102,864 research outputs found
An Interview with Lorenzo Andolfatto: Shi Kong and the Translation of Chinese Science Fiction in Italy
No full textIn 2010 Lorenzo Andolfatto edited and translated into Italian Shi Kong, an anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction: it was the first science fiction work translated directly from Chinese into Italian and one of the first publications of Chinese science fiction in a European language at all. In this dialogue Andolfatto and Iannuzzi discuss the birth of the volume, the cultural agency of the translator, present and future perspective of Chinese science fiction translations in the Italian market
Exploring the Curious Life and Times of Italian Science Fiction
No full textThis short article is a panel report on a double science fiction (sf) session organized by Giulia Iannuzzi at the The 2014 Annual Conference of the American Association for Italian Studies held in Zurich.
The first session, “The Genre In and Outside the Canon,” opened with a paper by Elio Baldi entitled “Science Fiction and Canon: The Case of Italo Calvino.” Calvino’s reception is an excellent example not only of the difficult relationship between Italian literary criticism and sf, but also of the striking differences between Italian studies in Italy and Italian studies abroad (especially in the US). The paper by Umberto Rossi that followed, entitled “Italian Slipstream: La ragazza di Vajont by Tullio Avoledo,” contextualized Avoledo’s work within a complex set of cultural phenomena and tendencies from slipstream to postmodernism and within the difficulties of the contemporary Italian publishing market. The second session, “From Rome to Mars: Geographies on the Screen,” featured Silvia Caserta on the presence and use of science-fiction imagery in two Italian films: Totò nella Luna (1958) and Fascisti su Marte (2006). The fact that the two films are comedies is indicative of Italy’s difficult relationship with the technoscientific imaginary. Despite using different frames and narrative strategies, Cavalli argued, both films convey an affectionate image of the Italian people as fundamentally incapable of using technologies. The second paper, by Giulia Iannuzzi, was entitled “Fortunes of American Science Fiction in Italy from the 1950s to the 1960s: Translations and Adaptations between Text and Screen” and closed the second session with some thoughts on the widespread practice of translating science fiction from English into Italian after WWII.
The dialogue between panelists was helped along by Domenico Gallo, editor and contributor to many Italian magazines and collections, who did a fine job of focusing attention on the key issues: the presence and meaning of sf imagery in “canonical” Italian authors such as Calvino and Primo Levi; the controversial relationship between Italian literary criticism sf, seen in the broader context of the uneasy relationship between Italian cultural elites and hard sciences, which tend to be regarded as an “inferior” form of knowledge; the contemporary publishing market and its division between small, specialized sf initiatives and the important sf works published as mainstream fiction
Una conversazione con Massimo Soumaré sulla traduzione della fantascienza giapponese in Italia
No full textIn this interview, Iannuzzi and Soumaré discuss the small number of professional translators from Japanese into Italian in the field of entertainment literature. This makes it particularly difficult to introduce works to an Italian readership. Additionally, the narrative modes and procedures of Japanese writers are different from those found in Italian literature. Some fantasy works such as mangas, though, have been widely translated. According to Soumaré, a translator should act as a cultural mediator while leaving concepts from the original texts as intact as possible. Soumaré mentions his editing of a series of volumes called Alia, for which he chose writers who might appeal to Italian readers unfamiliar with the Japanese fantasy genre. Among these writers are Sakyō Komatsu, Yasutaka Tsutsui and Shin’ichi Hoshi. He notices that the impact of Japanese works on Italian readers is often visual, determined by films and animations. He believes that, in contrast to the situation in Italy, entertainment literature in Japan has a cultural space of its own due to academic literary critics such as Takayuki Tatsumi. Japanese publishers, too, are more prepared than Italian publishers to risk publishing unusual works and little-known authors. He finally mentions some of his recent translations from the work of Okina Kamino, Ryō Suzukaze, and Jūza Unno
Recensione di G.C. Ferretti, G. Iannuzzi, "Storie di uomini e di libri. L'editoria letteraria italiana attraverso le sue collane".
