Abstract: In Italy, the question of the relationship between literature and reality has long been at the center of critical debate, and this continues to be the case for contemporary fiction. Many critics map today’s literature in terms of a shift from an apolitical postmodernism to a newly discovered ethical basis for fiction. Literature, they claim, has regained the function of providing a critical perspective on social reality. These attempts to deny the existence of a continuity between postmodernism and contemporary literature are often due to the misconception that postmodernist irony is associated only with a poetics of relativism and self-referentiality, and does not carry a message of solidarity that promotes social commitment. In this paper I will argue that Vattimo’s philosophy of weak thought, and Eco’s theory of postmodernist irony shed new light on the relationship between irony and social commitment, and contradict both the view of postmodernism as divorced from ethics, and the idea that there was a radical break between postmodernism and the humanist poetics of modernist authors. Italian postmodernism thus offers, I contend, a paradigmatic case for European literature of how the discourse of political commitment is a continuum from the beginning of the last century to today, where the so-called “political unconscious” of modernist texts is still at work in the reader-oriented ethics of postmodernists.

Abstract: My title is taken from an episode of the US sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm. The claim is made by the main character, Larry David (played by the real Larry David), and although it sounds reasonable enough, it is, in fact, as the entire episode reveals, perilously simplistic. Larry utters the fateful words at a gala evening at a research center in L.A., to which he has made a substantial !nancial donation. On arriving, accompanied by his wife Cheryl (not her real name), Larry is delighted to see the wall blazoned with the words: “Wing Donated by Larry David.” His delight is short-lived. As he proudly casts his eyes round the room to see who else is admiring the inscription, his eyes alight on the opposite wall. It says: “Wing Donated by Anonymous.”

Abstract: ❦Near the end of his 1929 essay on surrealism, and in the context of serious discussions of the occult, Walter Benjamin suggests a connection between investigations into reading and into telepathic phenomena, 1 a theme he returns to again, in the context of reading and more ancient traditions of magic, in his 1933 essay “Doctrine of the Similar.” 2 This connection he suggests between reading practices and the occult is a profound one, both historically and for Benjamin’s own time and work, and not just in terms of telepathy. Some of the earliest practices of reading were not of letters, words, or books, but of stars, entrails, and birds, and these practices had a significant impact on the way reading was understood in the ancient world. And the relations between such ancient magic and reading were still (or again) of crucial importance to the modernists of the early twentieth century, including Benjamin and his sustained interest in what he called ‘das magische Lesen.’ What I will present here is part of a larger project devoted to tracing out the more salient connections in both the ancient and modern worlds between the practices of reading and of magic, and particularly those of magic most closely aligned with practices of divination. 1

Abstract: The third chapter offers a fresh reading of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845) by mapping the ways in which his seminal Latin American narrative works alongside and against the institutionalization of Argentine geography. Looking to Sarmiento’s correspondence, editorials, and minor texts, it traces the rise of a new national discourse that revises European representations both aesthetically and orthographically, all the while appealing to Humboldt as a source of legitimization. The chapter argues that Facundo undoes the dialectic between knowledge and conquest as a didactic geography directed toward the citizens of Argentina, who must know the land to secure the nation. Yet because Sarmiento deems the land empty, he constructs a marketable geography to convince potential European and North American immigrants to populate the lush Argentine terrain.

Abstract: The brevity of the short play allows presenting multiple works during the same evening, and intertextuality can materialize right in front of the audience. This article uses Verga's Cavalleria rusticana and Capuana's Il piccolo archivio to explore the tension between tremendous success and almost complete invisibility in theatrical verismo . Rather than accepting the shortcomings of verist theories, later adaptations, or past context as definitive closure, the author proposes ideas for future productions to employ the richness of available materials for a contextualized performance.

