English-language Authors Research Articles

Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation by Loredana Polezzi (review)

224 Reviews around it,and between Italians and Slavs, climaxing in the horrifictrauma ofthe mass murder of captives being hurled into thefoibe?deep crevasses in the Karstic plateau. Pizzi picks up the suggestion of viewing the foiba as the Bakhtinian chronotope characterizing the regional literature of this period, but, without saying so, she has in effectapplied Bakhtin's notion more persuasively to the topography of the whole area (and might have interestingly discussed the same in relation to Hillis Miller's notion of the atopical?a literary locality which stands foreverywhere and nowhere). The third chapter focuses on 'The Myth of an Italian Motherland' and the writing of the Fascist era (some of it quite laughable). There are sometimes teasing vaguenesses, allusions left unexplained, ambiguities not defined, and a looseness in the use of the term 'Romanticism' to describe the literary alignment of twentieth-century Triestine writers towards the nineteenth-century Italian tradition, and the psychoanalytical framework is rather lightly sketched in. One ofthe strengthsof Pizzi's book, however, is the sheer range of Triestine writing, high and low, with which she is familiar and into which she here offers tantalizingly brief glimpses, though she makes no claim to completeness and does not discuss Cialente's Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger, Cergoly's// complessodell'imperatore, Lalla Kezich's La preparazione, Tullio Kezich's //campeggio di Duttogliano, or Susanna Tamaro's novels. The great absentee fromthis book, however, is Svevo, though Pizzi accepts Maier's dictumthat Triestine literature really starts with him. On the face of it, this looks strange. Even without counting Senilita as the first novel of the twentieth century, Svevo produced a substantial corpus of writing almost uninterruptedly until his death in 1928, and, for Pizzi's topic, what stands out is his quite distinctive treatment of Trieste and, not unrelated, his substantial and prolonged rejection by the Triestines. Svevo's works appeared at best on a drip-feed basis right up to the 1950s, before establishing themselves at an accelerating rate to the point where by the end of the century La coscienza di Zeno was voted its most important Italian novel. The point is that Trieste's greatest writer bypassed triestinitd (though he was to be selectively used to feed into it) and subscribed to italianitd essentially only by writing in his strongly contested Italian. To include Svevo, however, would have upset the economy and the strategy of Pizzi's book, whose fourth chapter is pointedly entitled 'Quale triestinita?' This focuses on three semi-outsider categories which in ascending order pose challenges to the hegemonic ideology of Triestine irredentism: an imposing array of women writers who were not susceptible to the female symbolism that gripped their male counterparts; Jewish writers,who found themselves rejected by the nation with which they had so enthusiastically identified; and Slovene writers, who, in what are in effect the closing words of Pizzi's book, wrote only in Slovene. La Trobe University John Gatt-Rutter Translating Travel: Contemporary ltalian Travel Writing in English Translation. By Loredana Polezzi. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2001. vii + 246pp. ?45. ISBN o7546 -0273-7. This volume examines the transformations which ltalian travel writing undergoes when it is translated, and offersin the process an innovative means of circumventing 'the constraints of the ltalian critical tradition and the image that it has produced (or failed to produce) of ltalian travel writing' (p. 3). Three chapters of theoreticalcritical discussion are followed by four case studies treating twentieth-century ltalian travellers to Tibet, the works of Oriana Fallaci, and the English-language fortunes of Italo Calvino'slnvisible Cities and Claudio Magris's Danubio respectively. The firstchapter documents from a variety of perspectives the low status of travel writing within the ltalian literary system. In fact, while English-language authors MLR, 99.1, 2004 225 have achieved near cult status in Italy, no successful contemporary Italian author has made his or her name as a travel writer. The Italian critical establishment's resistance to travel writing is further demonstrated by the cool reception (by Croce among others) of De Amicis's internationally successful travel writings and Italian philological and critical ambivalence towards Italy's legacies of travel writing fromthe early modern period, e.g...

