Books by Federico Bellini
L'abitudine è spesso intesa come il semplice sfondo sul quale si stagliano le date memorabili del... more L'abitudine è spesso intesa come il semplice sfondo sul quale si stagliano le date memorabili della vita di ciascuno. A uno sgardo più attento, però, le abitudini si rivelano una componente essenziale della nostra identità, poichè rivelano l'intima connessione fra ciò che ci appartiene così profondamente da non esserne consapevoli e l'alterità che ci viene incontro, popolando gli interstizi fra attività e passività, organico e inorganico, familiare ed estraneo. Molti scrittori e filosofi del secolo scorso hanno trovato nell'abitudine lo strumento adatto per mappare questo territorio, facendone uno dei più rilevanti snodi concettuali di un'epoca a sua volta tesa fra continuità e discontinuità. Il ritorno dell'abitudine quale tema privilegiato della ricerca filosofica fa dunque eco a quelle riflessioni, riprendendone le file interrotte. In questo volume, ponendo in dialogo alcuni dei capolavori della modernità letteraria con diverse prospettive filosofiche, si compongono le sfaccettature di un discorso che, mantenendo un'essenziale unità, si rifrange in diverse direzioni: Herni Bergson e lo spiritualismo francese gettano luce sulle rappresentazioni della routine in Marcel Proust e Samuel Beckett; "The Way of all Flesh" di Samuel Butler è letto come un riflesso letterario delle eterodosse teorie lamarckiane dell'autore; la nozione di habitus di Pierre Bourdieu si offre come chiave di lettura de "Il deserto dei Tartar" di Dino Buzzatii; la rappresentazione della dipendenza ne "La coscienza di Zeno" di Italo Svevo converge con il tardo pensiero di Sigmund Freud; la poetica dell'OuLiPo e l'opera di Georges Perec anticipano le teorie dell'antropologia filosofica dell'esercizio di Peter Sloterdijk. La costellazione così composta disegna uno sforzo trasversale di ripensare l'esperienza umana sotto il segno di un'identità minore, un'identità spogliata di ogni pretesa autarchica ma non per questo polverizzata o liquefatta.
Nei ritmi sempre più affannosi di una modernità mai conclusa l’indolenza diventa, se non un valor... more Nei ritmi sempre più affannosi di una modernità mai conclusa l’indolenza diventa, se non un valore, un prezioso elemento di contrasto. "La saggezza dei pigri" racconta e analizza tre personaggi letterari che, rifiutando di lavorare, danno corpo a uno sguardo alternativo sulla loro epoca. Bartleby, che nel racconto di Melville si ostina a “preferire di no”, esprime una reazione all’emergente capitalismo nel quale la dedizione al lavoro si coniuga all’edonismo consumista. James Wait, il marinaio allettato al centro di "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" di Conrad, è sintomo del conflitto fra esaltazione dell’operosità di una supposta comunità tradizionale e la consapevolezza della sua irrealtà. Sul rifiuto di lavorare del protagonista di "Murphy," poi, Beckett modula una riflessione sul rapporto fra attività e passività, interno e esterno, identità e differenza. In Bartleby, James Wait e Murphy si coglie il convergere della più grande potenzialità con la più radicale impotenza e in questo paradosso si configura un’idea dell’umano come intreccio fra creatività produttiva e sterile abbandono.
Traduzione, introduzione e cura di Francesco Baucia e Federico Bellini
Papers by Federico Bellini
Itinera, 2023
In this essay, I investigate some of the aspects of the resurgence of the theme of
habit at the ... more In this essay, I investigate some of the aspects of the resurgence of the theme of
habit at the dawn of the twentieth century by touching upon a series of paradigmatic texts of the modernist canon and by investigating their debts to and consonances with the contemporary philosophies of habit. My thesis is that during those decades – seen as a mere chapter in the longer history of modernity – the philosophical and literary theme of habit served not only as a way to understand and represent the ordinary dimension of life, but also as a means to develop an idea of human subjectivity that could mediate between the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies that permeated the competing ideologies of the time. The crisis of subjectivity that characterized modernism and which has often been simplistically represented as a disintegration of the subject into irredeemably broken fragments, should rather be seen as the development of a dialectical idea of a “minor subject”, that is, an open, dynamic, multilayered subjectivity still endowed by a certain malleable consistency. Both modernist literature and its philosophical counterparts found in the “minor subject” (here in the sense of “subject matter”) of habit, the opportunity to investigate and represent the porosity between activity and passivity, volition and determinism, individual identity and social structures, that characterize this idea of subjectivity.
I focus on three different representative – though not exhaustive – facets of the issue. In the first section, relying on Virginia Woolf's work, I highlight how some of the narrative techniques developed by modernist writers can be seen as an attempt to give a plastic representation to the blurred boundaries of subjectivity as captured in the everyday existence of their characters. I then connect these innovations to the theory of habit of Samuel Butler, whom Woolf identified as one of the harbingers of modernity. In the second section I focus on Marcel Proust to discuss how modernist writers proved to be able to combine two opposed views of habit: on the one hand, the view of habit as purely mechanical and leading to inauthentic life; on the other, the idea of habit as essential to the human being's potential for self-perfecting and creativity. The third section is dedicated to addiction, seen as a form of habit in which the subject is radically torn between opposite forces. Following insights from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I interpret Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience as a meditation on how such a torn subjectivity manifests the essential incompleteness of the human subject and life's insuppressible nostalgia for the inorganic.
