Search

L’Italia è ancora in guerra quando la rivista trimestrale «Società» inizia le pubblicazioni: il primo numero porta la data gennaio-giugno 1945. Insieme al fondatore, l’archeologo Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, che ne assume la direzione, della redazione fanno parte lo scrittore Romano Bilenchi e il filosofo Cesare Luporini (i quali dal 1946 diventano vicedirettori), nonché Maria Bianca Gallinaro, moglie di Luporini, traduttrice dal russo e dall’inglese, e Marta Chiesi, segretaria di redazione, ...

Tre riviste fiorentine di inizio Novecento – «Leonardo» (1903-7) diretta da Giovanni Papini, «La Voce» (1908-14) diretta da Giuseppe Prezzolini e «Lacerba» (1913-15) fondata da Papini, Aldo Palazzeschi, Ardengo Soffici e Italo Tavolato – hanno svolto un ruolo importante nel transfer letterario italo-tedesco. Gli intellettuali che vi hanno collaborato, reagendo alla rappresentazione della cultura tedesca dominante in Italia a inizio secolo, hanno costruito un’immagine alternativa della Germani...

Nella sua Gita a Prato (1833) Niccolò Tommaseo rimane colpito dalla presenza, in una città di dodicimila abitanti, di ben quattro stamperie, fra le quali spicca l’impresa dei fratelli Giachetti, «che diedero e danno opere di mole e d’importanza» (Tommaseo 1838: 311). Avviata nel 1819 dal medico chirurgo Vincenzio Giachetti per i figli Giuseppe, Antonio e Carlo, la tipografia dei Giachetti nasce a Prato all’interno di una fortunata costellazione culturale di assonanze tardo-gianseniste o liber...

Il mensile «rinascita» «Rinascita. Rassegna di politica e di cultura italiana» viene fondata a Napoli da Palmiro Togliatti nel 1944. Al fine di inquadrare la rivista tra la stampa periodica coeva, può risultare interessante ripercorrere un articolo apparso sul numero di gennaio del 1950, intitolato Le riviste di cultura. L’autore è lo storico romano Paolo Alatri, deputato del PCI dal 1963 al 1968, che interviene occasionalmente tra le pagine di «Rinascita» su temi letterari e di politica este...

1. Il secolo delle riviste? Parafrasando Contini e la sua definizione di «secolo di prosa» – riferita al XIX secolo – Giuseppe Langella (1982: 3) ha definito il Novecento, e forse non a torto, il «secolo delle riviste». Effettivamente, all’indomani della Grande Guerra, in un periodo ricco di nuove istanze culturali, novità politiche e cambiamenti legati al mondo intellettuale, il forte desiderio di uscire dalla tradizione si concretizzò in un proliferare di riviste d’arte, culturali e lettera...

1. L’introduzione al Faust di Scalvini: un’indagine La prima traduzione italiana del Faust di Goethe, o più esattamente della «prima parte della tragedia», fu realizzata, com’è noto, dal letterato bresciano Giovita Scalvini e pubblicata nel 1835 dall’editore milanese Giovanni Silvestri. Che il libretto contenga anche, come introduzione, il testo Cenni su la vita e su le opere di Volfango Goethe (Anonimo 1835), non viene quasi mai rilevato. Questa introduzione resta tuttavia per circa vent’ann...

1. Borgese e le letterature straniere: il lavoro editoriale 1.1. Modernità e romanzo Che negli anni fra le due guerre – anni che coincidono, di fatto, con il ventennio fascista – la cultura italiana sia rimasta chiusa in una pregiudiziale indifferenza verso le letterature straniere, è da tempo considerato un luogo comune da rimettere in discussione. «Sostenibile, suppongo, per altri campi del sapere», affermava Giovanni Raboni già all’inizio degli anni Ottanta, «l’immagine di una provinciale,...