No full textNote de lecture de G.C. Ferretti, G. Iannuzzi, "Strie di uomini e di libri. L'editoria letteraria italiana attraverso le sue collane", parue dans OBLIO, 14-15, 2014, p. 104-106.Note de lecture de G.C. Ferretti, G. Iannuzzi, "Strie di uomini e di libri. L'editoria letteraria italiana attraverso le sue collane"
Sister chromatid exchanges (SCE) in the cattle popolation Agerolese
No full textThe sister chromatid exchange (SCE) test has been used to check genome (DNA) stability of humans (Chaganti et al., 1974) and the main livestock species (Di Meo et al., 2000; Iannuzzi et al., 1990; Lopez and Arruga, 1992), as well as to discover DNA damage caused by a range of natural and artificially synthesised chemical compounds. The SCE test can
be performed during DNA replication, after two cell-cycle–replications in the presence of the thymidine analogue 5-bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU). While the sister chromatid with a native polynucleotidic chain (containing thymidine) is stained, the other sister chromatid, with BrdU in both polynucleotidic chains, is not stained. This allows easy visualization of the presence of SCEs. High number of SCEs is evidence for high genome instability and occurrence of possible mutations. The SCE test has also been used to determine the frequency of exchange on the active and inactive X chromosome in bovids (Iannuzzi et al., 1990) to compare genome stability of three different cattle breeds reared under similar conditions (significant differences in SCE mean values were found between Friesians— with lower numbers of SCE—and the Podolians) (Iannuzzi et al., 1991); and to compare the mean SCE values of animals with a normal karyotype and those (with significant higher SCE/cell mean values) carrying rob (1;29) (Rangel-Figueiredo et al., 1995). The aim of this work was to apply the SCE test on the Agerolese cattle population so as to check the genome stability of this endangered breed
Electric hive minds: Italian science fiction fandom in the Digital Age
No full textToday science fiction fandom seems to have achieved full critical recognition in all its complexity and segmentations, as an extraordinary vantage point from which to observe ongoing changes in the relationships between cultural industries and the public, and monitor developments in an increasingly interconnected mediascape. This essay looks at some critical issues regarding the activities of Italian science fiction fans, starting from central questions on their use of media and their accomplishments: where can fannish activities be positioned in relation to the professional fields of science fiction cultural production across different media? How have the new media, by making new spaces and tools available to produce content and connect people, influenced fans’ activities and the form and workings of fannish communities? And how, in turn, have these people and their activities influenced media development and the shape of the contemporary Italian mediascape? Provisional answers are provided to these questions drawing on existing primary sources, testimonies and contributions on past decades, and on a survey conducted in 2015 to capture the present state of Italian fandom
Women in Financial Services. Exploring Progress towards Gender Equality
No full textThis book explores gender diversity in the financial system, focusing especially on regulations, disclosure standards, theories and literature on the relationship between women in atypical positions and bank performance, female representation in governance bodies of banks and insurance companies, the gender pay gap and the gender balance in Central Banks. The topics are examined highlighting the progress towards gender equality (SDG 5) and the room for improvement in financial services with implications for policymakers, regulators and researchers in both finance and gender studies
“To boldly go where no series has gone before”. <i>Star Trek - The Original Series</i> in Italia: il linguaggio della tecno-scienza, il doppiaggio, il fandom
No full textThis essay consists of a critical analysis of the Italian dubbing of Star Trek. The Original Series (1966-1969), which was partially translated and shown on Italian television between 1979 and 1981.
The study of the dubbing is approached considering translation as a complex cultural phenomenon (drawing on studies such as Even-Zohar and Venuti's), and using the case of Star Trek also as an example of broader phenomena and dynamics, namely the presence of American science fiction series on Italian television, and the difficult relationship in Italy between humanistic and scientific cultures (here, Pierpaolo Antonello's contributions are the milestones), to which the essay attributes the noticeable simplification and flattening the techno-scientific language undergoes during translation in the Star Trek episodes considered.
