Ariosto Galaxy: beyond the book

I’m immensely happy to talk about the release of the book Galassia Ariosto. Il modello editoriale dell’Orlando Furioso dal libro illustrato al web, edited by Lina Bolzoni and published by Donzelli.

Galassia Ariosto is more than a book: it is the tip of the iceberg of the five-years project Looking at Words through Images run at the CTL – Centre for Data Processing of Texts and Images in the Literary Tradition, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa – and dedicated to the editorial galaxy grown during the Sixteenth century around the international success of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Particularly, the project addressed the spreading of illustrated books and the network of relations this editorial format established between texts and images.

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What we talk about when we talk about literature

The magazine Doppiozero published my review of the book Elogio della letteratura, a dialogue between the sociologists Riccardo Mazzeo and Zygmunt Bauman, recently released in Italy after its appearance in English as In Praise of Literature. In their attempt to use literature as a device capturing sociological symptoms, Mazzeo and Bauman build a map of the forces and tensions that cross the present, of its knots and cracks, of what humans are losing and what are (laboriously) gaining in this complex phase of history.

 

 

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Breaking news! Media and caricature in Bontempelli’s literature

I just published the essay “Edizione straordinaria! Bontempelli e la cognizione della Grande Guerra”, within the volume Dal nemico alla coralità. Immagini ed esperienze dell’altro nelle rappresentazioni della guerra degli ultimi cento anni, edited by Alessandro Baldacci (Firenze: LoGisma, 2017).

The essay analyses two novels by the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli, La vita intensa (1920) and La vita operosa (1921). I look at how these literary texts represent the «intense life» of the post-WWI metropolis, in whose spaces an analogy is established between the violence of war and the violence of peacetime dominated by the semiotic aggressiveness of modernity. Particularly, the psychic pressure of war seems to be extended by the pressure of the media system, which in those years was sky-rocketing and becoming increasingly complex and widespread.

Bontempelli’s two experimental novels are first published serially in two different magazines: «Ardita», a graphically dynamic and modern magazine issued monthly with the newspaper «Il Popolo d’Italia», in the case of La vita intensa.

«Ardita»’s cover designed by the artist Lorenzo Viani

«Industrie Italiane Illustrate», a journal funded by industrial companies, in the case of La vita operosa, which interestingly is a novel that largely satirises the way capitalism affects the human existence at the point that even bodies and minds are shaped by its force.

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Brexit. Good night and good luck, Europe

I recently interviewed the historian Donald Sassoon on Brexit and the (poor) political situation in Europe. Our dialogue will introduce a book titled BrexitBuona fortuna, Europa, published by Luca Sossella Editore within the new series Collassi, directed by Luca Massidda and Mario Pireddu and dedicated to the analysis of contemporary emergencies: disruptions of the past, crises of the present, and symptoms of the future.

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