We usually see the Renaissance as a marked departure from older traditions, but Renaissance scholars often continued to cling to the teachings of the past. For instance, despite the evidence of their own dissections, which contradicted ancient and medieval texts, Renaissance anatomists continued to teach those outdated views for nearly two centuries. In Books of the Body, Andrea Carlino explores the nature and causes of this intellectual inertia. On the one hand, anatomical practice was constrained by a reverence for classical texts and the belief that the study of anatomy was more properly part of natural philosophy than of medicine. On the other hand, cultural resistance to dissection and dismemberment of the human body, as well as moral and social norms that governed access to cadavers and the ritual of their public display in the anatomy theater, also delayed anatomy's development. A fascinating history of both Renaissance anatomists and the bodies they dissected, this book will interest anyone studying Renaissance science, medicine, art, religion, and society.
Revenge fantasies begin to fade when an American divorcee finds sanctuary and adventure in Italy. While recovering from her losses she enjoys the intimacy of small town life, ponders the future from her window on a lake, and revels in a succession of both comedic and serious lovers. Her memoir is about the islands one finds on a map - others, places where she says arrivederci to her former existence and embraces life Italian style: high heels on motorcycles, prosecco toasts atop a castle in Rome, sensual nights which end when the sky grows light - exhilarating moments provided by the highly romantic and sometimes volatile Italian male. Yet like an Italian opera, her story not only celebrates voluptuous characters and settings: it's also perforated by shocking deaths. On a November night in Rome, a gifted but alarmingly young man appears and leaves an indelible impression. On his island, he and the writer explore their obsession with each other during the year she almost abandons hope, but instead succeeds like the Romans: simply by enduring. " when he is an old man - and I no longer walk this planet - his grandsons will learn about the American woman he loved, the daring things we did in order to be together. He'll show them a book called L'Isola di Simone, and they'll believe that the old man once had the power to change a lady's mind, to create an island of faith where passion prevails and the poetry of love is written.
We usually see the Renaissance as a marked departure from older traditions, but Renaissance scholars often continued to cling to the teachings of the past. For instance, despite the evidence of their own dissections, which contradicted ancient and medieval texts, Renaissance anatomists continued to teach those outdated views for nearly two centuries. In Books of the Body, Andrea Carlino explores the nature and causes of this intellectual inertia. On the one hand, anatomical practice was constrained by a reverence for classical texts and the belief that the study of anatomy was more properly part of natural philosophy than of medicine. On the other hand, cultural resistance to dissection and dismemberment of the human body, as well as moral and social norms that governed access to cadavers and the ritual of their public display in the anatomy theater, also delayed anatomy's development. A fascinating history of both Renaissance anatomists and the bodies they dissected, this book will interest anyone studying Renaissance science, medicine, art, religion, and society.
What do Cesare Pavese, Beppe Fenoglio and Primo Levi have in common? Apart from their obvious Piedmontese origins, they and other writers coming from this Italian region share a certain tendency towards multilingualism, which is a characteristic that has not been comprehensively investigated over the years. This study presents a linguistic analysis of a group of modern and contemporary narratives written by Piedmontese authors. The novels and short stories here examined are notable for the intriguing way in which they move between a variety of idioms – Standard Italian, regional vernaculars, English and pastiches (with rare excursions into French). With the support of linguistic and philosophical theories on the relation between identity, alterity and language, the book demonstrates how the use of non-standard parlances is fundamental in both reinforcing the sense of belonging to specific social groups and highlighting the presence of dissimilar identities and ‘other’ cultures. A sociolinguistic study and an analysis of the political and historical context of the region are also provided in order to illustrate how the combination of different varieties in literature reflects the region’s peripheral position, as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in Piedmont since the nineteenth century. This book fills a notable gap, and casts new light on Piedmontese literature.
Federico Fellini is often considered a disengaged filmmaker, interested in self-referential dreams and grotesquerie rather than contemporary politics. This book challenges that myth by examining the filmmaker’s reception in Italy, and by exploring his films in the context of significant political debates. By conceiving Fellini’s cinema as an individual expression of the nation’s “mythical biography,” the director’s most celebrated themes and images — a nostalgia for childhood, unattainable female figures, fantasy, the circus, carnival — become symbols of Italy’s traumatic modernity and perpetual adolescence.
This biography illuminates the life of Ennio De Giorgi, a mathematical genius in parallel with John Nash, the Nobel Prize Winner and protagonist of A Beautiful Mind. Beginning with his childhood and early years of research, into his solution of the 19th problem of Hilbert and his professorship, this book pushes beyond De Giorgi’s rich contributions to the mathematics community, to present his work in human rights, including involvement in the fight for Leonid Plyushch’s freedom and the defense of dissident Uruguayan mathematician José Luis Massera. Considered by many to be the greatest Italian analyst of the twentieth century, De Giorgi is described in this volume in full through documents and direct interviews with friends, family, colleagues, and former students.
The Autobiography of a Language is an exploration of the deep and powerful ties between language and identity, focusing on an Italian American author and addressing global themes of modern writing. This is the first extensive, book-length work on Emanuel Carnevali (1897–1942), the first Italian American to attain literary recognition. It is a study on how an Italian immigrant to New York became an author and a key figure in transnational modernism. Most importantly, though, it's a study of contacts between American and Italian literatures in the modernist era, and an exploration of the challenges of writing in a second language. Carnevali's works are almost exclusively in English, even though he spent only eight years in the United States before returning to Italy. Combining literary analysis with some of the latest findings in applied linguistics and the study of bilingualism, this book contributes to a very active debate in the fields of comparative literature and translation studies: the implications of translingual writing. Andrea Ciribuco considers both the linguistic and cultural aspects of writing in a second language, examining its potential and pitfalls, and bringing Carnevali's works in touch with the sociocultural context of the great wave of Italian emigration.
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