1,722,595 research outputs found
“‘Sweet, and Sweeter Still’: The Role of Music in Ian McEwan’s Fiction”
No full textIn Ian McEwan’s literary production, music features prominently and under different guises: besides authoring two libretti, McEwan often chooses his characters among musicians and composers, and uses music as a powerful metaphor for the exploration of such weighty issues as artistic inspiration and creation, or the relationship between art and the world. This essay first intends to illustrate McEwan’s engagement with music throughout his career by pinpointing some of its key moments; then, attention is specifically devoted to his 2014 novel, The Children Act, where the universal language of music and its capacity to transcend the intrinsic finiteness of individuals and of the world qualify it as an alternative, even privileged, means to tackle the epistemological and ethical issues that lie at the very core of the story
A plunge into otherness: Ethics and literature in "Machines Like Me" by Ian McEwan
No full textThe paper intends to propose a reading of Ian McEwan’s 2019 novel, Machines Like Me, qua insightful reflection on the topic of Artificial Intelligence and its bearings on different aspects of human life, from interpersonal relationships to moral behaviour. The novel also engages in a reflection on the value and the prospects of literature, whose very premises might be called in question in a posthuman context. Machines Like Me is set in a 1980s world whose contours radically deviate from historical facts. The novel introduces the simulacrum in the form of an android, Adam, a hypersophisticated machine that enters the characters’ life and upsets it thoroughly. The troublesome relationship with Adam forces Charlie, the protagonistnarrator, to ponder on his own system of values, posing questions about the Other which inevitably end up throwing new light on the Self and on what it ultimately means to be human. By way of his “What if novel” set in an alternative past, McEwan tackles pressing issues of our present, while trying to envisage a future that is not far to come. The paper intends to explore both the ethical and the metaliterary level of the story on the background of the contemporary theoretical debate on transhumanism and posthumanism, pointing to the simulacrum as the uncanny catalyser of the major topics the author intends to address
Forward to the Past: la sfida della Storia in Machines Like Me di Ian McEwan
Full text linkIn his novel, Machines Like Me (2019), Ian McEwan offers an interesting example of “alternate history” while dealing with crucial ethical issues connected with the development of Artificial Intelligence. Instead of setting his story in the future, the author chooses to set it in the past, but he radically changes the contours of the latter. Hence, the England of the early 1980s is turned into a technologically advanced society, well ahead of the scientific progress of the early 21st century. Thus, the future casts its light on the past in what appears as a typically postmodernist mélange: besides mingling genres (from speculative fiction to uchronia), McEwan also performs an intriguing hybridization of fact and fiction. The paper intends to explore the rich historical dimension of the novel, which betrays the author’s interest in the reflection on history and on its narrativization – as well as its manipulation and/or contamination – within the literary text
Il piano come tecnologia sociale. Yevgeni Preobrazhensky e la prognosi per il futuro
Full text linkYevgeni A. Preobrazhensky was one of the main economists of Soviet Russia. In his analysis of the transition from the NEP to socialism we find structural elements of what the author calls plan-based thought. The concept of «socialist rationality» and «primitive socialist accumulation», the formulation of a «new economic and administrative science», the concept of planning as a result of «social rationalization» and the idea of «forecasting» as an expression of a specific conception of time that claims to impose the future in the present, are fundamental for understanding plan-based thought and its transformations on a global level.Yevgeni A. Preobrazhensky è stato uno dei principali economisti della Russia sovietica. Nella sua analisi del passaggio dal NEP al socialismo troviamo elementi strutturali di quello che l'autrice chiama pensiero di piano. Il concetto di "razionalità socialista" e di "accumulazione socialista primitiva", la formulazione di una "nuova scienza economica e amministrativa", il concetto di pianificazione come risultato della "razionalizzazione sociale" e l'idea di "previsione" come espressione di una specifica concezione del tempo che pretende di imporre il futuro nel presente, sono fondamentali per comprendere la storia del pensiero di piano a livello globale e le sue trasformazioni attuali
Una voce, molte voci: il senso di un’eredità
No full textSaggio prefatorio alla raccolta di studi di letteratura angloamericana di Cinzia Biagiott
A Coat of Many Colors: scritti di letteratura angloamericana
No full textIl volume raccoglie alcuni scritti di Cinzia Biagiotti (1956-2015), per molti anni docente di Letteratura angloamericana all’Università di Pisa, esperta della cultura dei nativi americani, oltre che studiosa di letteratura femminile e di poesia e prosa breve del Novecento. I saggi, in italiano e in inglese, affrontano la lettura di opere poetiche e narrative di diversi autori, da James Welch a Tillie Olsen e Raymond Carver, in un percorso critico che conduce il lettore alla scoperta del fascino e della potenza della parola letteraria, intesa come strumento privilegiato per l’indagine e la comprensione del reale
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Tradurre tra i ghiacci: Dracula in islandese svela archetipi letterari complessi
No full textRecensione al volume "I poteri delle tenebre. Dracula, il manoscritto ritrovato", traduzione della versione islandese di "Dracula" di Bram Stoker (1897)
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