Italian Critics Research Articles

The Poetic Logic of Panism: An Idealistic Reading of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Alcyone

ABSTRACT In the 1970s, an influential Italian critic, Emilio Mariano, wrote that Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetics ‘moves on a terrain of Neo-Idealism’. At that time, Mariano had already employed some excerpts from Giovanni Gentile’s works to interpret D’Annunzio’s poetics in his monograph Sentimento del vivere. In an academic environment that has tended to separate literature and philosophy as areas of inquiry, Mariano’s thesis received little further investigation by Italian critics. My article interprets D’Annunzio’s Alcyone through the critical frame of Gentile’s philosophy: actualism. The final goal of the article is to demonstrate that the poetics of panism, which is central in Alcyone, gives shape to some of actualism’s major tropes: the belief that reality is inseparable from the act of consciousness; the will to allow artistic activity to continue the creative work of nature; the idea that the immanence of spirit and matter is never accomplished permanently but rather continues endlessly.

Nancy w Krainie Wieprzy. Kilka uwag o "Co?" Romana Polańskiego i recepcji filmu we Włoszech

Nancy in the Land of Swines: A Few Reflections on Polanski’s What? and the Film’s Reception in Italy The article discusses Roman Polanski’s lesser-known film What?, made in 1972 in Italy, in Carlo Ponti’s villa. Despite not very favorable general reception immediately after the premiere and later in time, the film was appreciated by Italian critics who admired its intertextual values, self-citations and references to Italian cinema, such as ironic allusions to commedia all’italiana, or Federico Fellini’s works and oneiric atmosphere. The main aim of the text is to present some ways of reinterpreting and reevaluating Polanski’s underrated and almost forgotten movie.

Gramophone Voices: Puccini and Madama Butterfly in New York, ca. 1907

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904) was a notorious failure at its world premiere: condemned by Italian critics for its “decorative” surfaces and apparent repetition of earlier Puccinian tropes. The first of the composer’s two operas based on works by American playwright David Belasco, the opera was soon revised and received its belated New York Metropolitan Opera premiere in 1907 as part of a festival of the composer’s works organized in his presence. The decision to visit New York was timely: not only had Belasco’s source play been premiered there in 1900, but New York was by then emerging as the global center of the operatic gramophone industry, with recordings of Puccini’s works made in Camden, New Jersey, frequently featuring performers from the Metropolitan Opera. This development echoed wider operatic power shifts between Italy and the United States at this time, which informed evolving attitudes to new sound reproduction technology on both sides of the Atlantic. This article re-examines Madama Butterfly from the perspective of Puccini’s 1907 tour. In particular, it focuses on the composer’s interactions with the U.S. gramophone industry during and before his New York visit, examining them in relation to broader questions of the Italian operatic future and ideas of Italian vocality. While Madama Butterfly has long been addressed in relation to its Orientalist depiction of Japan, reframing Puccini’s Belasco-inspired opera within this transatlantic context can illuminate the fraught cultural politics of the gramophone industry, as well as their intersection with the wider musical dramaturgy of Puccini’s opera. Ultimately, I argue, Madama Butterfly emerges as a vital document of a changing auditory culture ca. 1900, as well as of an ambivalent colonial imagination.

Review: Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History, by Charles L. Leavitt IV

Review: <i>Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History</i>, by Charles L. Leavitt IV

Nello specchio del Rinascimento

Today, historians, philosophers, and scholars of cultural heritage discuss about the relationship between the periodizing labels of historiography and their symbolic employment within the current political rhetoric. To understand the relevance of this issue in Italy, it can be helpful to look at the academic and public debates around the category of “Renaissance”. On the one hand, this article aims to map some notable political uses of this historical figure as a symbol; on the other hand, it reconstructs a tradition of thought focused on the epistemic autonomy of the same category. With these intentions, I look at a group of Italian critics of Johan Huizinga’s aesthetic view of history – like Delio Cantimori, Eugenio Garin, and their heirs within the academic milieu of the “Scuola Normale” of Pisa. Finally, I evaluate whether there is any correspondence between “Renaissance” as a symbol within the political debate and its historiographical employment as a periodizing label.