Abstract: I am extremely grateful to the Humanities Center for organizing this wonderful event. Since the first day I ever set foot in Baltimore, and at Johns Hopkins University, I have had the feeling, and knowledge, that this is the place where Stanley Cavell's work, and thinking, is really, and definitely, at home. My friends and colleagues here, and the wonderful graduate students whom I have come to know over the course of these years, have, together, built for me a Cavell-bond, a sort of strange extended family circle for me, within which I feel I can say just about anything (on Wittgenstein, Austin, but also film, feminism, The Wire . . . and Cavell) and still be heard, and under- stood, as long as it has to do with Stanley Cavell's writing and teach- ing. Stanley's teaching, or lessons, or letters, have been on my mind every day, especially lately, with the publication of Little Did I Know, and the recent publication of the French translation of Cities of Words (translated not, as you would expect, under the title Cites de paroles, but Philosophie des salles obscures). Cities of Words is a work by a profes- sor, and it retraces his teaching. It reminds us of the pedagogical task assigned to philosophy by Cavell, hence of its moral importance: it teaches you how to think for yourself, how to find your voice, and get to know what matters to you. Which leads me to my question: what can you learn from an autobiography? What hope is there in memories, even in Stanley Cavell's memories? ("What hope is there in a book about a book?" Cavell asked at the opening of The Senses of Walden (xiii). Well, obviously there was a hope. Senses of Walden is - as Cavell says in passing in Little Did I Know (282) - the most perfect book, in

Abstract: This essay reflects on the tensions and contradictions caused by the recent massive arrival of immigrants to Spain. This phenomenon reveals important failures in the process of receiving and integrating these new members into society. Thus, racist and/or xenophobic attitudes proliferate in different grades while the existence of such behaviors is being denied socially and institutionally. The analytical thread for this research is an autobiographic account by the Catalan writer Najat El Hachmi, Jo tambe soc catalana (2004). There are three nationalisms in conflict in this text: Spanish, Catalan, and Moroccan. In particular, Catalan nationalism shows a more significant presence and influence; it confers identity to the author, although alternatively it excludes her from its shelter. In connection to nationalist definitions and the concrete uses El Hachmi grants them, I perceive the tensions between Catalan and Spanish culture (even though at points El Hachmi brings them together as "Western culture"), and Moroccan and Berber culture (which have their own particular conflicts). Between the culture left behind and the new one, two axes of conflict emerge from the receiving society in which Western culture opposes to Islam: religious differences and treatment of women.

Abstract: Loss haunts the world of Niezi (Sinful Sons), Pai Hsien-yung’s (1937) 1983 novel.1 Entitled “In Our Kingdom,” the first half of the novel is set in the “kingdom” of boy prostitutes in Taipei’s New Park and ends with the raid of this haven by police.2 In the second half of the novel, the boys obtain a new shelter, a bar named “Home of Peace and Pleasure” (Anle xiang), which soon catches the attention of a local newspaper. Dubbing the bar a “den of demons” (yaoku), this newspaper publishes a vehemently tarnishing report, which eventually leads to the close of the bar:

Abstract: This essay explores how a technique indelibly associated with film, montage, finds a literary mode of expression and how the literary figure of the apostrophe achieves cinematic form. I show how Andrea Zanzotto's Leopardian text "Filo" (1976), written during his collaboration with Federico Fellini on the film Casanova (1976), creates patterns of "verbal montage" that show how poetry can partake of cinematic modes of expression. My subsequent analysis of Fellini's film La voce della luna (1990) considers how the rhetorical figure of apostrophe--and a poet often associated with it, once again Giacomo Leopardi--becomes central to Fellini's critique of postmodern consumer culture.

Abstract: In what words might I speak of my delight and my gratitude for the life and work of Stanley Cavell? Beyond the attraction certain regions of philosophy hold for anthropology, I might ask what is it in this philosopher that invites me to his world? The publication of Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory is first and foremost (for me at any rate), an affirmation of the question Cavell once asked: Does the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” (Exodus 20:16), include the injunction that you shall not bear false witness to yourself? The resonance of this idea with the words he recorded on July 4th 2003 is worth noting.