АНАЛІЗ ВИКОРИСТАННЯ ІНФОРМАЦІЙНО-КОМУНІКАЦІЙНИХ ТЕХНОЛОГІЙ У НАВЧАЛЬНО-ВИХОВНОМУ ПРОЦЕСІ ЗАРУБІЖНИХ КРАЇН

Актуальність матеріалу, викладеного у статті, обумовлена нагальними потребами викладачів у ознайомленні з досвідом застосування інформаційно-комунікаційних технологій у педагогічній практиці для підвищення якості навчання в сучасному інформаційному суспільстві. Автори проаналізували значну кількість статей, в основному англомовних авторів, і підготували перелік періодичних фахових видань, як російськомовних, так і англомовних, які публікують матеріали з питань застосування в навчальному процесі мультимедія-засобів, технології Web 2.0, Web-технологій в он-лайн навчанні, впливу застосування ІКТ на навчальний процес, напряму використання ІКТ залежно від рівня оснащеності навчального закладу комп’ютерною технікою тощо.

God in Exile: Modern Atheism by Cornelio Fabro

BOOK REVIEWS 689 God in Exile: Modern Atheism. By CoRNELIO FABRO. Translated and edited by Arthur Gibson. Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1968. Pp. 1~7~. $35.00. Tlw subtitle of this magnum opus fixes the limits of the author's range of vision and suggests the terms of the thesis he attempts to establish. Fabro speaks of the roots of modern atheism in the Cartesian cogito; the line of inquiry he follows, after an initial analysis of what he takes to be the atheistic implications of Descartes' fundamental axiom, is more or less severely defined by his singular point of departure. Each subsequent chapter makes reference to this premise, which is also the source of what Fabro calls the internal dynamic of modern atheism. This continuing reference supplies focus and framework for Fabro's interpretations of postCartesian thought and provides the thread binding into some measure of unity a series of essays of uneven value and monumental proportions. God in Exile is an extended argument for the contention that immanentism is at the source of every expression of theism in modern philosophy. The work may be judged by the success of the argument and by the adequacy of this perspective as an insight on philosophical atheism. On the face of it, the impression left by Fabro's exposition, that all of modem Western thought, at least in its philosophical dimension, is atheistic in its intrinsic logic and final thrust, is a vague one and irritates by its excessive generality and facile selectiveness. One would have to examine closely Fabro's treatment of each author or movement and determine whether the book's central thesis finds genuine application. More basically, it is a question of the authenticity of treating these several writers, whose work spans a period of three centuries, merely, or very largely, as vehicles for the transmission, elaboration, and refinement of a single proposition. One may assume that it is legitimate to consider the inherent logic of a philosopher's position independently of the latter's purpose or intent or even stated convictions which may ignore or defy that logic. It remains for an interpreter to bear the burden of proof in attributing to an author conclusions which he himself did not draw or which he may even have expressly repudiated. Fabro does not go so far as to call each and every thinker whose philosophy he studies an atheist, but he does something equivalently as sweeping and forceful in its impact. His ultimate contention is that there is no philosopher of any stature or any school entirely free either of the formative influence of Cartesian immanentism or of that theoretical atheism which, so he claims, is its inescapable derivative. More dramatically, Fabro wants to convict the whole of serious modern thought of the exile of God, the effective elimination of the God of biblical faith and ethical monotheism. Fabro's method and principle of interpretation constitute the form of his inquiry and are imposed on the vast array of his materials with uncom- 690 BOOK REVIEWS promising consistency and unity of purpose. Although the approach follows a historical pattern, and although there is, indeed, abundant evidence drawn from a wealth of commentary and criticism contemporaneous with the authors studied, there is serious reason to question the work's overall historical accuracy. Fabro has chosen to emphasize precisely those aspects and elements in his subjects' thought which lend support to the thesis he is bent on verifying. His coverage is thorough; I can think of no philosopher of the first, or even the second, rank who is not included in Fabro's comprehensive survey of Western thought. His grasp of the essence of their teaching is stronger and surer in the case of Continental thinkers than that of English-language authors. In seven sections the atheistic core content of Western philosophy is laid bare, from the mid-17th to the mid20th century, from Cartesian rationalism to dialectical theology and the " death-of-God " radicalism. His lengthy introduction is preceded by an excellent essay delimiting the notion of atheism and refining the terms and conditions of the author's proposed inquiry. In a concluding section Fabro reviews the course he...