte Brontë, Letter to G.H. Lewes (12 January 1848)
{"title":"Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language","authors":"Frey Kalus","doi":"10.1080/00751634.2023.2221525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2023.2221525","url":null,"abstract":"I had not seen ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. Charlotte Brontë, Letter to G.H. Lewes (12 January 1848)","PeriodicalId":44221,"journal":{"name":"Italian Studies","volume":"78 1","pages":"242 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44254297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2220538
Eleonora Lima
ABSTRACT This article considers the place of Le città invisibili within the debate on cybernetics, both as a product of its time as well as a harbinger of the future advent of network culture. It proposes to interpret the two most emblematic images of the book – the enchanted palace of the Kublai Khan, and the everchanging ‘invisible cities’ visited by Marco Polo – as Calvino’s personal contribution to the definition of cybertext and cyberspace. Curiously, the same emblematic images are also found in the work of two of Calvino’s contemporaries: the American pioneer of information technology Ted Nelson, and the Japanese architect and exponent of the Metabolist movement Arata Isozaki. Through a comparative analysis, this article shows how the new concept of information brought by cybernetics crystallised in virtually identical images and metaphors across disciplines and cultures: in literature, with Calvino, in computer science with Nelson, and in architecture with Isozaki.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2221134
Niccolò Amelii
cosa di cui Saba stesso, osserva Worsnip, forse peccava – un poeta che si pone, ancora prima di iniziare a scrivere, l’idea di essere onesto e spiegare a tavolino l’onestà delle cose. Come ogni selezione, quella di Worsnip è una scelta critica – cioè di poesia: ‘credo Saba dia il suo meglio quando guarda alle cose della vita intorno a sé e ci riflette sopra, non quando parte con l’intenzione di dirci della vita il significato’. La speranza è che questa edizione arrivi ad essere frequentata sia da chi Saba non sa chi sia e – tramite nuovi lettori – a chi Saba lo conosceva già.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2023.2218226
Pierpaolo Antonello, Mara Josi, Nicole Maniero
Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was unquestionably one of the most prominent and influential twentieth-century Italian writers, both at national and international levels. The year 2023 marks the centenary of his birth, a fitting moment to reassess his literary legacy, and to put forward new critical perspectives on his work, particularly by intercepting the emerging interest from a younger generation of scholars who are placing Calvino under novel critical and theoretical light. Given his self-exegetical effort, which funnelled and constrained his critical reception and discussion, and his role as a gate-keeper of a specific idea of literature that has maintained an authoritative position for decades, Calvino has held a contested centrality in the context of the Italian Novecento, reaching the position of an instant ‘classic’ when still alive. This has contributed to his success but also produced forms of militant ‘rejection’ within the Italian critical field, particularly in relation to the socalled ‘post-modern’, de-politicised phase of his production. However, in spite of any prescriptive ideological positioning, or of historically sensitive attempts at (de)canonisation, it is indubitable that Calvino represents a possibility (or a potentiality) for literature in one of its most exemplary and original forms in the context of twentieth-century writing. Re-discussing Calvino in the present also presupposes the kind of gesture towards the future that informed his last book, Lezioni americane. Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, as an attempt to discuss the function of literature and its tradition in respect to the epistemic and cultural challenges in the contemporary context. With his phenomenological, non-Cartesian posture towards reality, for Calvino, literature is the site where one can experiment with, and juxtapose, different narratives and modes of structuring our understanding of reality, with science being eminently important in providing new world-views and myths. As a result, the readings included in this special issue are in conversation with the contemporary and with some of the salient issues that have emerged within literary criticism in recent years at the international level, widening critical parameters towards programmatic interdisciplinary work, as the outstanding focality emerging in the critical approaches to Calvino’s oeuvre at the international level. This informed the symposium held in Cambridge in May 2021 from which this special issue emerged. In anticipation of the Centenary celebratory event, the guest editors, in collaboration with Guido Furci from the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, set up an international conference, titled Italo Calvino: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives. More established scholars and a new generation of young researchers were invited to engage in a dialogue on new critical readings of Calvino’s work through interdisciplinary theoretical approaches. The critical and theoretical tools offer
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