Первые переводы романа А.С. Пушкина «Евгений Онегин» на итальянский язык

The article analyses two early translations of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin into Italian. The first Italian critics of Eugene Onegin in the 19th century (Cesare Boccella, Enrico Montazio, Carlo Tenca) were convinced that the novel was weak and did not deserve to be translated. However, two translations appeared in the 19th century. The first translation of 1856 belongs to Louis Delatre, a Frenchman who assimilated in Italy. Delatre visited Russia, where he met Pyotr Vyazemsky, whose stories about Pushkin inspired Delatre to translate five of Pushkin’s works, including Eugene Onegin. The second translation was published in 1858 under the pseudonym A. B., currently attributed to A. Besobrasoff - Anna Ivanovna Bezobrazova, a Russian noblewoman. Comparing the original and the translations, the author identifies and describes the aspects of the original subject to translation shifts (genre definition, structure, lexical and stylistic levels) and determines the specificity of the early Italian reception of the novel. Louis Delatre. The translation of poetry into prose, the rearrangement of fragments within the text, the reduction of “useless details” (including significant structural elements of the original), the addition of notes, the replacement of Russian realities with Italian equivalents reveal an orientation towards greater clarity and ease of perception. The change in the style of the original and the focus on the Italian literary tradition indicate the identification of a foreign work through the prism of Italian culture. The factors stated above are indicative of the adaptation and orientation towards an unprepared reader, who is not familiar with a foreign culture. Delatre acts within the framework of the historically conditioned norms of translation practice, whose task at this stage is to bring the original closer to the reader, to facilitate his acquaintance with a foreign text. Anna Besobrasoff. On the one hand, the focus on the “plot”, the search for Italian equivalents, the addition of notes and descriptions are also characteristic of a historically conditioned adaptive translation strategy. On the other hand, literal translation, style neutralization, elimination of a specific group of “useless details” are rather typical of the translator’s individual reception, probably a consequence of the student’s goal of translation, the translator’s desire to “practice the beautiful Italian language.” Both translations did not attract the attention of literary criticism and did not significantly influence the formation of the idea of Eugene Onegin in Italy at an early stage. The first Italian translations were more an accident rather than a regularity, since they stemmed from the translators’ personal interest in the novel, rather than a request from the recipient culture. This can be confirmed by the date of the next translation - it appeared only in 1906. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

Selected Italian Introductions to Works by Thornton Wilder

Abstract At the beginning of the twentieth century, several influential Italian writers, critics, and translators turned their attention to American literature as a source of inspiration during a time of great turbulence that came with the rise of fascism and World War II. The new world as it was depicted in American literature seemed to be worth considering as an alternative to the model that was being proposed in Italy. Because of this growing interest, the publishing industry decided to translate works from both America and other foreign countries—despite growing resistance from the fascist state—and publish them in inexpensive series. The first editions of Thornton Wilder's novels and plays were published in the midst of that difficult period, and selected introductions to those works, translated here for the first time, can help us understand both the enthusiasm for Wilder's work and why his works were so often chosen to be a part of new literary collections created by the Italian publishing industry during that period.

Beyond the webs of ideology: Orson Welles’s Othello in post-war Italy

This article focuses on Orson Welles’s filmic adaptation of Othello (1951) with attention to how the filmic form interacts with the historical background of post-war Italy. The country where the director first took refuge after being virtually blacklisted from Hollywood did not seem to welcome his controversial style either. Taking the hint from the biased responses of most Italian critics to Othello, the article explores Welles’s revision of Shakespeare’s tragedy in relation to the early-1950s Italian landscape. I shall analyse how the visual techniques of the film create a challenging style that ensnares and engages the audience. The dominant imagery of entrapment can have a meta-cinematographic effect that disturbs the mimetic function of the screen. The resulting formal inconsistency and disunity of the film defies a totalizing notion of the work of art and invites the viewers to question and go beyond ideologically biased interpretations of the sociopolitical scenario it springs from. My aim is to show that Othello offers an intellectual engagement that goes beyond the webs of ideology which trapped the Italian post-war situation and leads to a more complex confrontation with the most urgent issues in the country.

