Documents found
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1652.
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1653.More information
AbstractThe article argues that the locus of the most interesting and important work in the fields of immigration and labor history lies precisely at the intersection of class and ethnicity. In developing this thesis, particularly with respect to Italian immigrant working-class movements in the United States, the author draws on his experiences as a working-class ethnic and historian as well as his readings of the literature.In the course of his research on Italian immigrants in Chicago, the author stumbled upon the submerged, indeed suppressed, history of the Italian American left. Italian-American working-class history has since been the focus of his work. Since mainstream institutions had neglected the records of this history, the recovery of rich documentation on Italian American radicalism has been a source of particular satisfaction. These movements had also been "forgotten" by the Italian Americans themselves. Despite important work by a handful of American scholars, relatively few Italian American historians have given attention to this dimension of the Italian American experience. Curiously the topic has received more attention from scholars in Italy.Mass emigration as much as revolutionary movements was an expression of the social upheavals of turn-of-the-century Italy. As participants in those events, the immigrants brought more or less inchoate ideas of class and ethnicity to America with them. Here they developed class and ethnic identities as Italian-American workers. The construction of those identities has been a process in which the Italian immigrants have been protagonists, filtering cultural messages through the sieve of their own experiences, memories, and values. Historians of labor and immigration need to plumb the sources of class and ethnic identity more imaginatively and sensitively, recognizing that personal identity is a whole of which class and ethnicity are inseparable aspects. The author calls upon historians to salvage and restore the concepts of class and ethnicity as useful categories of analysis.
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1654.More information
The classification and interpretation of intermedial texts (i.e. texts combining words and images), depend on the point of view taken in the context of communication, which implies either the production or the reception of such texts. Production is in some cases simultaneous (posters, comic strips, advertisements), and in others consecutive (art criticism, ekphrasis, illustrations). The reception of an intermedial text is mostly simultaneous (illustrations, posters, advertisements) and in some particular cases (art criticism, ekphrasis) consecutive. Based on these criteria – simultaneity and consecutiveness – a distinction can be made between different degrees of interweaving word and image in intermedial discourse. A third criterion, that of distinctiveness (i.e. the physical possibility of separating word and image) can be applied. This enables us to distinguish between four different degrees of interaction: transposition, juxtaposition, combination, and fusion of word and image. Such categories open the way for a theoretical construction of virtual types of interaction and intermediality. A limited number of categories enables us to define any occurrence of intermedial discourse as a specific combination of intermedial types. This does not mean that occurrences are necessarily limited to the number of categories suggested, for the latter do not constitute a limited number of types of intermediality as various other combinations are possible. The commemorative stamp, almost always an intermedial discourse, demonstrates perfectly the descriptive power of the theory proposed here, at the same time as it illustrates the specific artistic creativity evident in each stamp. An analysis of word and image relations in a corpus of contemporary Dutch stamps supports the validity of the categories of intermedial discourse suggested and the possibility of combining them in a single commemorative stamp.
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1655.More information
Works from the social sciences contend that pharmaceutical treatments play a central role in the expansion of the medicalization process. Drugs also change the way people view their action on the body. Drawing on data collected using semi-structured interviews with 26 women in France, this paper explores women's uses of hormone replacement therapy and compares them to those reported by earlier works on Viagra users. Data suggest that both drugs are used for restorative, normalizing and body enhancement purposes. Differences are outlined regarding the inscription of the drug in the body which is deemed to be natural or artificial.
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1657.More information
The author proposes to examine imagined sociabilities specific to French-Canadian women of letters as they can be read in newspapers and periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century. More specifically, the study focuses on the imaginary literary community constructed by women of letters through an analysis of the list of authors most often recommended by Joséphine Marchand, Françoise (pen name of Robertine Barry), Gaétane de Montreuil (pen name of Georgina Bélanger) and Madeleine (pen name of Anne-Marie Gleason) in the various newspapers and journals that carried their columns. This notable list offers a unique perspective on popular culture during that era. Besides highlighting significant distortions between authors of this list and those we consider the major authors of the time, preliminary results allow us to posit the hypothesis that underneath the apparent moral and social conformity of the reading suggestions, these women of letters construct a female literary community potentially receptive to certain literary practices specific to women without crashing headlong into the dominant ideology.
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1659.More information
This essay furnishes a critical interpretation of Federico De Roberto’s novel The Viceroys (1894) within the theoretical coordinates provided by Giorgio Agamben’s notions of “potentiality” and “impotentiality” (dynamis and adynamia, respectively, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics). The essay argues that two apparently marginal characters in the story—Chiara’s aborted fetus and Cavaliere Eugenio—embody a possibility that is open to a radical unpredictability, which is to say, to an “impotentiality” that contrasts both Benedetto Croce’s naturalistic reading of the novel and Vittorio Spinazzola’s materialist account of it. In fact, Chiara’s fetus and Eugenio are presented as metaphors of the power of imagination and literature embedded in life (in the bíos). Such a power is opposed to that of “race,” upon which critics usually flatten their interpretations of The Viceroys and, in particular, their readings of Consalvo’s concluding speech to his aunt Ferdinanda (“no, our race has not degenerated; it is the same as it ever was”).
Keywords: De Roberto, Agamben, Darwin, The Viceroys, Race, Power, Illusion