Virginia Woolf’s blurred boundaries, Marcel Proust’s ambiguous authenticity, and Italo Svevo’s split selfhood are three interconnected facets of the modernists’ interest in the “minor subject” of habit. Investigating the interaction between the philosophical and the literary discourses on habit at the dawn of the twentieth century can contribute to a more nuanced reconstruction of a pivotal moment in the history of thought but also to the contemporary philosophical debate. Almost exactly one century later, the current renewed interest in the theme of habit mirrors a situation in part similar to what characterized the ideological landscape of the time, as now too it is concerned with the attempt to reimagine a “minor subject” that mediates between the postmodern pulverization of identity and the temptation of reaffirming anachronistic forms of strong subjectivities.
Miranda, 2022
In this essay I reflect on the role mathematics plays in Melville’s works and imagination moving ... more In this essay I reflect on the role mathematics plays in Melville’s works and imagination moving from one specific mathematical reference in chapter XCVI of Moby-Dick “The Try-Works.” Here Ishmael mentions the cycloid, a peculiar geometrical construct that was at the center of mathematical and philosophical debates during the 17th century. In the first part of my essay I show how it is only in the light of some of its properties that Ishmael’s playful reference to the cycloid can be understood, thus testifying to the author’s profound understanding of these mathematical notions. Moreover, Melville must have also been aware of the pivotal role the cycloid played in the history of early modern thought: the investigation into its properties was at the basis of the invention of calculus, which in turn was at the center of the philosophy of post-Cartesian thinkers such as Leibniz and Spinoza. Building on this, in the second part of my essay I intend to show how Ishmael’s mention of the cycloid can be seen as a reference to a philosophical worldview according to which nature appears as a continuum of indefinitely foldable matter, a view in which Melville conflates such diverse thinkers as Spinoza, Plato, Goethe or the Transcendentalists and which he presents as both fascinating and problematic. Once the cycloid episode is read in this light and put in relation to a series of structurally similar scenes throughout the novel, it can be interpreted as the representation of this ambivalent position, one of many instances of Melville’s ability to bring together and keep alternative worldviews in creative tension.
The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2022
“The work is everything,” says Ben, the main character of McCarthy’s play The Stonemason, summing... more “The work is everything,” says Ben, the main character of McCarthy’s play The Stonemason, summing up his grandfather Papaw’s view of the craft of the stonemason as the ground of beauty, justice, and truth. Judging from McCarthy’s inclination to indulge in extended descriptions of all sorts of labors and crafts he must, at least in part, agree with his character. As has been noted elsewhere, craftsmanship is a privileged theme in Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre, and the available archival material proves that the author has always been meticulous in gathering information about the crafts he has set himself to describe, undertaking extensive bibliographical research in all technical aspects and at times seeking help from specialist advisers. Relying on some manuscripts and letters held at the Wittliff Collections in San Marcos, Texas, this article investigates the way McCarthy collaborated with two specialist medical advisers, Dr. Oren Ellis and Dr. Barry King, in the writing of a scene of his novel The Crossing. The intention is to provide insight into McCarthy’s creative process and to further understand the way descriptions of crafts integrate within his overall poetics in what can be defined as an attempt to oversaturate the representation of reality.
Ever since Cesare Pavese's pioneering 1932 translation of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Italy has pro... more Ever since Cesare Pavese's pioneering 1932 translation of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Italy has proven particularly receptive to Herman Melville's masterpiece, which has not only been enthusiastically loved by generations of readers and stimulated the interest and acumen of local Americanists, but has also inspired an extensive number of Italian writers and artists. The first part of this article sketches a provisional map of some of the most recent examples of Moby-Dick's reception in the Italian arts. These range from Simona Mulazzani's dreamy etchings of tattooed whales and Giovanni Robustelli's delicate watercolours, to Sara Filippi Plotegher's environmentally inspired illustrations and designer Matteo Ugolini's Moby-Dick lamps. These works shed light on some of the meanings typically associated with Melville's work and how they have changed over the last two decades. In particular, I intend to show how the understanding of Melville's work has recently shifted from the somber and grave tone of early twentieth-century interpretations and rewritings - when it was all about tragedy, darkness, sacrifice, and folly - to the lighter tone of more recent admirers. Building on this shift, this essay investigates one of the most successful recent transmedial adaptations of Moby-Dick: Roberto Abbiati's play Una tazza di mare in tempesta (A Sea Storm in a Teacup). This adaptation distills Moby-Dick into a seventeen-minute show performed for a very small audience within a wooden box that simulates the hold of a tiny ship. Abbiati manages to evoke the whole drama by using figurines and found objects, as well as by selecting key passages from the novel with scalpel-like precision. Abbiati has also published a beautiful and singular graphic novel adaptation of Moby-Dick, summarizing each chapter of the book with only one drawing. Abbiati's works are evidence of the enduring vitality of Melville's presence in contemporary Italian art and offer the opportunity to appreciate the lighter dimensions of Moby-Dick.