Italian neorealism and the ‘woman’s film’: Selznick, De Sica and Stazione Termini

As a screenwriter, I don’t consider Stazione Termini a document of my neorealist career, because the Italian-American co-production watered down whatever neorealist seed there was in it (the examination of a very restricted space and time).1 The above quotation from Cesare Zavattini, theoretician of neorealism and screenwriter on Vittorio De Sica’s acclaimed films, can usefully be read alongside a memo sent by the American producer David O. Selznick to De Sica, after the filming of the latter’s Stazione Termini in 1953, a film co-produced by Selznick and starring Montgomery Clift and Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones. In the memo Selznick lamented the ‘distortion of Jennifer’s face and figure into a monstrosity because of what I regarded and still regard, as the almost irrational insistence upon giving superior consideration to photography of buildings’.2 Stazione Termini is a film that is actually two films: based on an original screenplay by Zavattini, and shot on location in Rome’s Termini station, the film was co-produced by Selznick and De Sica’s production company. It was heavily cut by Selznick and released in the USA in 1954 under the title Indiscretion of an American Wife; Italian critics generally regard it as anomalous in the context of De Sica’s career and of the Italian neorealist canon, coming as it does after neorealist classics such as Sciuscià/Shoeshine (1946), Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan (1950) and Umberto D. (1952). As will become apparent, compromises involved in its production and distribution, and the involvement of Hollywood stars and crew, mean that some critics do not even regard it as a ‘De Sica film’. The tension indicated in the statement quoted above, between the cinematic focus on the star’s face in close-up and the material environment shot in deep focus, highlights the competing conceptions of cinema on the parts of both De Sica and Selznick, and the extraordinary emphasis Selznick placed on the close-up as a way of safeguarding the star image of Jones. At the same time, Zavattini’s observation of a neorealist idea that is betrayed or diluted in the film is significant, as it invokes the importance of the film’s spatial representation, manifest in its ‘clash’ of cinematographic practices.

‘The Destiny of a Whole Race’: Identity, Race, and Politics in the Cold War Italian Performances of ‘Porgy and Bess’

Abstract In 1954–5, Porgy and Bess appeared for the first time in Italy in an all-Black production formally endorsed by the US State Department. Italian theatre administrators saw this production as an opportunity to sever any ideological connection with Fascism after decades of institutional support. At the same time, while Italian audiences and critics were often aware of the essentializing practices at the origins of Porgy and Bess, they relied on the stereotypical image of African American culture presented by the show to project their own experiences and political aspirations onto the opera’s subject and music. Drawing on primary sources, interviews, and the analysis of the earlier European reception of Porgy and Bess, this article argues that the success of the opera in Italy, rather than being determined by US diplomatic efforts, was a result of Italians’ need to redefine a sense of collective identity in a time of political transition.

With rhymes about the human fate. Philosophy in the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi is one of those authors whose texts oscillate on the border between literature and philosophy. It is true that Leopardi does not use traditional forms of philosophical expression, but the fact is that most of the considerations of the Italian thinker are expressed by the simultaneous conduct of two discourses: literary and philosophical. Leopardi experimented almost every form of literary expression, but he went down in history mainly as a poet, who contained a significant part of his highest beliefs in poetry. The practice of philosophizing through poetry is nothing new in literature, and the various connections between literature and philosophy are almost ancient, but the ongoing discussions in the world of Italian critics about the relationship between Leopardi and philosophy suggest that the reflective lyrics of the famous poet from Recanati are an noteworthy case. This article is a reflection on the use of figures of speech in the process of explaining the worldview by Leopardi, with particular emphasis on metaphor, and on the overall impact of the poetic medium on the presentation and shaping of adopted ideology.

