1,721,109 research outputs found
Il mito letterario della 'campagna inglese': forme di identificazione immaginativa
No full textIl saggio intende cogliere il ruolo svolto dalla letteratura nella identificazione del paesaggio rurale inglese come matrice della nazione (favorito anche dai lessemi country/Country). I riferimenti sono a testi di Kilvert, Wordsworth,Hardy, Carlyle, Read, Macaulay. Il concetto di “semiotizzazione” viene messo a punto ed utilizzato come strumento teorico per sondare i processi culturali di creazione di un senso del luogo, a partire da precise variabili simboliche e forze materiali
Quattrocento anni e non li dimostra: complessità, traducibilità e attualità di Shakespeare
No full textReading Literature: an Ethical Gesture in the Postmodern Context?
No full textThe essay is an investigation of "the postmodern" in relation to its real or virtual ethical dimension. The approach is both literary and philosophical and the essay proposes that literature can provide valid means to foster "dialogical interpretations" in a pluralist and multicultural world
Spatial mobility as social mobility in the Early Seventeenth Century: Henry Peacham Jr.’s picaresque novel. A Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum
No full textThe theme of migration and travel occupies a prominent position in the literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Travelogues, travel notes, poems, and disparate accounts of the booming explorations towards the New World(s) abundantly embody the spirit of adventure of the age. The energetic spirit promoting the appropriation of new and distant lands did not, however, belong exclusively to the class of sailors, pirates, merchants. It seems, on the contrary, to define a widespread political and cultural attitude on the part of different social groups, at all levels of society.
A significant sign of this phenomenon is the rise of the picaresque novel whose sagacious protagonists travel primarily for material gain and partly for entertainment. Their spatial movement is clearly the means of a new upward social mobility. This movement is obviously very different from the present day migrations prompted by wars and political persecution, but, mutatis mutandis, it is somehow similar to contemporary migrations in search of economic improvement and amelioration of one’s social status.
I will discuss the many implications of this kind of narratives in the XVII Century by examining Henry Peacham Jr.’s A Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum, a 1639 short novel (for which no modern edition was available until I produced one in 1997, after a period of research at the Folger Shakespeare
Library in Washington D.C.) (Locatelli 1998).
The protagonists of Peacham’s picaresque novel, the twins Meum and Tuum, move across England from the Fenlands to Cambridge and from there to London, thus providing a rich and amusing picture of the geographical, social and cultural situation of England in Early-modern times. Through their keen observant gaze the reader is taken to farms and universities, taverns and churches, and thus meets a rich variety of social types, and is given a unique perspective on the mores and shifting values of Jacobean England. The utilitarian purpose of the movement of picaresque heroes is certainly distant from the devotion prompting Mediaeval pilgrims; moreover, their social ambition is usually combined with their ability to provide witty and satirical comments on their surroundings. The story of their adventures is thus much more than just a lively “Michelin Guide” of England avant la lettere, it is a vivid illustration of social situations and a convincing anticipation of the emergent entrepreneurial mentality of the XVIII century
Un percorso didattico dei "classici" della letteratura: Shakespeare nel secondo ciclo
No full textIl saggio si propone quale contributo metodologico alla didattica della letteratura. Teoria e tecnica dell’insegnamento possono condurre a sviluppare nei giovani un genuino interesse per i classici tramite la proposta di letture critiche e dialogiche.I riferimenti specifici sono, in questo caso, al teatro shakespeariano
Critical observations on the cultural tradition of "city and country": "The hum and murmur", "the triumph and the jingle"
No full textThis essay develops from Raymond William’s seminal book “The Country and the City” and
takes its legacy well into the critical context of contemporary studies on “The Politics of the
Landscape” and cultural memory, to which it wishes to contribute. The relationship between the country and the city is explored against a specific historical background, which is interpreted in relations to the categories of “taste”, “wealth” and various ideological interpellations. The country house is here represented as an emblem of the paradoxical relationship of town and country, and of the intricate, rather than linear and oppositional relationship of rural and urban “values” and lived experience
'It hath no bottom: and I will sing it': Literature as endless hypersign of revelation and concealement
No full textThis essay suggests different interpretation of A MidsummerNight’s Dream based on the psychoanalytical category of the repressed and on the anthropological categories of the un-said and the taboo. Moreover, it illustrates how the specific effect of poetic and dramatic language provides a special knowledge of the literary as a unique cultural locus
Literature as an Ecological Space of Self-Awareness, and Perspective-Taking. With a Reading of The Voyage Out
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