L’avventura editoriale di Giovanni Silvestri si colloca nel contesto del rilancio culturale della città di Milano fra gli anni del governo napoleonico e il nuovo radicamento dell’amministrazione absburgica, all’indomani del Congresso di Vienna. Come hanno dimostrato gli studi di Marino Berengo (1980), le cause di questa vigorosa fioritura di imprese intellettuali, che porta Milano ad assorbire le funzioni che dal Cinquecento in poi nello spazio lombardo-veneto erano state svolte da Venezia, s...

Per entrare con maggiore puntualità nell’argomento affrontato dal presente contributo, è necessaria una riflessione di carattere preliminare sulla differenza sostanziale nell’organizzazione istituzionale delle discipline germanistiche in Italia rispetto a quella nei paesi di lingua tedesca – sul collocamento cioè della medievistica (di lingua tedesca) in un settore scientifico-disciplinare autonomo, la Filologia germanica, cui è oltretutto attribuita una diversa denominazione (L-FIL-LET/15) r...

«Il nome di Giorgio Pasquali», ha scritto Carlo Emilio Gadda (1952: 92), «non è forse dei più familiari alle orecchie dei tifosi di calcio: è nome insigne nell’ambito della cultura italiana ed europea». Queste le parole di Gadda sull’«Approdo letterario» del 1952, appena pochi mesi prima che un incidente stradale ponesse fine alla vita di una delle figure centrali della filologia classica del Novecento. Oggi, a distanza di oltre sessant’anni, il nome di Pasquali è noto a un pubblico probabilm...

Michel Espagne e Michael Werner, i due principali interpreti della moderna teoria dei transfert culturali, hanno provato che ogni passaggio tra realtà intellettuali diverse segue una precisa strategia che tiene conto sia dei contesti di accoglienza e di partenza, sia del ruolo di coloro che si fanno carico del processo di ricezione e di trasmissione di uno scambio culturale. In particolare, essi hanno sottolineato che le «premières manifestations d’un transfert ne sont pas des œuvres, souvent...

1. Introduzione L’Istituto di Psicologia di Padova, fondato nel 1919 da Vittorio Benussi (1878-1927), ha rappresentato per oltre sessant’anni non solo un ponte tra la cultura psicologica italiana e quella di lingua tedesca, ma anche l’anello di una catena di istituti e laboratori di ricerca psicologica appartenenti al movimento fenomenologico, ossia a quella complessa rete di scuole e di tradizioni di ricerca originatesi dall’insegnamento di Franz Brentano (1838-1917): a partire dal suo epice...

La ricezione di cultura tedesca in Italia, a partire dalla metà del diciottesimo secolo, prende corpo entro una rete sempre più ramificata di mediatori e strutture di mediazione. Accademie, università, case editrici e riviste segnano il perimetro entro il quale si dispiega l’attività di intellettuali animati da interessi molteplici, legati a una concezione transnazionale del proprio mestiere e spesso capaci di intercettare precocemente tendenze e movimenti ancora a uno stato iniziale, creando le condizioni per il loro incardinamento nella cultura italiana. Una circolazione di idee che accompagna lo sviluppo delle relazioni sociali e politiche fra i due Paesi, spesso fornendo incisivi strumenti di interpretazione per tensioni, conflitti e riavvicinamenti.

Succede spesso, infatti, che la forma preceda il contenuto e sonocontento che Lei non intenda distruggere questa forma ora.Speriamo che col tempo essa si riempia di contenuto.Sigmund Freud a Edoardo Weiss30 settembre 1926 1. Marco Levi Bianchini promotore della psicoanalisi in Italia 1.1. Le prime traduzioni in italiano delle opere di Freud Le prime traduzioni in italiano di tre opere di Sigmund Freud, uscite in tedesco tra il 1900 e il 1909, furono pubblicate da Marco Levi Bianchini tra il 1...

1. pubblicazioni periodiche e transfert culturale 1.1. Questo intervento su due riviste del Settecento romano, le «Efemeridi letterarie di Roma» (1772-1798) e l’«Antologia romana» (1774-1798), non appare per mere ragioni cronologiche all’inizio di una serie di lavori che dal XVIII secolo giunge al XX con «Rinascita», «Società» e «Politecnico». Il numero stesso di contributi sulla «cultura tedesca in Italia tra Settecento e Novecento» che contengono fin dal titolo un riferimento a pubblicazion...