La musica della poesia. Il suono e il senso nella lirica europea (1700-2000), a cura di Luca Zoppelli, 2024
Stevens' poetry is often defined by a deliberate pursuit of refined musicality, frequently paired... more Stevens' poetry is often defined by a deliberate pursuit of refined musicality, frequently paired with an indeterminacy of meaning. The two elements—musicality of sound and opacity of meaning—are deeply intertwined in both the implicit and explicit poetics of the poet. In this essay, I will trace the relationship between these components, beginning with the expressive noise effects of certain alliterative and onomatopoetic techniques, and progressing to more intricate structures where the primacy of the acoustic signifier is orchestrated to produce genuine musical effects. This progression extends to the adaptation of musical forms, such as the sonata or variation, for poetry. As we move from the first mode to the second, we will see how Stevens' musicality reflects a philosophy of poetry in which textual opacity results from the poet’s effort to distance his lyrical subjectivity, allowing signifiers to combine freely in a unique interpretation of Modernist theories of impersonality.
La poesia di Stevens è spesso caratterizzata da una deliberata ricerca di raffinatezza musicale, che è frequentemente accompagnata da una opacità del significato. I due elementi—musicalità del suono e opacità del significato—sono profondamente intrecciati sia nella poetica implicita che in quella esplicita del poeta. In questo saggio traccio la relazione fra queste due componenti, in un percorso che va dall'uso rumoristico-espressivo di certi giochi allitterativi e onomatopeici a strutture più complesse nelle quali la preminenza del significante acustico viene orchestrata in modo da produrre veri e propri effetti musicali, anche facendo ricorso a forme modellate direttamente su quelle proprie del linguaggio musicale, come la sonata o la variazione. Nel procedere dalla prima modalità alla seconda, si vedrà come la musicalità di Stevens rifletta una filosofia della poesia in cui l'opacità del testo è il risultato del tentativo compiuto dall'autore di rimuovere le tracce della propria soggettività lirica dall'opera, lasciando che i significanti si combinino in modo spontaneo, in una originale declinazione delle teorie moderniste dell'impersonalità.
The Victorian era is often considered to have been dominated by the 'Gospel of work', that is, th... more The Victorian era is often considered to have been dominated by the 'Gospel of work', that is, the ideology that identified work as one of the supreme virtues. However, starting from about the 1870s, this ideology started to be more and more radically questioned by several writers who claimed in favour of idleness. In this essay, I analyse and compare three of the most relevant British partisans of idleness of the period – Robert Louis Stevenson, Jerome K. Jerome and Oscar Wilde –, in order to show how idleness played a key role in the development of their poetic and how they contributed to its reevaluation as an alternative value for the modern times.
Nuova Secondaria, 2023
Dissipatio H.G., written by Guido Morselli (1912-1973), qualifies as one of the most curious Robi... more Dissipatio H.G., written by Guido Morselli (1912-1973), qualifies as one of the most curious Robinsonades of the twentieth century. The protagonist is a 40 year old misanthrope who, after having first planned and then renounced to commit suicide, wakes up to realize that all human beings but himself have disappeared from the face of the earth. Thus, the whole world turns into a desert island to the protagonist, who is led to face the Robinsonian challenge of making sense of his solitary life. However, while Robinson Crusoe struggles to recreate his beloved world on a smaller scale, Morselli's last man drifts through what remains of a civilization he used to despise. Descending from the mountain village where he had fled in search of tranquillity to the hated city of Crisopoli, he finds it transformed into an empty monument to meaningless wealth and to the systematic destruction of nature. In this radical rewriting of the Robinson Crusoe myth, Morselli develops some of the key themes of Defoe's novel while radically changing the perspective. In the essay, I consider the themes of work, of the relationship between humanity and nature and of individual beings and the redeeming otherness embodied by Friday.
Merope, 2019
In spite of radical differences in terms of themes and temperament, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and... more In spite of radical differences in terms of themes and temperament, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and Italo Svevo (1861-1928) have a lot in common: first, they both were multilingual writers who encompassed diverse languages, cultures and literary traditions; second, they both became professional writers only after having worked in different fields, an experience that had a significant impact on their work and worldview; and finally, they were both pivotal figures in the emergence of literary Modernism, intended as a reaction to the fin de siècle crisis on a transnational level. In this paper, I focus on this latter aspect by comparing the works of the two authors, especially those from the 1890s, in the light of their role as precursors of Modernism. Their juxtaposition reveals how both authors were influenced by the same philosophical concepts, the same scientific debates and theories, and the same literary models, as well as how they reacted in similar ways to these influences. In particular, I focus on the way they tackled the turn-of-the-century epistemological crisis by proposing an ethical alternative to the destruction of Kantian gnoseology based on a radically innovative view of the relationship between health and sickness, good and bad, and identity and difference.
