Volume 43, Number 2, 2022

IT:

Ci sono concetti e storie che, letti insieme, riescono ad illuminare la realtà in modi inattesi. È quanto è capitato a me nelle prime fasi della pandemia di COVID-19, quando le mie letture di Levi si sono intrecciate con la biosemiotica, un paradigma teorico che aiuta a capire come funziona lo scambio di segni sotteso alle dinamiche biologiche. Scritto durante quei mesi difficili, questo saggio è il risultato di quell’esperienza. Prendendo la biosemiotica come chiave interpretativa, nelle pagine che seguono userò due diversi scritti di Primo Levi – “L’amico dell’uomo” dalle Storie naturali e I sommersi e i salvati – per esplorare quanto profondamente la comunicazione sia parte del tessuto stesso della nostra vita, dalle cellule agli organismi della società. Vedremo come la libera espressione di questo impulso semiotico – un desiderio di vivere attraverso la circolazione di segni – sia rintracciabile in tutti gli strati della materia vivente. E vedremo come esso non sia solo la condizione per la sopravvivenza, ma tout court la forza indispensabile che rende possibile l’evoluzione naturale e i cambiamenti culturali.

EN:

This essay sets itself two objectives. The first objective is to call attention to how Calvino looks at the visual style of Charles Fourier’s writings as a model of utopianism that aspires to achieve a maximum degree of ekphrastic effect and vision. To this model, as it is shown, Calvino opposes a perspective consisting of envisioning utopia not in the form of fullness and plenitude (the fullness and plenitude of a perspicuous and complete picture) but in the form of glimpses and fragments. The second objective is to bring into focus the restrained ekphrastic force of Calvino’s utopia that emerges, most prominently in Le città invisibili. As it is argued, this restrained ekphrasis generates a utopianism without utopia, the author’s response to the crisis of contemporary utopian imagination.

EN:

This essay traces the parallels between Vita nuova 19 and the impasse at the gate of the City of Dis in Inferno in order to propose Medusa and Beatrice as diametrically opposed figures. Whereas Beatrice activates the intellect and catalyzes internal reflection and conversion, Medusa deactivates the intellect and obstructs reflection and conversion. Moreover, contextualizing the Medusa figure within the wider approach to the gate in Inferno 8 and 9 reveals the figure to be linked to the forging of the poet’s novel apostrophic mode of reader engagement inaugurated in those cantos. Dante weaves into both of these episodes a philosophical / theological discourse of light and darkness, drawing upon Aristotelian sources filtered through Guido Guinizzelli, as well as the Pauline dialectic of light and darkness in 2 Corinthians. Moreover, Dante the poet unfolds the Medusa / Beatrice binary alongside his development of his novel apostrophic mode, thus laying out the parallel actions of viewer and reader, both of which depend upon healthy intellects capable of absorbing and reflecting divine light in a way that brings about conversion.

EN:

This essay discusses the construction of a post-traumatic subjectivity in Tornatore’s La sconosciuta. Following a sex-trafficking survivor’s struggle against ghosts of the past as well as present forms of offences and vulnerabilities, the narrative unfolds through flashbacks and dramatizations of the victim’s precariousness as an Eastern European, irregular, immigrant woman. The nexus that emerges between traumatization and stigmatization circles around the woman’s body and the contrast it personifies between her perceived cultural inferiority and physical desirability. Just as this character exposes the prejudice and discriminatory behaviour that perpetuate exclusion of ethnic minorities as well as systems and structures of injustice and exploitation, the ambivalences she embodies as a diligent and caring but also deceptive and violent nanny questions the victim/criminal paradigm typically present in public discourses concerning irregular immigrants and trafficking victims, especially. The critique of essentialist perceptions and practices merges with a focus on retraumatizing re-experiences that are triggered by sensory impressions and distressful interactions. Critical perspectives on complex trauma will illuminate possible correlations between the acute and protracted abuse represented and the susceptibility the character shows toward revictimization as well as the self-destructive and partly violent tendencies she exhibits. When she eventually starts to articulate past events and acquires a gradual control over her memories, it is largely for the presence of listeners who communicate empathy and detachment. Finally, it is this critical attitude that spectators are encouraged to assume to consider interconnections between essentialist exclusion, acute and protracted exploitation, and structures and systems of global injustice.

