Mediating culture in the Italian literary field, 1940s-1950s: an introduction

This introduction lays out the scholarly and methodological context where to situate the contributions to this special issue. By combining a rigorous scrutiny of hitherto untapped archival sources with a re-examined application of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture within the field of periodical studies and publishing history in Italy (1940s-1950s), the studies illuminate the complex ways in which journals, periodical editors, and the connected publishing houses negotiate cultural practice in a literary field increasingly dominated by the polarization of political discourse

Introduction: rupture and continuity in the Italian literary field 1926-1960

Introduction to the Special Issu

Officina: Experiments in Engagements in the Arts

This article is primarily concerned with interconnections between forms of impegno (political engagement) and aesthetic choices, as they were articulated in the literary and cultural journal Officina. In order to reassess the role of Officina within the Italian cultural and political debate of the day, this article considers two main narratives unfolding in the journal: the aesthetic rejection of Novecentismo, understood as the epitome of artistic autonomy, and the articulation of a form of Marxist impegno suitable for a neo-capitalist society and stemming from the class-based idea of the organic intellectual. Using published and unpublished correspondence, we argue that Officina had a pivotal role in producing a theoretical framework for the conceptualisation of a post-neorealist idea of Marxist critical analysis as well as of intellectual, aesthetic and political engagement.</jats:p

Il testo fantasticizzato e goticizzato come metafora della destrutturazione del discorso ‘nazione’: attorno agli scrittori scapigliati

Beginning in the late 1870s in Italy, new narrative forms, mixing elements borrowed from the Gothic and fantastic genres and modes with those from historical realism, started to enjoy much greater success and to find more followers and practitioners. More specifically, at the margins of an already existing hypothetical historical-realist narrative block, heterodoxical narrative expressions were coming into being. These were often populated by physically dismembered and psychologically multi-faced ‘in-between’ characters, who were traditionally depicted through Northern European forms of the Gothic and fantastic, until the leading members of the first Italian avant-garde movement, the Milanese Scapigliatura, transplanted their interpreations of the story of Italian national unification into their short stories and novels. In the texts analyzed, the use of the typically Gothic and fantastic motifs of the uninhabited house (or habited by ghosts) and the feminine body, both in its phenomenology of the mother, nurse and spouse, and in that of the faithless, fallen and sick woman, function as metaphors to portray the shape of the national body. By looking at the representations of the house, the female body and marriage, this article demonstrates how the heroines of the post-unification novels Fosca (1869) by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti and Senso (1883) by Camillo Boito understand and construct their corporeality as the epistemological locus where the ethical ambivalence towards the disappointing outcomes of national unification could be expressed. Therefore, the Gothic with its instances of social subversion embodied in the heroines in the castle, and the fantastic with its ontology of ‘hesitation’ and of the fragmented and divided body could offer the ideal narrative solution for portraying the failure of Italy’s palingenetic re-birth during the Risorgimento

Quale fascismo?: muralismo, nuovo muralismo e arte di strada

Nel 1933 Mario Sironi, artista di punta del regime, decise che la pittura da cavalletto avrebbe dovuto essere sostituita dal muralismo. In questo articolo, mi soffermo sull’analisi di due murali commissionati dal regime per decorare l’esterno dei all’EUR e celebrare il progetto corporativo a due artisti futuristi che avevano giocato un ruolo di primo piano nelle politiche culturali del regime: Enrico Prampolini, Le Corporazioni (1941) e Fortunato Depero Le professioni e le arti (1942). Di seguito, mi concentro su alcune espressioni contemporanee di arte strada e nuovo muralismo realizzate in chiave antifascista, e suddivise per iconicità nei lavori di Jorit e di Cibo; per impatto urbano in sedi con una storia di antifascismo nei quartieri romani della Garbatella e Quadraro, e nel quartiere dell’Ortica a Milano. Pertanto, la domanda principale che si pone questa analisi è: come articolano l’arte di strada e il nuovo muralismo contemporanei le rappresentazioni del fascismo per problematizzare la relazione tra individuale e collettivo nel discorso pubblico

Delusional identities: The politics of the Italian Gothic and fantastic in Igino Ugo Tarchetti's Trilogy Amore nell'arte and Luigi Gualdo's Short Stories, "Allucinazione", "La canzone di Weber" and "Narcisa"

This article builds on Homi Bhabha's argument that, although a sort of central linear writing expresses a sense of nationhood, writing the story of a nation demands the articulation of a type of ambivalence frequently associated with the uncanny process of the doubling of the self. This ambivalence is voiced through discourses on the dialectic between reason and unreason, and articulated through the representation of deviant sexual desire towards women. In the context of their Italian reception after national unification in 1861, the Gothic and the fantastic were used by writers belonging to marginal literary environments both to challenge representations of femininity against the rules of a patriarchal society, and to voice their disillusionment with the social and political results of the perceived "failed and disjointed" unification. This article analyses representations of women, understood as metaphors of the nation, and men, seen as silenced bards of the new nation, in key texts of the period: Amore nell'arte by I. U. Tarchetti (1869) and Luigi Gualdo's short stories, "Allucinazione", "La canzone di Weber" and "Narcisa" (1868). In these texts, the female protagonists are depicted as women who fail to adjust to the rules set by the new middle classes responsible for guiding ethically, ideologically and socially the newly-formed nation, while men are seen as unable to sustain any social unity, and as being driven rather by necrophilic instincts towards the female. © The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved