The Immense Rumor

The European Journal of Humour Research, 2017

This essay provides a brief overview of English jokes targeting Italians, and sets out to show how internet memes are a progression of traditional jokes in which Italians are the butts but with a modern twist.

2009

On December 14th, under the series “Linguaggi di carta”, sponsored by the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies on Translation, Languages, and Culture (Dipartimento di studi interdisciplinari su traduzione, lingue e culture, or SITLeC), the recently published book by Dominic Stewart, Crossing the Cultural Divide: An Englishman in Italy, was presented. The event was chaired by Delia Chiaro, directress of the Department, and Rosa Maria Bollettieri, Derek Boothman, and Sam Whitsitt contributed comments. Dominic Stewart was also present.

"Altrelettere" | Special Issue, 2022

The coming of age genre has long been a male-dominated tradition (Lazzaro-Weiss 1990), but—as a consequence of the great success of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend tetralogy (2011-2014)—topics such girlhood and female friendship have begun to gain greater visibility in literature and the media. The issue aims to explore the ways in which female youth has been represented in modern and contemporary Italian cultural production before and after Ferrante’s novels. How have girls and young women been portrayed through the decades? Have the ways of representation changed based on social role models?

Irish Studies Review, 2011

The Irish have become embedded in the 'diaspora space' of England so that their presence is taken for granted. This article explores the ways in which films made by English directors include Irish characters in apparently unplanned and incidental ways which reflect their own assumptions and those of their audiences about the 'natural' place of the Irish in English social landscapes. It interrogates the understandings and intentions of the director (Richard Eyre), screenwriter (Patrick Marber) and actors (Judi Dench, Andrew Simpson) in the film Notes on a Scandal which adds an Irish character to Zoë Heller's novel. Many other narrative films contain small clues, usually denoted by voices, but also 'looks', culture and roles. These sources enrich the evidence available to social scientists analysing the deep entanglement of the Irish with both the long-settled and more recently arrived populations living in England.

2016

In this essay, I would like to explore the representations of Italy through the eyes of three outstanding postcolonial writers: Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje and Nuruddin Farah. Even though Italy is an oasis of art and culture, Jhumpa Lahiri looks at it with a profound sense of both admiration and sadness in Hema and Kaushik (2008). Her scrutiny of the ancient, pre-imperial ruins of the Etruscan period leads her characters to question life, death and marital life. Similarly, Ondaatje opposes an Italian Renaissance villa to the debris left behind by war in his well-known The English Patient (1992). His Punjabi character Kirpal Singh mentions Gabicce Mare, a place that soon after World War II will become a memorial and cemetery for the Indian troops who fought and died for the liberation of Italy. This discourse is picked up by Helena Janaczeck, a Polish-Italian writer who combines a narrative on Polish migration in Italy with an elegiac narrative about the cemetery and memorial in ...

2009

Urban studies (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2018

Since the early 2000s there has been an undeniable global escalation of negative othering discourses concerning migrants and refugees. The fixation on ethnic difference in these discourses blinds us toward possible sources of connection. To unsettle this essentialist discourse of othering, we need to consider practices that denormalise the taken-for-granted taxonomies of the Self and the Other at their cores and rethink conditions for connection. Urban relational initiatives, experiences and narrations could provide interesting perspectives for exploring new possibilities for connection in liquid modern times, where old-fashioned collective categories lost their function. A multilayered, non-centric, non-celebratory approach of friendship as an empirical and conceptual frame provides a refreshing angle for capturing the multiplicity of everyday urban interactions. The contributions to this special issue provide insights toward enlarging our imaginings of the myriad ways that friends...

Fast Capitalism, 2008

Mosca-Italy has been always close to the heart of modern social theory. If one were to stretch the point to include Augustine of Hippo's formative years in Milan, one might even say that the seeds of critical social theory as it came to be were planted in Augustine's City of God which was in effect, if not design, a transcendental critical theory of Rome's collapse before Alaric's invasion in 410 C.E. Wherever one locates the origins of Italian social thought it would be hard to deny that Gramsci, in particular, is the principal figure in the modern era. Prison Notebooks ranks as a masterwork of critical theory and a work well ahead of its time (arguably more subtle, if less systematic, than the early writings of Adorno and Horkheimer). At the very least, the notebooks did more, and did it earlier, to lay down the working principles of a comprehensive outline of the cultural crisis of the modern State than even the parallel movement in Germany. Not only that, but Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemonies was a precursor of Althusser's famous essay on the cultural effects of State power and, at the least a marker on the way to, if not a direct source of, Foucault's later theories of biopower and governmentality. More recently, Hardt and Negri's Empire, while of mixed Italian heritage, calls attention to the value of Gramsci's thinking in the renewal of Italian social theory upon its foundational ties to the younger Marx's revision of left Hegelianism. The, to me, inexplicable success of Empire goes mostly to demonstrate the greater originality of Gramsci's ideas. Where Gramsci was careful (a care required to confound his prison censors), Hardt and Negri are breathtakingly careless in their silly misappropriations of Foucault and Deleuze. Still, it is good that attention has turned to the Italian traditions which, if we are to be fully serious about them, requires the study of two who by the refinements of their expositions represent the Italian way in a fashion reminiscent of Gramsci's. These, then, are the other Italians-Umberto Eco and Giorgio Agamben. Perhaps because, like Vico before them, both Eco and Agamben started out as medievalists (which is to say, classicists), their writings are fraught with riddles. It should be said, however, that like Gramsci, whose writings were necessarily over-coded, their mystery stories are meant to be solved. Then too where they are inscrutable it is less painfully for irony's sake, as in the earlier writings of Derrida and the two great books of Deleuze and Guattari. Eco and Agamben incline toward the mysterious and do so not for their own religious purposes but because of the religious questions intrinsic to medieval thought and culture; in particular, they address two of the most inscrutable mysteries of the boundaries between the human and the nature-mysteries, whether theological or existential, all humankind must confront: lies and life. How are we to live if things are as they seem or as they are said to be? Do we have any real alternative but to pick from the forbidden tree of knowledge at the cost of our idealize nature? In A Theory of Semiotics (1979), Eco makes the remarkable observation that "every time there is signification there is the possibility of lying." More fully, Eco states (58-59): Every time there is [the] possibility of lying, there is a sign-function: which is to signify (and then to communicate) something to which no real state of things corresponds. A theory of codes must study everything that can be used to lie. One clue as to what he is driving at is in the title of the 1968 Italian edition of Theory of Semiotics: La struttura assente (The absent structure) which of course is a reference to Ferdinand de Saussure's classical statement of the elements of semiology. The structures of all signifying systems, including spoken languages, are organized not upon the correspondence between signs and things in the world but in a social contract by which the effective communication of meanings depends on an absent structure in the form of any given system of signs and rules