Abstract: Pope Benedict set off an on-going debate concerning the links between religion and violence in his controversial speech at the Uni ver si ty of Regensburg (Bavaria) in September 2006.1 In his talk, the Pope explicitly rejected any substantial or natural link between violence and faith. Appealing to a well-established tradition of Western theology and philosophy, Benedict argued that God’s metaphysical essence being Reason, religion must therefore have no place for violence. So strongly does violence controvert religious tenets, the Pope argued, that any religious claim for the compatibility of the two unavoidably calls into doubt the very substance of religion. Although Benedict did not make the case for the interdependence of monotheism and rationality, this connection obviously underlies his argument. This thesis is in evident opposition to a position formulated recently by the German Egyp tologist Jan Assmann2 who postulated a logical link between violence and mono theism based on an intellectual tradition go ing back to Sigmund Freud. To Assmann only the birth of monothe-

Abstract: In a certain sense, Christian miracle narratives can be considered as early precursors of the modern fantastic. Many of the motifs referred to in nineteenth-century fantastic tales and novels are already to be found in medieval miracula and mirabilia: strange natural phenomena, werewolves and revenants, the battle between good and evil. Obvious parallels can also be found on the level of structural configuration, such as the reproduction of certain narrative patterns in the French novella.1 While the fantastic has been more or less defined as a distinctive genre, its main medieval precursor, the merveilleux chretien, is a more heterogeneous phenomenon. It seems appropriate to consider it as a flexible set of patterns and themes, appearing in different sorts of texts and in different pragmatic contexts, such as hagiographies, sermons and miracle collections. Miracles can be functionalized as an argument for Christian belief, as a proof of the sanctity and the virtue of a person or a relic, or as a didactic means in order to impress and to convince an audience of a theological message. Thus, miracle stories do not constitute a genre, but rather a set of textual elements,

Abstract: In a footnote to his early essay “Force and Signification” from 1963, Jacques Derrida considered the contemporary vogue for the notion of “structure” in the following terms. “In order to assess the deep necessity that underlies the undeniable phenomenon of fashion, one must proceed initially by the ‘negative path,’—the choice of the word is initially a—structural, of course—ensemble of exclusions. To know why one says ‘structure’ is to know why one ceases to say eidos, ‘essence,’ ‘form,’ Gestalt, ‘collection,’ ‘composition,’ ‘complex,’ ‘construction,’ ‘correlation,’ ‘totality,’ ‘idea,’ ‘organism,’ ‘state,’ ‘system,’ etc. One must understand why each of these words revealed itself to be insufficient, but also why the concept of structure continued to borrow certain implicit meanings from them and allows itself to be inhabited by them.”1

Abstract: ❦In the mid-fifties of the last century, when I was twelve years old, my mother took me to the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. This was to be my reward for an unexpectedly good year at school. Because of my somewhat eccentric passion for heroes, fairy tales and music, my parents thought that Wagner might be worth a try; especially because one of my older cousins was employed at the festival. Tickets were relatively easy to come by for him. I had set my heart on The Flying Dutchman, but we ended up with Parsifal. That was all right though, for everything was mystical, solemn and beautiful. When, after the long first act, the curtain went down, I did what I had learned to do during my earlier visits to the opera. Full of dauntless youthful spontaneity, I applauded. I applauded most vehemently. When I think of it, what followed was one of the more embarrassing moments of my life. Apart from mine, not a single pair of hands was clapping; everyone remained in rapt silence. Only a gentleman seated in front of me turned around hissing, “Stop it. One doesn’t applaud Parsifal.” Unfortunately, my mother felt obliged to provide moral support and encouraged me to keep on clapping—which I did, until my applause died away in the ringing silence of the Bayreuth Wagner sanctuary. Until this day, I remember how on my way out, during the inter val, I felt a thousand eyes upon me. What had I done? A young fool (if not necessarily an innocent one), I simply had not grasped that the site of the performance, as well as its nature—a festival play for the consecration of the stage (ein Buhnenweihfestspiel) at Bayreuth—

Abstract: This article addresses the debate on Gomorra discussing, in particular, the textual hybridity of Saviano's book. Drawing on J. L. Austin's philosophy of language, the author argues that this controversial characteristic is due not so much to the blending of different genres as to the presence of two distinct pragmatic dimensions, a constative and a performative dimension. The constative effectiveness and the performative efficacy of the text are crucial aspects of Gomorra and, as it is shown, both aspects derive from the beneficial indiscipline that Saviano exhibits in mixing together discursive activities and purposes which are usually kept separate.