RSA Journal, 2019
Possibly due to the fact that it has never been produced in its entirety, Cormac McCarthy's play ... more Possibly due to the fact that it has never been produced in its entirety, Cormac McCarthy's play The Stonemason has thus far received only scant attention by critics. However, an analysis of this text, supported by the manuscripts held at the Wittliff Collections, proves highly rewarding for an understanding of the author's poetics. In this paper, I first discuss the intrinsic limits of the play in light of the history of its reception and of its failed productions as well as McCarthy's misattribution of a quote from Jean-Baptiste Le Rond D'Alembert to Carl Friedrich Gauss in the first stage direction. Then, I analyze the play following McCarthy's own suggestion – recorded in his correspondence with Emily Mann – that the piece was intended to be “a simple, classical story about a hero and his mentor, how the hero loses his way, and how he recovers it”. In doing this, I rely on several intertextual references. Finally, I consider McCarthy's decision to publish the work in spite of its limitations as a meta-poetic statement about his own authorial ethics.
Este ensayo se propone contraponer dos conceptos muy diferentes de apocalipsis: por un lado el pe... more Este ensayo se propone contraponer dos conceptos muy diferentes de apocalipsis: por un lado el pensamiento apocalíptico como alternativa al desgastado pensamiento gnóstico de la modernidad occidental propuesto por Reyes Mate; por el otro la interpretación del Apocalipsis según san Juan como vestigio de un pensamiento mítico oculto detrás de la capa de ressentiment puesta por la tradición cristiana. Acercando estos dos conceptos aparentemente tan incongruentes propongo llevar a cabo un experimento hermenéutico para ensayar si, como en un arco eléctrico, de esta forma se puede producir alguna luz que contribuya a iluminar al mismo tiempo los dos conceptos y el campo que los separa.
Image & Narrative, 2018
In this paper I analyse and compare the motif of the rocking chair in some of Samuel Beckett's an... more In this paper I analyse and compare the motif of the rocking chair in some of Samuel Beckett's and Franz Kline's works. Rocking chairs appear in three of Beckett's main works: the novel Murphy, Film, and the short play Rockaby. Kline, in turn, painted a series of portraits of his wife sitting on a rocking chair in a pivotal moment in his life and career – as well as in the history of modern painting –, namely, in the years immediately preceding his turn to abstract painting. By comparing the uses of this apparently marginal motif I intend to show how they can mutually shed light onto each other and help address some of the major aspects of both bodies of work. In particular, I claim that the rocking chair served both authors as a sort of fetish object through which to address their views on the relation between the subject and the outer world, a major theme both in their works and lives which played a relevant role in the development of their creative process and the definition of their poetics.
European journal of American studies, 2017
The Stonemason (1995), Cormac McCarthy’s first published play, is a sustained meditation on the v... more The Stonemason (1995), Cormac McCarthy’s first published play, is a sustained meditation on the values of the ethic of craft as opposed to mere work, as well as on the difficult application of such values to reality. On the one hand, craft is represented as the quintessential value; on the other,
it is measured against the real world in which values have to be constantly renegotiated in order to be useful. In this essay, I analyze how the tension between the ideal of the “craftsman hero,” represented by Papaw, and Ben’s attempt to live up to it traverses The Stonemason through three distinct if intertwined levels. First is the individual level, at which craft is intended as Ben’s personal experience of learning from Papaw how to lay stone upon stone as he struggles to hold his family together. Second is the social level: stonemasonry is one element of the economic system which is the battlefield for the struggle between the effort of the oppressed to improve
their position and the ever-renewing ways in which the oppressors defend and exercise their power. Finally, there is the symbolic-mythical level: here stonemasonry is seen as the archetypical craft embodying a view of the world as the product of either a benevolent or an evil God. It is in the tension between the ideal and the reality of craftsmanship as it crosses these three dimensions that one can appreciate the full scope and complexity of McCarthy’s ethic of craft.
Hybris. Revista de filosofía, 2017
In this essay we interpret some of the more complex pages from the novel by Cormac McCarthy The C... more In this essay we interpret some of the more complex pages from the novel by Cormac McCarthy The Crossing as "philosophical parables", i.e., as a story within a story in which the author deals with some of the most stimulating philosophical and ethical issues. We refer to the ambiguous relationship between life (and death) human and animal as well as conceptualized in the figure of the Hunter; to the complicated network of
roots and adventure, destiny and determinism, sense and nonsense of all life; to the search for God as the guarantor of a full life that can never be achieved; the conditions of possibility of the truth in the narration and history. Finally, we consider how the work and philosophy of McCarthy can be interpreted as part the literature and postmodern thought.