The painter in fiction is a motif that has long since inspired scholarly writing internationally. Besides the wealth of shorter critical essays on single literary works featuring artists, among the more consistent critical monographs uncovering the painter as a literary type are Theodor R. Bowie’s The Painter in French Fiction (Bowie 1950); Maurice Beebe’s Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts. The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (Beebe 1964); Herbert Marcuse’s doctoral dissertation f...

The attempt by writers to capture the motifs of the painters appears to be at the same time both the most evident and the less investigated mode of decoding the concept of literary impressionism at least in Scandinavia, where scholars mainly have dealt with the grammar, the rhetoric, and the stylistics of the phenomenon (Møller Kristensen 1955; Dahl 1969; Lund 1993; Nilsson 1965; Rykkja 1972). Still, the claim that literary impressionism occurs when a writer strives to reproduce the motifs an...

The characters encountered above have allowed us yet another access to the reflection on the impact of impressionism on Swedish fiction written in the late nineteenth century. To justify the introduction of a painter among the underprivileged characters populating Fattigt folk, Geijerstam chooses a misunderstood avant-garde artist. Although it is likely that any ‘-ism’ in opposition to the official taste would have served the purpose, the adoption of impressionism makes its representative, Iv...

As a conclusion to the discussion regarding the modes of literary impressionism in Swedish prose, I will turn back to the results stemming from my critical survey of the use of the term in the Finland-Swedish press, presented in the preceding chapter of this study. By subjecting Georg Nordensvan’s collection of short stories Skuggspel. Tidsbilder and Mikael Lybeck’s novels Den starkare and Allas vår Margit to closer scrutiny, I wish to evaluate the appropriateness of the contemporary critics’...

In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy phenomenology is explained as follows: Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. […] In recent philosophy of mind, the term “phenomenology” is often restricted to the characterization...

The aim of the following paragraphs is to bring into focus the concept of literary impressionism mainly within the context of Finland-Swedish literature. The attempt is to show to what extent the critical debate in Finland-Swedish reviews and newspapers demonstrated an awareness of the idea of impressionism in literary writing and what aspects of the phenomenon this understanding encapsulated. This has been done by undertaking a survey of the use of the term in the literary criticism present ...

In The Cambridge History of French Literature, Robert Lethbridge departs from Brunetière’s early codification of the analogies between impressionist painting and literary techniques to explain literary impressionism. Drawing parallels between themes and subjects in painting and in «the work of the majority of the novelists» (Lethbridge 2011: 534) in the age of impressionism, he suggests that painters and novelists alike were occupied with motifs such as: stations, steam-engines and railways; ...

The most complete overview of how the concept of literary impressionism has been used, internationally, in literary criticism and in the writing of the history of literature is to be found in the Swedish scholar Hans Lund’s study, Impressionism och litterär text (1993; Impressionism and Literary Text). To the scholar interested in the history and the evolution of this notion, Lund’s work is of immense value, as it examines the use of the term during the eleven decades following its coinage in...

“It seems very pretty,” she said […], “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are!” L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) 1. On the usefulness of locating impressionism in swedish prose There are cultural contexts within which impressionism is acknowledged as a significant literary tend...

The motto introducing this study is borrowed from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). It was with me even before phrasing the first paragraph, and I believe it captivatingly expresses the irresistible attraction of subjects that seem hard to grasp intellectually. It also points to the difficult, but necessary, attempt that has to be made to bridge the gap between one’s personal understanding of intriguing subjects and the wording of this understanding....

The argument here has been the recent revival of critical interest in the impact of impressionism on literature, as well as the variety of literary impressionisms that one encounters historically, both on the international scene and in specific Nordic contexts. Although the French impressionist painters are still, as they were in earlier studies, «a fairly solid core of reference» (Muller 1938: 356) for scholars working on this subject today, interart comparisons have by no means been the onl...

