Volume 41, Number 1, 2020

EN:

This article examines the cultural impact of personal computers in Italian literature in the first decade of their mass diffusion (from the mid-1980s to the second half of the 1990s) through the analysis of four texts written by some of the most respected writers of the time: Primo Levi’s article “Personal Golem” (1985), Umberto Eco’s novel Il pendolo di Foucault (1988), Francesco Leonetti’s novel Piedi in cerca di cibo (1995), and Daniele Del Giudice’s story “Evil Live” (1997). More than simply addressing the advent of personal computers, what these texts have in common is the use of religious images and metaphors in order to make sense of the new technology. This study aims at showing how this frame of reference served the four writers in expressing the contradictions inherent to the machine. Bulky and tangible because of its hardware, but animated by an elusive and mysterious software, the personal computer was perceived at the same time as a dull office appliance and a threatening virtual entity. Finally, by showing how timely and well-informed these literary works on the impact of PCs are, this article wants to make the case for considering the role of literature in shaping computer culture.

IT:

Secondo Carlo Bo, dopo secoli di antispagnolismo, solamente con lo scoppio della Guerra civil la cultura spagnola entrò di nuovo “nel giro delle nostre idee.” Il presente studio, pertanto, intende indagare il caso letterario che probabilmente meglio documenta il tentativo di riappropriazione letteraria e ideologica che gli intellettuali italiani hanno operato a vantaggio della cultura spagnola a partire dalla fine degli anni Trenta, ossia la straordinaria fortuna del Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías di Federico García Lorca. Nello specifico, si analizzerà la traduzione realizzata da Leonardo Sciascia e la conseguente diatriba letteraria sorta con i precedenti interpreti lorchiani, con l’obiettivo di evidenziare, all’interno del più ampio contesto ricettivo dell’elegia, le peculiarità ideologiche insite nell’operazione, non sempre fortunata, dell’autore siciliano.

EN:

One of the most acclaimed (female) voices of contemporary Sardinian and Italian literature, Michela Murgia offers in her short novel L’incontro a powerful expression of poietic writing. Writing as poiēsis, as creative force capable of shaping reality through theoretical reflection, expresses itself in the in-between space of literal and metaphorical orders. In particular, L’incontro represents an expression of poietic writing in its combination of female theology and community activism. This contribution reads L’incontro, a novel of formation unfolding along the preparations for the traditional Sardinian Easter ritual of S’incontru, through the lens of feminist theology and within the theoretical framework provided by the theorization of sexual difference. Marina Warner’s (1976) and Virginia Ramsey Mollenkott’s (1983) feminist biblical exegesis, in conversation with the “teologia al femminile” elaborated by Marinella Perroni and Cristina Simonelli, connect Murgia’s L’incontro to her theological essay, Ave Mary: E la Chiesa inventò la donna (2011). In this context Murgia’s writing articulates a concept of poiēsis that intertwines thinking and doing, transcendence and immanence while shaping a more open and inclusive community.

EN:

This article examines one of Tomizza’s unjustifiably understudied texts within two primary contexts: one formed around the historical, political and social background of early 20th-Century Trieste, the other around the author’s recurrent concern with hybrid characters and geopolitical, cultural and linguistic borderlands. At the surface, these contexts are dramatised to revisit a political and ethnic conflict from the viewpoint of one of its most invisible victims. To uncover the novel’s more deep-running operations, however, this study takes a narratological approach and applies perspectives associated with imagology and linguistic hybridity as well as theories of border writing and border-crossing. Whereas the narrative fusion of historical reconstruction, self-reflexive commentaries, epistolary testimonies and mythical fictionalisations creates a discourse of literary fragmentation and deterritorialisation, the protagonist’s biographical background and socio-culturally embedded experiences are interlaced to represent a liminal character formed by dual perspectives, plurilingual enunciations and incompatible loyalties. Franziska exists between history and myth and as she increasingly acquires different cultural codes, she also comes to linger, irreconcilably, between different and conflicting cultural civilisations. Just as the multidimensional text questions norms of literary unity, so does this fluid character expose stereotypical conceptions of ethnic identities. As an amalgamated device, the self-referential narrator and the border crosser he constructs expose not only ideals of linguistic and cultural purity but also totalitarian conceptions of geographical and cultural borders. Ultimately, this experimental literary operation implicates the reader in a democratic literacy of multiple perspectives that questions normative notions of identities, belonging, culture and nationhood.

EN:

When in 1834, during his Grand Tour of Europe, Hans Christian Andersen set foot in Naples, he was immediately won over by the exuberant vitality of the Neapolitan people. The Parthenopean city, where he “was exposed to sensuality as a daily temptation” (Rossel, “Hans Christian Andersen” 24 and “Do You Know the Land” 95), also awakened Andersen’s more repressed instincts. From this experience he drew material for his most autobiographical novel, Improvisatoren (1835; The Improvisatore), whose protagonist tries to and succeeds in resisting the seductions of Neapolitan sensuality. If on the one hand the Danish author underwent the typical experience of the Northern traveller visiting the South and, more specifically, Naples, enjoying its openness and gaiety, on the other hand he never completely abandoned himself to Southern allures, upholding his moral and religious beliefs against a city that continuously attempted to wholly seduce him. The present paper aims to retrace Andersen’s first journey to Naples—where, by the writer’s own account, “the blood boils” (The Diaries of Hans Christian Andersen 85)—as a voyage into a tempting sensuality, contextualizing it within the wider context of nineteenth-century travelling experience in the city by Northern travellers.

IT:

L’architettura e gli spazi urbani delle città italiane, nei primi decenni successivi al Secondo conflitto mondiale, appaiono rappresentare in chiave figurata i contenuti di un nuovo innesto comportamentale sulla tradizionale edilizia che si confrontava con le coordinate contemporanee del consumismo. La definizione di un’inedita gamma valoriale — suscitata dalla modernità — viene sperimentata nella modifica degli atteggiamenti sottoscritti dalla popolazione rurale, per i quali non mancavano le osservazioni critiche di intellettuali come Pier Paolo Pasolini, che avvertiva, preoccupato, quanto potesse essere infido, per quella umanità, il cedere alla lusinga del comfort. Simili richiami alla responsabilità e al guardare con prudenza ai moderni ritrovati andavano interessando anche i prodotti di architettura, soprattutto per gli edifici sacri — da ricostruire o da realizzare ex-novo — che cedendo il passo alla modernità andavano rinunciando, in molti casi, all’implicita genesi di “opera monumentale,” essendo, per antonomasia, i luoghi di culto riconosciuti, da sempre, quali edifici identitari. Il sacro e l’architettura del sacro “subiscono” o “inverano” un processo di “desacralizzazione” per divenire testimonianze secolari.