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Articles 121 - 127 of 127

Full-Text Articles in Italian Literature

Primo Levi: The Drowned, The Saved, And The "Grey Zone", Ilona Klein Jan 1990

Primo Levi: The Drowned, The Saved, And The "Grey Zone", Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. Even though his first book Se questo è un uomo–published in English as Survival in Auschwitz–did not sell well when first published by De Silva in 1947 (2,500 copies published, of which 600 remained unsold and were eventually destroyed by the 1966 flood in Florence), it was accepted unanimously in Italy as a literary masterpiece and a great witness to history when Einaudi republished the volume in 1956. From that moment on, Italian readers and critics have acknowledged the literary beauty and importance of Levi's writings. He …

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"Official Science Often Lacks Humility": Humor, Science, And Technology In Levi's Storie Naturali, Ilona Klein Jan 1990

"Official Science Often Lacks Humility": Humor, Science, And Technology In Levi's Storie Naturali, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Primo Levi's third book, written under the pseudonym of "Damiano Malabaila," was published for the first time in the fall of 1966 by Einaudi. Storie naturali is a collection of fifteen short stories which represent the beginning of a new Cours in the author's narrative. After the autobiographical Survival in Auschwitz of 1947 and his second book of 1963 The Reawakening–both dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath–Storie Naturali ("Natural Stories," not yet published in English) represented such a break in the literary patter established by Levi up to that point, that the author decided to use a …

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Language, The Other And God: On Italo Calvino's Last Novels, Richard Grigg Oct 1987

Language, The Other And God: On Italo Calvino's Last Novels, Richard Grigg

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

To the extent that Italo Calvino's novels point us toward a God beyond the God who died with the advent of modern nihilism, they are an important resource for constructing just that kind of notion of the divine that is required by the contemporary cultural situation: a notion that is an alternative to both theism and atheism. While theism cannot withstand the corrosive forces integral to the modern world view, atheism makes the fatal mistake of supposing that there is no longer any dimension of ultimacy available to contemporary persons. The God we have been led to by Calvino's last …

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The Order Of Bourgeois Protest, Geoffey Waite Jan 1986

The Order Of Bourgeois Protest, Geoffey Waite

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Relatively little theoretical work is currently being produced by Western "Leftists" on committed protest culture. Simultaneously and not by chance, Western Marxism has drifted increasingly away from solidarity with the concept and practice of the vanguard party and toward a more or less easy compact with the problematic of poststructuralism and postmodernity. This relative paucity of discussion of commitment and protest stands in significant relationship to two critical moments: first, a powerful, overtheorized tradition of Western Marxist debate about commitment and protest (Benjamin, Sartre, Barthes, Marcuse, Adorno, among others); second, a wide-spread, undertheorized work-a-day practice of "traditional" liberal …

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Eco's Echoes: Fictional Theory And Detective Practice In The Name Of The Rose, David H. Richter Jan 1986

Eco's Echoes: Fictional Theory And Detective Practice In The Name Of The Rose, David H. Richter

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a serio-comic pastiche of the detective story set in the middle ages, which uses history as "a distant mirror" to comment, from a Western Marxist perspective, on contemporary political issues. Structurally, however, The Name of the Rose is a fictional enactment of many of the semiotician's recent critical and philosophical ideas. ( 1) Eco's discussion of "abductive" reasoning in C. S. Peirce and Aristotle appears in a detective not only more fallible than Sherlock Holmes but more aware of what his powers consist of and why they work and fail. (2) Eco's …

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The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno To Paradiso, David Matual Sep 1982

The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno To Paradiso, David Matual

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It is apparent from the title of his novel The First Circle and from various details there and in other works that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is familiar with at least the imagery of Dante's Divine Comedy. One direct and several indirect references to it also suggest a Dantean subtext in his longest and most ambitious project, The Gulag Archipelago. Indeed, the loci of the Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—are transformed in the Gulag into metaphorical representations of the various stages in the development of man's consciousness—and especially Solzhenitsyn's consciousness—during the ordeals of arrest, inquest, imprisonment, …

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Bradomín And The Ironies Of Evil: A Reconsideration Of Sonata De Primavera, Sumner M. Greenfield Sep 1977

Bradomín And The Ironies Of Evil: A Reconsideration Of Sonata De Primavera, Sumner M. Greenfield

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Of the four novels that form Valle-Inclán's tetralogy of seasonal Sonatas, the most problematical and dissonant is the springtime segment, which is the third in the order of composition. Valle-Inclán uncharacteristically subordinates seasonal esthetics in favor of a peculiarly ironic manipulation of the theme of conflict between good and evil set in an Italian context redolent of the Renaissance and rife with religious fanaticism. The ingrained theatricality of the young Marqués de Bradomín leads him to affect the pose of a "devilish" don Juan in order to break down the defenses of a young would-be nun who seems destined …

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