«What exactly is meant by ‘impressionism’ in fiction?» is one of the questions raised by Marianna Torgovnick in a scathing commentary on Mario Praz’s concluding words to his essay Mnemosyne: the Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (Torgovnick 1985: 6). With this, and a host of other queries, Torgovnick is phrasing her perplexity when confronted with Praz’s view on interart analogies relying on the idea of a vague and general Zeitgeist. Torgovnick’s wording is only apparently simpl...

In an attempt to complete the discussion of the writers’ awareness of impressionism, we will in this last section turn to the representation of the impressionist as a literary character in Swedish fiction. I will examine a body of four little-known texts written at the close of the nineteenth century, casting the impressionist in the role of protagonist or minor character: Gustaf af Geijerstam’s tale Utan pängar (Moneyless) from the collection Fattigt folk (Poor People), II, 1889 (Geijerstam ...

The following pages are concerned with forms of literary impressionism present in late nineteenth-century Swedish prose fiction and, specifically, with the narrative techniques employed in the texts that are up for scrutiny. Impressionist techniques in writing is an argument that undoubtedly calls attention to the question of the relationship between literature and the visual arts: are these writerly techniques no more and no less than ut pictura poesis? Are there ways of transferring the mea...

To prove impressionism’s all but homogeneous connections with Scandinavian literature, I will now concentrate on three moments involving significant actors on the late nineteenth-century literary scene as well as highly divergent views on the relationship between impressionism and literature. An overview of Herman Bang’s poetics of impressionism will be put forward; firstly through an examination of both early and present-day critical reactions to his prose and, secondly, through the scrutiny...

What, then, are the narrative characteristics of a writing that builds on the rendering of impressions? The question has been variously debated. Even a scholar such as Sven Møller Kristensen, who, as we have seen, departs from the idea that impressionist writing is the transposition into words of the methods and style of the painters, reflects on the second element of the coinage ‘literary impressionism’, and agrees that «det dybest gående træk i impressionismen er [...] undgåelsen af den log...

In bringing to a close this section concerned with avoiding a «casual and descriptive» (Watt 1980: 172) use of the term literary impressionism by presenting examples considered apt to illustrate forms of impressionist fiction in Swedish prose, I would like to stress the directions in which the investigation has moved and the results of the textual analyses carried out. Although the point of departure has been the two common interpretations of literary impressionism in the international debate...

The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1771; hereafter EB) and Rees’s Cyclopaedia, or an universal dictionary of arts and sciences (1778-1788; hereafter RCy) are the two general reference works under scrutiny here. They are the most relevant outcomes of this kind in the second half of the century. Rees still answers to a taxonomic approach, derived from Chambers, and is aimed at connecting the different branches of knowledge; the EB, instead, is not interested in this but in ...

3.1 General introduction: explanatory prefaces and contents The handbooks and practica analysed in the present study belong to the second half of the eighteenth century. It is a period characterised by dramatic changes in the medical field, by a growing and expanding social interest in medical events, as well as by the impact of medical research and practice on British society as a whole. The writing of medical books and their circulation among the lay people was also favoured by the expansio...

Fever is a term that pervades eighteenth-century medical texts and represents a very common and widespread medical experience in early and late modern times. This is one of the main reasons for fevers to be treated extensively by medical men trying to establish their causes and effects, describe their external manifestations (symptoms), and determine their typical signs (peculiar to each type of fever). The complexity and the variety of febrile experience, the multifarious environmental conte...

This study investigates eighteenth-century medical writing, particularly concerning the elaboration and the communication of medicine in such reference works as universal dictionaries of arts and sciences, medical dictionaries, and handbooks. Most of the vernacular texts under scrutiny here were issued in the second half of the century, a period in which the advancements in medical research, medical education and medical practice favoured the circulation of an expanding medical vocabulary and stimulated medical writing as a whole. A vast amount of reference works was produced for experts and non-experts alike: medical topics were common in social settings, in personal and communal letters, in specialised journals, in pamphlets and in magazines. All this unprecedented activity certainly contributed to the vernacularisation, and the dissemination of medicine in different kinds of works and different text types. The texts examined in the study are representative of their authors’ effort to expand medical knowledge and to define medicine as an independent science based on strict observation, as well as to establish intelligibility within and outside the disciplinary discourse community.