EN:

Luigi Malerba uses his knowledge of peasant society to publish, in 1963, his first book of fiction, La scoperta dell’alfabeto (The Discovery of the Alphabet). While this collection of brief narratives represents the sharecroppers known by Malerba in his youth, the focus of the text (and of this essay) is the narrating voice. Specifically, his transformation from “il ragazzo” (“the boy”) of the opening tale into “l’uomo” (the man) of the concluding novella. The tales of peasant life that comprise the bulk of the text are non-chronologically ordered elements of a recherche that, at the book’s end, leaves unelaborated and repressed the narrator’s participation in and perpetuation of the long-standing system of class oppression of which he is a beneficiary. Moreover, consideration of the modifications wrought in the definitive 1971 edition, when juxtaposed to the two experimental novels by Malerba published in the interim, Il serpent (The Serpent, 1966) and Salto morale (What Is This Buzzing? Do You Hear It Too?, 1968), enables us to chart Malerba’s gradual supersession of the neorealism of his mentor, Cesare Zavattini.

IT:

L'articolo presenta i risultati di uno studio esplorativo condotto in collaborazione con il personale docente in Italia e in Svizzera sul tema della percezione della dimensione cooperativa e di quella collaborativa nell’insegnamento dell’italiano. L’articolo dapprima inquadra la cooperazione e la collaborazione nel contesto della glottodidattica, e poi presenta le specificità del campione e dello strumento di ricerca. Segue l’analisi dei dati, che porta a una serie di riflessioni e di analisi operative per l’educazione linguistica.

IT:

Gran parte della critica ha definito i romanzi di Elsa Morante un prodotto realistico e oggettivamente pessimistico tale da non offrire al lettore possibilità di salvezza. In realtà, andando oltre il livello superficiale di lettura dei testi morantiani, si può scorgere un “sistema” perfetto pensato per fornire al lettore, come anche allo stesso autore nell’atto creativo, un’alternativa positiva soltanto mediante il valore catartico e, quindi, compensatorio, della tragedia e del dramma umano. Questo livello latente di lettura e interpretazione, partendo proprio dalle considerazioni di Sigmund Freud sino a toccare il concetto di “scrittura come riparazione” di Stefano Ferrari, può risultare utile e analiticamente fecondo soprattutto se si parte dalla constatazione che la stessa Elsa Morante non fu immune da quella cosiddetta “cultura dell’inconscio.” Analizzando le memorie del procidano come “odissea alla rovescia” del protagonista per il superamento di un complesso edipico irrisolto, il lettore de L’isola di Arturo, “prima persona responsabile,” potrà, dunque, nel caos totale di morte e distruzione, mediante le figure antieroiche dei personaggi di carta e secondo lettura fornita da Melanie Klein, trovare una via di fuga soddisfacente al male universale, intendendo, così, l’esperienza del lutto e della separazione come necessaria premessa a una riformulazione tardiva, ma urgente, di una soggettività frammentata. Quella “fisiologia compensatoria” che ha le sue radici nell’esperienza terapeutica della letteratura e della testimonianza del sé (operazione memoriale analoga alla scrittura di Proust) caratterizza l’“opera di pensiero” di Elsa Morante.

EN:

Dino Buzzati’s most famous text, The Tartar Steppe (1940), is not simply the story of a young officer dispatched to do service in a remote fortress overlooking a vast northern desert, but a continuous oscillation between chronicle and fabulous realism. The narrative elicits a feeling of sharp malaise, a sense of anguish similar to the one conveyed by existentialist philosophy and Kafka’s fiction. By comparing Buzzati’s novel to its progenitors, this essay depicts the central experience of its main character as a journey to the afterlife where people, objects, and landscapes are but projections of a spiritual limbo.