Abstract: In irgend einem abgelegenen Winkel des in zahllosen Sonnensystemen flimmernd ausgegossenen Weltalls gab es einmal ein Gestirn, auf dem kluge Thiere das Erkennen erfanden. The well-known opening fable of Nietzsche’s essay Ueber Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinne1 emerges from a corner—a Winkel—though no particular one.2 It relies upon the multitude of points in space and moments in time, a region defined

Abstract: This paper considers the Decameron in the context of female literacy in Boccaccio's society. The theories about education of women, particularly as expressed in the conduct books of the time, indicate a general reluctance to teach women to read, largely for fear of the erotic influence that certain texts might exercise. A consideration of some of these tenets is utilized to reframe aspects of the Decameron , to illuminate some of Boccaccio's narrative strategies, and to give further interpretation to the dedication of his work to the idle ladies.

Abstract: I began to think about the question of frontality in front of the scene of Harold’s coronation as it figures in the Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidered account of the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of 1066 and of the Battle of Hastings, sewn most probably in the decades following the event itself [figure 1]. Panel 73 contains the only image in the Tapestry’s 230 feet of figures looking directly at the viewer. Archbishop Stigand faces forward in the emblematic pose of prayer such as can be found in works like an eleventh-century image of Saint Clement from the lower basilica of San Clemente in Rome or this image of Saint Apollinaris from the cathedral of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna [figure 2]. While the great majority of the Tapestry’s 626 human figures are shown in strict profile with only half a face and one eye showing and a few are shown in some version of three-quarter view with a face partially averted, King Harold upon the throne is shown frontally. Seated and crowned, Harold holds what is not quite a scepter, but a rod, or “virga,” in one hand and an orb topped by a cross in the other; his feet, set at an angle oblique to each other, rest upon a raised pedestal; his robe is draped in a “V damp fold”; the figure is contained, as in many of the Tapestry’s interiors, by what seems like a constructed architectural frame. The embroidered portrait of King Harold in majesty, in the tradition of the emperors of centuries past, puts him on a plane different

Abstract: In Eugenio Cherubini's 1903 sequel to Collodi's masterpiece, illustrated by G. G. Bruno, the headstrong puppet swims to Africa to find riches. Published during Italy's emigration crisis, and in the shadow of failed colonial campaigns, Pinocchio in Affrica plays out issues central to the state's legitimacy. Targeting a precisely defined audience, the book plots these issues using a structure (home-away-home), moral (hard work and obedience), and protagonist that offer a comforting predictability. Cherubini's novel creates a familiar space in which readers could simultaneously indulge and disown illicit fantasies, and find more satisfying meaning in events that were humiliating to them.

Abstract: “Meine Damen und Herren!”1 With these words, Paul Celan’s 1960 Georg-Büchner-Preis-Rede Der Meridian commences its claim upon the audience, and allows itself to be claimed by a tradition of rhetorical conventions—such as the apostrophe, “Meine Damen und Herren.” For all its banality, this call to the assembly in Darmstadt also calls attention to itself. At first glance “Meine Damen und Herren” is not original; to the contrary, it is the most common mode of beginning a formal address. As such, the phrase gathers Celan’s address together with countless others and reveals nothing of the singularity that belongs to a speech and occasion. A worn commonplace, this opening tends to be no more and no less than a rhetorical performance.2—And indeed, the phrase “Meine Damen und Herren” would seem to be a characterless performance, available to any number of speakers upon any number of occasions. Nonetheless, when it serves as such an empty (yet polite) rhetorical commonplace, the phrase tends to glide seamlessly into the words that

Abstract: L'enorme successo di Gomorra di Saviano ha richiamato l'attenzione su un fenomeno, quello del "ritorno al reale" (Angelo Guglielmi) della narrativa italiana recente. Il terminus a quo di un tale fenomeno, infatti, puo essere fissato nei primi anni Novanta, e il libro di Saviano rappresenta piuttosto la punta dell'iceberg degli autori italiani di nuova generazione a produrre narrazioni ibride che oscillano tra i due poli della fiction e della non fiction. Attraverso il riferimento ad alcuni testi esemplari il saggio rintraccia innanzi tutto alcuni intertesti fondamentali. In secondo luogo, il saggio mette a fuoco il legame tra tali forme ibride di narrazione ed una nuova stagione dell'impegno.