The analysis of vernacular medical writing in reference works, such as universal dictionaries of arts and sciences, medical dictionaries, and handbooks testifies to the fact that medicine was a relevant topic both in genteel society, and within an emerging disciplinary community. On the one hand, medicine was general knowledge and shared experience; on the other hand, it was on the way to specialisation and professionalisation. The advancements in medicine, in the second half of the eighteent...

The core of the present study is an investigation on eighteenth-century medical writing, particularly concerning the elaboration and the communication of medicine in reference works such as universal dictionaries of arts and sciences, medical dictionaries, and handbooks. Most of the vernacular texts under scrutiny here were issued in the second half of the century, a period in which the advancements in medical research, medical education and medical practice, as well as a growing awareness of...

1.1. Sexual and textual politics between folklore and literary tradition Carter’s writings have been either praised or despised in the light of her alleged feminist agenda, of her appropriation and subversion of different generic conventions in order to expose and overthrow patriarchal control over social structures, power relations and the circulation of knowledge – or, most notably, her failure to do so – of her provocative claims and her bewildering style. Even if her subversive, parodic, ...

2.1. Getting ready to explore identity journeys As has already been remarked, power is the key to understand how the transition of metamorphosis from textual strategy to its visible materialisation on the body through gender politics works in Carter’s fairy tales. The stories sketch a definition of metamorphic female identity at least in a twofold way. First of all, subjectivity is represented as unstable, fragmented and multiple, and is caught in the act of being made through language and st...

Carter’s ‘new wine’ is still making old bottles explode as the fairy tales collected in The Bloody Chamber go on engendering reflections and new interpretations. Most notably, they also engage in a productive dialogue with the work of contemporary writers such as Tanith Lee, Margo Lanagan or Sara Maitland, who followed Carter’s path in exploiting fairy tales’ potential to represent, investigate and re-interpret female identity. That is why, rather than ‘drawing conclusions’, I would like to e...

1.1. The body in context: a discursive framework Carter’s fairy tales always represent a physical metamorphosis of some sort, the most obvious being that of the young woman who is growing up and experiencing the physical and psychological changes which are part of the transition from childhood to adulthood. A number of other symbolic and meaningful changes are illustrated, which embody the revolutionary and disruptive potential of Carter’s narratives in that they overthrow rather than sustain...

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman. (A. Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 1979)

This work aims to develop new readings of the poetics and the politics of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) in the light of the bodily metamorphoses represented in the fairy tales. Metamorphic processes can be said to inform the stories of the collection both in a thematic and a stylistic perspective and address the need to rethink human experience altogether, especially as regards heterosexual relationships and power distribution between the sexes. By exhibiting the body and its changes in texts where it is traditionally concealed or treated as a natural essence, Carter foregrounds the powerful potential of metamorphosis – as a concept, a topic, a structuring and guiding principle, and as a proposed model – in order to expose and challenge patriarchal myths and discourses, which slow down or even prevent the progressive empowerment of women’s conditions and positions within society (in the Seventies as well as today). Carter’s creativity and commitment are engaged in a productive dialogue with some contemporary feminist philosophers, to show how and why her fairy tales and their transformative potential can be – once again – signified anew.

2.1 Becoming animal Although the metamorphoses of the often hyperbolic bodies represented in The Bloody Chamber do not challenge the heterosexual matrix, they do challenge patriarchal discourses by being implicated in what they oppose (more often than not the protagonists are introduced as docile bodies, subject to discourse and not yet subjects of power), so that they are able to turn power against itself. Moreover, their agency is made explicit through their disruptive bodily performances, ...