L'analisi Linguistica e Letteraria , 2017
Relying on Max Weber’s and Colin Campbell’s description of the Spirit of Capitalism, I interpret ... more Relying on Max Weber’s and Colin Campbell’s description of the Spirit of Capitalism, I interpret the narrators of Melville’s Bartleby and Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! as embodying two complementary aspects of the same ethical attitude informing such spirit. This is characterized by the oscillation between sentimentalism and individualism, charity and egoism, idealism and pragmatism, which Melville detected in the everyman of his time. In particular, I focus on the references to the theological debate on free will and to the theme of melancholy as pivotal elements to comprehend Melville’s insight. Finally, I show how Merrymusk and Bartleby, the main characters of the stories, may be seen as representing Melville’s attempt to question the American society of his time.
Lingue e Linguaggi, 2017
In this essay, I investigate the role played by the work ethic in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. ... more In this essay, I investigate the role played by the work ethic in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. I interpret the novel, in the wake of Fredric Jameson and Giuseppe Sertoli, as a political allegory expressing Conrad's views on the crisis of the value of work which took place during the fin de siècle. The novel represents an idealized pre-modern organic community, based on discipline and work, and embodied by the crew of the Narcissus, as it is attacked by the evil forces of degenerate modernity, embodied by the two antagonists James Wait and Donkin and their refusal of work. On the one hand, Wait stands for the turn-of-the-century decadent culture, which was undermining the Victorian faith in work. On the other hand, Donkin stands for contemporary social movements and criticism of the labour system of the time. By analysing the way the ethic of work and its discontents are represented in The Nigger of the Narcissus, and by highlighting the ambiguous stance taken by the narrator and the author in the face of it, I intend to show how, in spite of his veneration of work, Conrad was well aware that such an attitude was quickly becoming anachronistic. The organic community in which the Victorian worship of work could be a meaningful social experience rather than a mere glorification of profit and social climbing was on the wane, and a new and more modern ethic of work had to be invented.
In F. Lonati, G. Segato (a cura di), "Il gioco per eccellenza: cinquant'anni di Cormac McCarthy",... more In F. Lonati, G. Segato (a cura di), "Il gioco per eccellenza: cinquant'anni di Cormac McCarthy", Milano: Sedizioni 2017
Il saggio offre una lettura del primo romanzo pubblicato da Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper, tesa a identificare in esso alcuni dei nuclei tematici che riappaiono in continue elaborazioni e variazioni in tutta la produzione dell'autore. Questi sono: l’assenza del padre, da intendersi tanto in senso letterale quanto come figura della mancanza di un orizzonte di riferimento trascendente; la ricerca di un senso dell’esistenza attraverso l’incontro con una figura d’autorità che riempie il vuoto lasciato dal padre; l'insistito ripercorrere la crisi della modernità come nostalgia per un passato tradizionale vissuto sempre solo nel ricordo; il confronto con il mondo della natura quale spazio di una alterità tanto vivificante quanto perturbante.
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Books by Federico Bellini
Papers by Federico Bellini
habit at the dawn of the twentieth century by touching upon a series of paradigmatic texts of the modernist canon and by investigating their debts to and consonances with the contemporary philosophies of habit. My thesis is that during those decades – seen as a mere chapter in the longer history of modernity – the philosophical and literary theme of habit served not only as a way to understand and represent the ordinary dimension of life, but also as a means to develop an idea of human subjectivity that could mediate between the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies that permeated the competing ideologies of the time. The crisis of subjectivity that characterized modernism and which has often been simplistically represented as a disintegration of the subject into irredeemably broken fragments, should rather be seen as the development of a dialectical idea of a “minor subject”, that is, an open, dynamic, multilayered subjectivity still endowed by a certain malleable consistency. Both modernist literature and its philosophical counterparts found in the “minor subject” (here in the sense of “subject matter”) of habit, the opportunity to investigate and represent the porosity between activity and passivity, volition and determinism, individual identity and social structures, that characterize this idea of subjectivity.
I focus on three different representative – though not exhaustive – facets of the issue. In the first section, relying on Virginia Woolf's work, I highlight how some of the narrative techniques developed by modernist writers can be seen as an attempt to give a plastic representation to the blurred boundaries of subjectivity as captured in the everyday existence of their characters. I then connect these innovations to the theory of habit of Samuel Butler, whom Woolf identified as one of the harbingers of modernity. In the second section I focus on Marcel Proust to discuss how modernist writers proved to be able to combine two opposed views of habit: on the one hand, the view of habit as purely mechanical and leading to inauthentic life; on the other, the idea of habit as essential to the human being's potential for self-perfecting and creativity. The third section is dedicated to addiction, seen as a form of habit in which the subject is radically torn between opposite forces. Following insights from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I interpret Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience as a meditation on how such a torn subjectivity manifests the essential incompleteness of the human subject and life's insuppressible nostalgia for the inorganic.
Virginia Woolf’s blurred boundaries, Marcel Proust’s ambiguous authenticity, and Italo Svevo’s split selfhood are three interconnected facets of the modernists’ interest in the “minor subject” of habit. Investigating the interaction between the philosophical and the literary discourses on habit at the dawn of the twentieth century can contribute to a more nuanced reconstruction of a pivotal moment in the history of thought but also to the contemporary philosophical debate. Almost exactly one century later, the current renewed interest in the theme of habit mirrors a situation in part similar to what characterized the ideological landscape of the time, as now too it is concerned with the attempt to reimagine a “minor subject” that mediates between the postmodern pulverization of identity and the temptation of reaffirming anachronistic forms of strong subjectivities.
La poesia di Stevens è spesso caratterizzata da una deliberata ricerca di raffinatezza musicale, che è frequentemente accompagnata da una opacità del significato. I due elementi—musicalità del suono e opacità del significato—sono profondamente intrecciati sia nella poetica implicita che in quella esplicita del poeta. In questo saggio traccio la relazione fra queste due componenti, in un percorso che va dall'uso rumoristico-espressivo di certi giochi allitterativi e onomatopeici a strutture più complesse nelle quali la preminenza del significante acustico viene orchestrata in modo da produrre veri e propri effetti musicali, anche facendo ricorso a forme modellate direttamente su quelle proprie del linguaggio musicale, come la sonata o la variazione. Nel procedere dalla prima modalità alla seconda, si vedrà come la musicalità di Stevens rifletta una filosofia della poesia in cui l'opacità del testo è il risultato del tentativo compiuto dall'autore di rimuovere le tracce della propria soggettività lirica dall'opera, lasciando che i significanti si combinino in modo spontaneo, in una originale declinazione delle teorie moderniste dell'impersonalità.
it is measured against the real world in which values have to be constantly renegotiated in order to be useful. In this essay, I analyze how the tension between the ideal of the “craftsman hero,” represented by Papaw, and Ben’s attempt to live up to it traverses The Stonemason through three distinct if intertwined levels. First is the individual level, at which craft is intended as Ben’s personal experience of learning from Papaw how to lay stone upon stone as he struggles to hold his family together. Second is the social level: stonemasonry is one element of the economic system which is the battlefield for the struggle between the effort of the oppressed to improve
their position and the ever-renewing ways in which the oppressors defend and exercise their power. Finally, there is the symbolic-mythical level: here stonemasonry is seen as the archetypical craft embodying a view of the world as the product of either a benevolent or an evil God. It is in the tension between the ideal and the reality of craftsmanship as it crosses these three dimensions that one can appreciate the full scope and complexity of McCarthy’s ethic of craft.
roots and adventure, destiny and determinism, sense and nonsense of all life; to the search for God as the guarantor of a full life that can never be achieved; the conditions of possibility of the truth in the narration and history. Finally, we consider how the work and philosophy of McCarthy can be interpreted as part the literature and postmodern thought.
Il saggio offre una lettura del primo romanzo pubblicato da Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper, tesa a identificare in esso alcuni dei nuclei tematici che riappaiono in continue elaborazioni e variazioni in tutta la produzione dell'autore. Questi sono: l’assenza del padre, da intendersi tanto in senso letterale quanto come figura della mancanza di un orizzonte di riferimento trascendente; la ricerca di un senso dell’esistenza attraverso l’incontro con una figura d’autorità che riempie il vuoto lasciato dal padre; l'insistito ripercorrere la crisi della modernità come nostalgia per un passato tradizionale vissuto sempre solo nel ricordo; il confronto con il mondo della natura quale spazio di una alterità tanto vivificante quanto perturbante.
habit at the dawn of the twentieth century by touching upon a series of paradigmatic texts of the modernist canon and by investigating their debts to and consonances with the contemporary philosophies of habit. My thesis is that during those decades – seen as a mere chapter in the longer history of modernity – the philosophical and literary theme of habit served not only as a way to understand and represent the ordinary dimension of life, but also as a means to develop an idea of human subjectivity that could mediate between the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies that permeated the competing ideologies of the time. The crisis of subjectivity that characterized modernism and which has often been simplistically represented as a disintegration of the subject into irredeemably broken fragments, should rather be seen as the development of a dialectical idea of a “minor subject”, that is, an open, dynamic, multilayered subjectivity still endowed by a certain malleable consistency. Both modernist literature and its philosophical counterparts found in the “minor subject” (here in the sense of “subject matter”) of habit, the opportunity to investigate and represent the porosity between activity and passivity, volition and determinism, individual identity and social structures, that characterize this idea of subjectivity.
I focus on three different representative – though not exhaustive – facets of the issue. In the first section, relying on Virginia Woolf's work, I highlight how some of the narrative techniques developed by modernist writers can be seen as an attempt to give a plastic representation to the blurred boundaries of subjectivity as captured in the everyday existence of their characters. I then connect these innovations to the theory of habit of Samuel Butler, whom Woolf identified as one of the harbingers of modernity. In the second section I focus on Marcel Proust to discuss how modernist writers proved to be able to combine two opposed views of habit: on the one hand, the view of habit as purely mechanical and leading to inauthentic life; on the other, the idea of habit as essential to the human being's potential for self-perfecting and creativity. The third section is dedicated to addiction, seen as a form of habit in which the subject is radically torn between opposite forces. Following insights from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I interpret Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience as a meditation on how such a torn subjectivity manifests the essential incompleteness of the human subject and life's insuppressible nostalgia for the inorganic.