Abstract: In May 1763, the death of Durand, the bookseller who owned the commercial rights to the Histoire naturelle of Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, left for sale the already printed volumes of the book as well as the manuscripts yet to be published. During the course of the following year Buffon, not wanting to work with someone he did not know and had not personally chosen, furnished enough money to buy the publication rights to the Histoire naturelle (including all of the printed copies that had not yet sold).1 Given what is known about copyright and printing laws in France at the time, this situation was not typical—while the author of a book composed its intellectual content, once the manuscript was transferred to the editor and publisher, neither the ideas, nor the words, nor the published copies of the book were considered to belong any more to the original writer. Many eighteenth-century authors, unlike Buffon and a few others who were rich enough to be able to control their entire enterprise, did not have a say or much of a share in the financial future of their works, and the ideas therein, once handed

Abstract: In the spring and summer of 1968 Paul Celan addressed a number of poems to his son Eric, the second of his sons and the only one still alive. His first son, François, had died shortly after birth in October 1953 and his passing is commemorated in Celan’s poem “Grabschrift für François” (“Epitaph for François”) published in the 1955 collection Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold).1 Celan and his wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, were deeply marked by the devastating loss of their first child. We know from their correspondence that the child’s name had been agreed upon very early on in their courtship.2 Indeed, for the poet described by his future wife’s family as “un juif . . . apatride . . . de langue allemande” (“a stateless . . . German-speaking . . . Jew”) (Celan and Celan-Lestrange II: 72) the name François seemed to carry a promise of repatriation associated with the naturalization papers he had filed at this time along with a request to have his sur-

Abstract: ❦In the years shortly before and since the centennial anniversary of her 1885 death, Rosalia de Castro has emerged to take her place in the canon of nineteenth century Spanish authors, and has been the subject of substantial biographical and critical attention. Martha LaFollette Miller notes of Castro that “critics have repeatedly stressed that the note of intimacy and authenticity found in her poems has saved her from the oblivion into which so much of Spain’s nineteenth century verse has been cast” (“Parallels” 3). But intimacy and authenticity are not the only notes Rosalia de Castro strikes: this long-dead poet remains relevant to modern readers precisely because she writes sincere, authentic poetry that still retains the qualities that D.C. Muecke, the great anatomist of irony, found definitive to that mode: “it is intellectual rather than musical, nearer to the mind than to the senses, reflective and self-conscious rather than lyrical and self-absorbed” (6). Most of the many definitions of irony in literature call attention to the opposition of ironic self-consciousness against ingenuous or mystified sincerity. Taking the perspective of the reader who experiences a text unfold over time, Paul de Man in particular views the two states as mutually exclusive, meaning that once you have been de-mystified by an ironic realization, you cannot return to the self you were before (222). Similarly, the ironist’s self-doubling and distancing tends in de Man’s view to escalate rather than be stable or reversible (220). This would seem to imply that irony is incompatible with sincerity or authenticity, a conclusion consistent with the common definition of irony as a special kind of falsehood, ‘to say one thing while meaning

Abstract: Luchino Visconti's fame as a filmmaker tends to eclipse his prolific activity on the stage where over the course of three decades, he established himself as a major figure in postwar Italian theater. In his 1957 film, Le notti bianche , the influence of this work in the theater is undeniable. By mixing the theatrical tradition of the chamber play with the Kammerspielfilme of German silent film, Visconti created a unique marriage between theater and cinema to tell Dostoyevsky's tale of love and longing. While often considered a minor film, this article reconsiders Le notti bianche at the crossroads between dramatic arts.