Review of: Using Gramsci: A New Approach

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks has become a very important inspiration for the twentieth-century Marxist political thinkers around the world. ‘Using Gramsci A New Approach’ is one of the most recent additions to various works done around the Prison Notebooks of this Great Italian political theorist and cultural critics. Michele Filippini, a researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna has come up with ‘a new approach’ on Prison Notebooks and has touched some major concepts that are previously given little attention by Gramscian scholars. By extending Gramsci’s concepts beyond Marxist perspective, Filippini’s book provides expert guides to key features and themes in Gramsci’s writing in combination with the pressing political, social and cultural struggles of our time. The author does not show a clear connection between those topics discussed in the book, but his work remains a valuable addition to Gramscian thoughts in the twenty-first century.&#x0D; Key Words: Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ideology, the individual, Society

Ferrante Feud: The Italian Reception of the Neapolitan Novels before and after their International Success

ABSTRACT This article analyses the Italian reviews of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, published in the years 2011–2014. The focus of the study is twofold: first of all, it examines how Ferrante’s works have been assessed in the Italian press, and secondly, it investigates whether the Italian reception of the works has been influenced by their international – and especially American – success. Drawing on previous studies of the evaluation of female writing by Anna Williams, Stefania Lucamante, and Tiziana de Rogatis, the analysis emphasises how Italian critics in a selection of reviews published in newspapers, literary magazines, and collective blogs have approached Ferrante’s writing from the perspective of style, content, genre, and literary contextualisation. The analysis shows that the reception of the first two parts of Ferrante’s quartet has striking similarities to the patronising patterns uncovered by Williams, while the reviews after the international success are more appreciative. These results are also discussed with regard to literary consecration and canonisation by highlighting how Ferrante is addressed in recent books on contemporary Italian literature.

В.В. Розанов в итальянском достоевсковедении

The article attempts to retrace the history of perception of Rozanovian personal­ity and creativity, presented in the light of the experience of Dostoevsky’s inter­pretation in Italy. By this work, the author introduces the texts, previously un­known to the Russian specialists on Rozanov, published in Italy over the past 50&nbsp;years. The elaborations of the Russian Rozanovian Studies serve as the me­thodological and axiological guidelines, that, however, are not cited in connec­tion with the format of the article, but with which the author relates in her own conclusions. The great sensitivity of Italian critics to Dostoevsky could not be re­flected on the approach to his younger contemporary. The article raises the ques­tions about the degree of influence and borrowing, congeniality and the presence of the polemic component. It carries out its analysis with the help of the proven critical tools: using the main lines of research and consideration of possible ap­proaches to the thinkers’ common axial themes. The author distinguishes main research lines in the mainstream of which it is possible to trace the stages of de­velopment and the exit of Italian Rozanovian Studies from under the shadow of Dostoevsky Studies. The “popular” and literary-biographical lines of research are summarized, and the religious-philosophical line is more detailed, with the inclusion of a political element. The last line analyzes in fuller manner the Com­ments on “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”. Rozanov’s entire future creative process, according to Italian critics, has already been declared by this book, right up to the final “Apocalypse of our time”. Passing thinkers through the phases of rapprochement and repulsion, admitting Dostoevsky’s finish speaking in Rozanov, Italian researchers consider Russian thinkers as inhabitants of different meta­physical worlds, generating in their touch the invariants of Russian culture.

Figurality of painting. Bologna beyond Informal Art

Between 1959 and 1962 Italian painting made a gradual transition from the materialism of the Informal to new forms of figuration full of organicist and surrealist moods. Bologna is undoubtedly one of the cities that best represents this turning point: the research conducted between the late Fifties and early Sixties by Vasco Bendini, Pirro Cuniberti, Luciano De Vita, Giuseppe Ferrari, Mario Nanni, Leone Pancaldi, Concetto Pozzati and Sergio Vacchi confirms this. Their work is included in important national exhibitions such as Possibilita di relazione (Rome, 1960), Nuove prospettive della pittura italiana (Bologna, 1962), Alternative attuali (L'Aquila, 1962) or the 1964 Venice Biennale and is followed and supported by many important Italian critics such as Francesco Arcangeli, Renato Barilli, Maurizio Calvesi, Enrico Crispolti and Andrea Emiliani. This essay aims to outline the essential features of the artistic situation in Bologna at the end of the Fifties and to focus on the stylistic peculiarities of the individual authors with the support of critical voices who promptly commented on them.