This general tendency to simplify (and even remove) technical and scientific terminology in the Italian version can be explained by two main factors: the idea that Italian viewers are less well educated scientifically than Americans, and limited investment (in terms of both financial and professional resources), on the part of the TV channel and dubbing company (TMC and ADC).
Both these aspects reveal a perception of a television series as merely a commodity product, typical of the years preceding the current new golden age of American series, but still not unknown in contemporary Italy (as has been shown in other cases, by studies such those by Buonomo, Izzo and Scarpino, and Ranzato).
The analysis of the Italian dubbing of Star Trek in the present essay is accompanied by a preliminary overview of the translation and airing of American science fiction series in Italy between the 1950s and the 1970s, and by a survey of the fortunes of these series across different media over the same period.
Star Trek, at the center of one the biggest and most profitable contemporary cultural franchises, and one of the most well organized fandoms (studied also by Henry Jenkins on more than one occasion), arrived in Italy too with its novelizations and derivative products. The Italian fandom proved to be both remarkably devoted and uncommonly well-informed from the cultural and scientific point of view: after protesting loudly about the poor quality of The Original Series dubbing, the Italian Star Trek Club obtained the right to oversee the translations of many of the subsequent series and publications
‘Qu'il est question d'une langue sauvage’: Phrasebooks for European Travellers in Eighteenth‐Century North America
No full textThis article explores the vocabularies of indigenous languages published as part of the travel accounts written by explorers, traders and colonial policymakers in North America over the eighteenth century. Starting with the renowned Voyages by the Baron de Lahontan, the analysis takes as its endpoint the journals of the famous expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The aim of this study is to foreground what these lexicographic compilations reveal about European encounters with societies categorised as radically different from – and less civilised than – the traveller's own: an ‘otherness’ sometimes exploited as a mirror and term of comparison that challenged the observer's ethnocentrism. Drawing on existing scholarship about the cultural history of Euro-American encounters in the modern age, this study puts forward an original analysis of the temporal conceptualisations underpinning vocabularies of ‘savage languages’, in terms of both historical diachronicity and time as a culturally constructed frame of human experience. This focus on the lists of words and phrases included in travel accounts, journals and relations makes it possible to question the relationship between the recording of linguistic evidence and travel narratives, and explore the complex negotiations between empirical observation and pre-existing cultural categories and stereotypes. A close reading of these often-neglected primary sources helps us to identify recurrent conceptual tropes and assign a central role to the historicisation of American indigenous people within wider processes of cultural construction of a global Europeanness
Umani postumi, moderni vampiri. Riuso, serialità, coralità dell'orrore in True Blood
No full textCosa rende alcuni di noi – abitatori di ecosistemi narrativi sempre più densi e complessi – compulsivi spettatori dell'orrore? Cosa decreta la vivacità di tropi horror dotati di una storia già lunga alle spalle e il loro corrente, inesausto riuso catodico?
La proposta critica che avanziamo in questa sede è un invito a contemperare nell'analisi delle produzioni televisive seriali contemporanee, aspetti narratologici e produttivi, fattori (intra- e inter)testuali e sociologici, a partire dalla convinzione che le ragioni della fortuna di una serie (non solo) horror vadano ricercate precipuamente nei territori dove questi aspetti si intrecciano.
Proponiamo come caso di studio il successo di pubblico e di critica di una delle serie d'autore per eccellenza degli ultimi anni: True Blood, creata da Alan Ball per il network HBO nel 2008 e giunta nel 2014 alla settima e finale stagione. Da situare entro il contesto di un più ampio fenomeno di proliferazione del genere horror nella serialità televisiva contemporanea, True Blood offre un ottimo esempio dei nuovi meccanismi di distinzione tramite i quali la serialità televisiva odierna sta differenziando in maniera crescente segmenti di pubblico
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