88 research outputs found
Werner Sombart and the global society. Anticipations from a classic author of sociology
No full textThe article examines the most salient works in which the sociologist Werner Sombart saw the dimension of globality as a social element, constitutive of mo- dernity and its future. The aim is to understand the role of globality, as an idea and a phenomenon, in the constitution in all aspects of society (economic, political, cultural, anthropological). The Works to which the article refers show a global society, one that goes from the time of Sombart to the present day, as the author had already envisioned in all their potentialities and criticalities
The materialistic foundations of the social order. Sociological anticipations in the thought of James Harrington
No full textJames Harrington’s best known work is The Commonwealth of Oceana1. In it, the author outlines
the construction of an ideal republican constitutional system, Oceana, described through a
meticulous overall apparatus that includes within it the entire state organization, passing from
the political, to the administrative and military element up to the economic and fiscal one,
examined with extreme abundance of details. It is interesting to note that the focus is on the
sphere of the city and its government and not exclusively on the concept of form of government.
The urban context, that is, represents one of the most important elements on which the
author’s cognitive efforts are concentrated
Sotto il cielo di Trieste. Fortuna critica e bibliografia di Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini
No full textIl saggio ricostruisce la fortuna critica delle opere di Quarantotti Gambini, dalle recensioni e dai dibattiti che hanno segnato l'uscita di ciascun libro, al consolidarsi di vulgate nelle storie della letteratura alle attenzioni più recenti. Accanto al saggio è offerta una esaustiva bibliografia critica sull'autore e la bibliografia completa delle sue opere: romanzi, saggi, articoli e racconti.
Il saggio e la bibliografia critica, seguendo la vicenda esemplare dell'autore, disegnano uno spaccato dell'informazione e della critica nei decenni che vanno dagli anni Trenta del Novecento ad oggi, mentre la bibliografia di Quarantotti Gambini profila una moltitudine di percorsi di lettura: il lavoro giornalistico, l'impegno testimoniale, i processi di maturazione della scrittura che portano i numerosi elzeviri narrativi a confluire via via nei romanzi.
Questo volume, arricchito dalla prefazione di Elvio Guagnini, si offre come uno strumento per i futuri studi su Quarantotti Gambini e sulla ricezione della letteratura triestina e istriana nel Novecento italiano, e come ritratto di una letteratura pienamente calata nella realtà storica e nella società del suo tempo.
---
The volume includes a critical essay on the fortune and reception of Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini literary work, the complete bibliography of the author and the bibliography of the criticism.
Quarantotti Gambini's reception is surveyed from the first reviews that welcomed his narrative and poetic works since the late 1930s, to the critical debates around the idea of “triestinità”, of “realismo” and “decadentismo”, up to the author's presence in contemporary essays and histories of Italian literature.
The bibliography of the author includes his volumes of poetry, fiction and essays, as well as many articles and short stories he published on newspapers and magazines during his life, suggesting also interesting reflections on the genesis of the novels, in which Quarantotti Gambini used to re-elaborate many of his short writings, with progresses and changes in the writing that still wait to be taken under close reading.
This critical work, enriched by the preface by Elvio Guagnini, is proposed as a useful tool for the future studies on the author and on the reception of Trieste literature in the Italian Nineteenth century
L'ebraismo nella formazione dello spirito capitalistico. Un excursus tra le opere di Werner Sombart
No full textThis paper aims to retrace the thought of a classic of sociology, Werner Sombart, in relation to the theme of religious origins of the capitalistic spirit. It analyzes Jewish contribution to the capitalistic spirit’s origins and development, through the variables and the conceptual categories used by the Author in his different works. The focus is concentrated on ethics religiously based by which Jewish community may have contributed to a certain economic orientation. It tries to understand the meaning and significance of Jewish religious spirit and its cultural matrix, through critical analysis of the Author’s thought about this topic, which has, to date, no appropriate representation in the literature. It tries, moreover, to underline the newness of his thought relative to the religious dimension’s centrality for the capitalism’s origin. It aims, finally, to think about the role of Jewish ethics in the period of advanced capitalism
An “Eye-talian” in the New World: Cognitive Estrangement and Diglossia in Antonio Gallenga's Early Italian American Narrative
No full text"On the 15th of August, 1836, I was born again" is the incipit of that extraordinary and little known autobiography which is Antonio Gallenga's "Episodes of my Second Life" (1885). The 15th of August, 1836 is the day Gallenga embarked from Gibraltar for New York, and the opening of this text, as well as its title, emphasizes very well the beginning of the transoceanic journey as a turning point in the author's life.
A close reading of the the text focuses on three central aspects: the narration of the self, with specific attention devoted to the migration experience as a source of estrangement and to the relationship between the narrating and the narrated "I"s; the linguistic self-consciousness of the narrator and the character; images of America and placement/locating of the self.