A Lucky metaphor by Cesare Brandi: The "Crystal Churches" of the Armenians

The expression ‘chiese di cristallo’ (crystal churches) appeared in the title of an article written by Cesare Brandi in 1968 for the Italian newspaperCorriere della Sera, which reviewed a photo exhibition on Armenian architecture. This definition for Armenian churches met some success in critical studies and it is often used in non-academic literature. The aim of this brief essay is to explain Brandi’s metaphor of crystal in light of earlier theoretical considerations – such as the ones of Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer – and in relation to additional examples of this expression found in Italian art critics of the first half the 20th century.

Reconceptualizing Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism: Evidence From the Early Consecration of Anglo-American Pop-Rock in Italy

This article explores how foreign, recently imported cultural forms can redefine the dynamics of legitimation in national cultural fields. Drawing on archival research, the article discusses the early consecration of Anglo-American pop-rock in 1970s Italy and analyzes the articles published by three specialist music magazines. Findings reveal the emergence of a shared pop-rock canon among Italian critics, but also that this “cosmopolitan capital” was mobilized to implement competing editorial projects. Italian critics promoted both different strategies of legitimation vis-à-vis contemporary popular music and opposite views of cultural globalization as a social process. Theoretically, the article conceptualizes “aesthetic cosmopolitanism” as a symbolic resource that can be realized through competing institutional projects, rather than as a homogeneous cultural disposition.

Le "Metamorfosi" di Ovidio come poema dell’«indistinzione», dell’«illusione» e dell’«incertezza»

This paper discusses three very influential contributions to contemporary Ovidian criticism: Italo Calvino’s Ovid and Universal Contiguity (1979) and Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), Gianpiero Rosati’s Narciso e Pigmalione (1983) and Nicola Gardini’s Con Ovidio (2017). Within the essays of these three Italian critics and authors emerges an idea of the Metamorphoses as a grandiose depiction of the precarious and deceptive nature of reality: an idea which is not, of course, the only interpretive option from a critical point of view, but is doubtless the best suited to the Zeitgeist in the «Age of Uncertainty».

Political Photoromances: The Italian Communist Party, Famiglia Cristiana, and the Struggle for Women’s Hearts

This essay examines the Italian fotoromanzo (photoromance) as a case study, vis-à-vis questions of cultural hierarchies, gender representations, and governance. In particular, it focuses on the photoromances published by the Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana and by the Office of Propaganda of the Italian Communist Party in the late 1950s, in the context of the heated debate exploded in the press against the popular media. Italian journalists, film critics, Christian Democratic and Communist politicians alike blamed photoromances, published in women’s magazines such as Bolero Film and Grand Hotel, for corrupting or stultifying women. This essay highlights differences and continuities in social and cultural discourses, between the products of Catholic, Communist, and corporate publishers, with particular regard to femininity, womanhood, and consumer culture. In this way, it also explores similarities between Catholic and Communist models of social, sexual and moral conduct.

“The Biennale of Dissent 1977” and Italian Architecture during the 1970s

In 1977, “The Biennale of Dissent” was a significant event in the history of the anti-Soviet dissidence. In Italy during the 1970s intellectuals, artists and architects had many connections with Marxist theories and the Soviet Union, but their role, referred to in this event, appears complex and, on occasions, contradictory. The Italian cultural world mirrored a political situation, in which it became a duty to take up a position which opposed Italy’s Fascist past. Artistic and political opinions coincided. For this reason, in Italy the culture of dissidence led to a heated debate. One generation of architects was born in this context and few were able to think outside the box. The interpretation proposed for Italian architecture and the masters of the time should prompt a consideration of the current absence of Italian critics and architects in international debates.