Virginia Woolf’s blurred boundaries, Marcel Proust’s ambiguous authenticity, and Italo Svevo’s split selfhood are three interconnected facets of the modernists’ interest in the “minor subject” of habit. Investigating the interaction between the philosophical and the literary discourses on habit at the dawn of the twentieth century can contribute to a more nuanced reconstruction of a pivotal moment in the history of thought but also to the contemporary philosophical debate. Almost exactly one century later, the current renewed interest in the theme of habit mirrors a situation in part similar to what characterized the ideological landscape of the time, as now too it is concerned with the attempt to reimagine a “minor subject” that mediates between the postmodern pulverization of identity and the temptation of reaffirming anachronistic forms of strong subjectivities.
La poesia di Stevens è spesso caratterizzata da una deliberata ricerca di raffinatezza musicale, che è frequentemente accompagnata da una opacità del significato. I due elementi—musicalità del suono e opacità del significato—sono profondamente intrecciati sia nella poetica implicita che in quella esplicita del poeta. In questo saggio traccio la relazione fra queste due componenti, in un percorso che va dall'uso rumoristico-espressivo di certi giochi allitterativi e onomatopeici a strutture più complesse nelle quali la preminenza del significante acustico viene orchestrata in modo da produrre veri e propri effetti musicali, anche facendo ricorso a forme modellate direttamente su quelle proprie del linguaggio musicale, come la sonata o la variazione. Nel procedere dalla prima modalità alla seconda, si vedrà come la musicalità di Stevens rifletta una filosofia della poesia in cui l'opacità del testo è il risultato del tentativo compiuto dall'autore di rimuovere le tracce della propria soggettività lirica dall'opera, lasciando che i significanti si combinino in modo spontaneo, in una originale declinazione delle teorie moderniste dell'impersonalità.
it is measured against the real world in which values have to be constantly renegotiated in order to be useful. In this essay, I analyze how the tension between the ideal of the “craftsman hero,” represented by Papaw, and Ben’s attempt to live up to it traverses The Stonemason through three distinct if intertwined levels. First is the individual level, at which craft is intended as Ben’s personal experience of learning from Papaw how to lay stone upon stone as he struggles to hold his family together. Second is the social level: stonemasonry is one element of the economic system which is the battlefield for the struggle between the effort of the oppressed to improve
their position and the ever-renewing ways in which the oppressors defend and exercise their power. Finally, there is the symbolic-mythical level: here stonemasonry is seen as the archetypical craft embodying a view of the world as the product of either a benevolent or an evil God. It is in the tension between the ideal and the reality of craftsmanship as it crosses these three dimensions that one can appreciate the full scope and complexity of McCarthy’s ethic of craft.
roots and adventure, destiny and determinism, sense and nonsense of all life; to the search for God as the guarantor of a full life that can never be achieved; the conditions of possibility of the truth in the narration and history. Finally, we consider how the work and philosophy of McCarthy can be interpreted as part the literature and postmodern thought.
Il saggio offre una lettura del primo romanzo pubblicato da Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper, tesa a identificare in esso alcuni dei nuclei tematici che riappaiono in continue elaborazioni e variazioni in tutta la produzione dell'autore. Questi sono: l’assenza del padre, da intendersi tanto in senso letterale quanto come figura della mancanza di un orizzonte di riferimento trascendente; la ricerca di un senso dell’esistenza attraverso l’incontro con una figura d’autorità che riempie il vuoto lasciato dal padre; l'insistito ripercorrere la crisi della modernità come nostalgia per un passato tradizionale vissuto sempre solo nel ricordo; il confronto con il mondo della natura quale spazio di una alterità tanto vivificante quanto perturbante.
In Moby-Dick, Melville represents the natural environment as the mere superficial layer of an abyss populated by indifferent and ungraspable forces, overwhelming the human being and ultimately crushing him. McCarthy, in particular in The Road, forces his characters to face a natural world that clearly “was not made for man,” and much less for his happiness. In this paper, I evaluate commonalities and differences in the representation of the Gnostic dark side of Nature offered by the two authors. In particular, I focus on the ethical stance taken by the authors in front of the indifference of Nature – namely, Melville's ironic exercise of devotion without faith and McCarthy's elegiac praise of discipline beyond duty – in order to evaluate their potential purport for contemporary ecocritical debate.
Analyzing from some of the most significant texts, I discuss the intrinsic reasons of these formal experiments in the light of Beckett's whole artistic trajectory. First I highlight how Beckett's short forms are not to be considered as something given, but as the result of a process. Then, I propose a typology of techniques characterizing the two opposite but complementary aspects of such process: abstraction on the one hand – produced by means of symmetry and excavation – and complication on the other – produced by means of fragmentation and condensation. Geometrical simplification and condensed complication, the external compression of form and the internal contraction of matter: Samuel Beckett finds a balance between these two complementary aspects, creating works that are at the same time miniaturized and distilled, cameos and fragments.