These elements allow to explore how the migration experience was conceptualized and which critical and literary devices where put at work by an author whose literary awareness render this text a rare narration between autobiography, travel journal, memoire, auto-fiction.
This essay – working at the theoretical intersection between Italian American Studies and Speculative Fiction Studies – puts forward new observations the role played by estrangement mechanism in early Italian American narratives
Fantastiche traduzioni: Riccardo Valla, Lyon Sprague de Camp e lo spazio dei generi speculativi in Italia
No full textThis essay aims to shed new light on speculative genres in the Italian cultural context, devoting specific attention to translations and the transcultural editorial practices that characterized the publishing market in the peninsula during the second half of the Twentieth century. Preceded by some general remarks outlining tendencies and notable aspects as regards the Italian cultural context, the central part of the essay focuses on a case study: the correspondence between Riccardo Valla (Torino, 1942-2013) – editor in chief of the publishing house Nord – and US author Lyon Sprague de Camp (New York, 1907-2000) during the 1970s. Editorial consultant and curator, science fiction and fantasy refined connoisseur, and traducteur extraordinaire, Valla fostered the Italian reception of de Camp’s work, negotiating the translation rights acquisition of many novels, programming their placement in Nord’s catalogue, and authoring or supervising their translation. This case study is a vantage point from which to assess the activity of a publishing house that during the considered period had a pivotal role in bringing science fiction and fantasy to the Italian bookshelves. Furthermore, it brings us into the laboratory of an exceptional translator, highlighting its distinctive publishing and cultural agency
“are you familiar with project Blue Book?”. Ripensare la serialità (fantascientifica) attraverso twin Peaks
No full textThis essay locates the television series Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2 seasons; 2017, 1 season) within the developments underwent by Television studies in the last three decades, with particular regard to the changes the genre system of fictional narrative on the small screen has experienced during this period. It then delves into the issue of the series relationship with the science fiction genre and its problematic positioning with respect to the canon of science fiction seriality.
At a time of exceptional vitality of the serialised fictional narrative in audio-visual media, Twin Peaks polarises a multitude of issues in the sociology of culture, media aesthetics and the television storytelling. With its authorial chrisms and its use of feuilleton devices that made the fortune of a new kind of television, its skilful mixing of realism and fantastic-esoteric themes, the involvement of a lively fandom and the interest it catalysed in academic studies, the series created by Mark Frost and David Lynch in 1990 has masterfully epitomised a coeval golden age of US television seriality and, with the 2017 revival, a new creative and productive season.
The critical discourses that Twin Peaks has been able to raise around it make it an emblematic product of the narrative hybridism that has increasingly characterised high-end television since the 1990s, and how this has been received in academia over decades in which television studies, screen studies and sociology of the media have seen the emergence of a new popularity of serial television narratives as objects of study. Within this context, the series which passed from ABC to Showtime offers itself as a vantage point for observing the crucial reconfigurations which have affected the system of genres, understood both as productive categories and distribution labels, and as indicators used to activate conventional horizons of expectation.
More than the discussions on the degree of science-fictionality of Twin Peaks, Frost and Lynch’s series has favoured complex (and critically productive) reflections on the porosity of the science fiction repertoire, on its dissolution within new forms of hybridism, and the presence and liveliness in narratives of high productive range and whose aura of authorship is connected precisely with a self-conscious disruption of existing viewing protocols
Rex J. Rowley
No full textAudio recording of the 10/06/13 UNLV Libraries Author Series event featuring Rex. J. Rowley, author of Everyday Las Vegas: Local Life in a Tourist Town. Includes remarks by Libraries Dean Patricia Iannuzzi, CGR Director Dave Schwartz, and Rowley
Commemorating the Future
No full text2021 will mark the centennial of the establishment of the city of Stanley, in Rutland, as the new British cultural capital, thanks to George VI’s initiatives in 1921. Stanley’s renaissance took place after the monarch’s heroic decision to oppose a Russian invasion force in 1900, which brought to England’s military successes over France, Russia, and Spain, and to the final coronation of George the VI as King of France at Rheims, in 1920. The rise of Russia, and the oppressive influence exert..
Science Fiction, Utopia, and Digital Humanities
No full textThis article was first featured in Italian on the website of Apice (Archivi della Parola, dell’Immagine e della Comunicazione Editoriale, functional centre of the University of Milan), March 9, 2021. The author would like to thank Lodovica Braida for permission to translate and reproduce it here. Interested in the relationship between humanity and techno-science, the speculative imagination thrives in the digital world. Indeed, science fiction has functioned as a hypothetical laboratory for..
- …