"Transnational Subjects: Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Encounters"
Gerald Brenan is a very interesting if uncommon figure in English modernism. Grown up in India and South Africa, he received his education in England, and after fighting in WWI in France he became an active member of the Bloomsbury Group. Shortly afterward, not being able to face the costs of the expensive life of the London bohème, he took the surprising decision of moving to Yegen, a tiny and primitive village of then wild Andalusia. There, he led the life of an intellectual hermit, studying the thousands of books he had brought with him on a mule's back and struggling to become an accomplished writer. At the same time, though, he kept constantly in communication with some of the most prominent figures of the Group, some of which (V. Woolf, L. Strachey, R. Partridge, and D. Carrington among others) undertook the difficult trip to Yegen to visit him.
Brenan's self-exile to the geographical periphery of the cultural world of the time is probably one of the main reasons why he never attracted much critical attention. Nonetheless, that same peripheral collocation also served as a privileged vantage point from which to observe the dynamics of modernity as Brenan – despite his decision to live in a rural and underdeveloped area – always kept up with the British cultural climate. Moreover, even though Brenan never really entered in close contact with the Spanish cultural scene – apart from some sporadic exchanges with prominent Spanish intellectuals such as Luis Araquistáin –, he was an attentive observer of the cosas de Espaňa and he considered himself as an interpreter of the Spanish world for his British readers. In particular, he authored one of the earliest and most important books on the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Labyrinth, which was highly influential both in Britain and Spain. He also wrote a History of the Spanish Literature, a biography of Santa Teresa and several other books on Spanish topics.
In my paper I intend to investigate Brenan's role as 'cultural mediator' between Spain and Britain. On the one hand, I will take into account both Brenan's receptiveness to Spanish culture and his ability in adapting it for his readers; on the other hand, I will focus on the author interpretation, as a partial outsider, of the intellectual atmosphere of Bloomsbury modernism. In particular, I intend to study – within an imagological framework – to what extent Brenan's representation of the Spanish world was influenced by previous conventional images. On the one hand, Brenan knows that for his readers Andalusia “represents the height of the exotic and the Oriental” and tries to react against such stereotype; on the other, as claimed by Sir Raymond Carr, “there can be no doubt that Brenan inherited […] the stereotypes of the Romantics”. Such ambiguity, typical of Brenan's stance, will be finally evaluated against other authors' works, in particular those of Laurie Lee and Mario Praz.
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ESSE Conference, 22-26 August 2016
The National University of Ireland, Galway
Nei romanzi di Cesare Pavese le Langhe non sono uno sfondo pittoresco, ma quasi un personaggio che assiste agli eventi con regale o divino distacco. "Gli dèi sono il luogo", scrive nei Dialoghi con Leucò, e le sue colline appaiono davvero intrise di una vitalità pagana, che le riveste con gli attributi antropomorfi di divinità ctonie, come nel celebre passaggio di Paesi Tuoi nel quale si stagliano come profili di mammella. Nella loro ruvida morbidezza Pavese ritrova un senso femmineo della natura, i segni di un mondo ancestrale con il quale la cultura contadina conservava un rapporto fatto di riti, celebrazioni, abitudini. Dalle Langhe come teatro di questa ritualità legata alla terra Pavese risale ai tempi preistorici di un'umanità primitiva, ai culti delle madri, all'intreccio violento di sacrificio e fecondità. L'essere donna della terra Pavese l'aveva prima intuito vivendo in questo paesaggio, poi riscoperto nei testi della nuova antropologia che curava per la "Collezione di studi religiosi, etnologici e psicologici" e infine ribadito, capovolgendo l'identità, nelle sue poesie, in cui è l'amata a identificarsi con le colline.
In modo tutto diverso Beppe Fenoglio guardava allo stesso territorio, dove trascorse gran parte della sua vita e soprattutto l'esperienza della lotta partigiana. Il suo occhio non cerca i segni di un passato mitico e di storie archetipiche, ma le cicatrici ancora fresche di un passato storico saturo di violenza. Attorno ai paesi teatro dei suoi romanzi le colline non si stringono in un abbraccio di madre o matrigna, ma si dispongono in una folla di quinte ammassate, che proiettano ombre stranianti a seconda della prospettiva che le investe. Così esse mutano in una fantasmagoria di forme, facendosi ora il riparo che in anfratti e cascine offre calore e protezione, ora figure modellate in una sostanza d'incubo. In Una questione privata la fuga del protagonista è incanalata in un paesaggio che gli preme addosso e scivola via in frammenti sconnessi, mentre in Primavera di Bellezza la deformazione espressionistica del paesaggio si esprima talvolta in un'atmosfera fatata e sospesa, dai colori di fiaba gotica.
Pavese come Fenoglio nonostante la diversità di tavolozza, si ritrovano in un tono di fondo comune, un carattere anche stereotipicamente piemontese, che è come il riflesso morale della geologia di queste valli: una sobrietà appassionata, una virilità affettuosa, la declinazione del mito in una scala domestica e della tragedia in una forma composta.