Vol. 26, AdI 2008: Umanesimo, Postumanesimo e Neoumanesimo

Call for papers

Essays are sought for a special issue of Annali d’Italianistica 26 (2008): “Umanesimo, Postumanesimo e Neoumanesimo”.

Deadline for submission is January 30, 2008; publication is expected by fall 2008. All contributions will be refereed. Essays, not to exceed 25 double-spaced pages and written in Italian or English, should conform to the style set forth by Annali d’Italianistica for “Notes” and “Works Cited”.

Prospective contributors should address all inquiries to:

Massimo Lollini
University of Oregon
Department of Romance Languages
Eugene, OR 97403
Tel: 541-346-0957
Fax: 541-346-4030
Email: maxiloll@uoregon.edu

Description (Italian)

“L’uomo, per l’indiffinita natura della mente umana, ove questa si rovesci nell’ignoranza, egli fa sé regola dell’universo” (Scienza nuova seconda, par. 120). Così scrive Giambattista Vico in uno dei suoi memorabili assiomi o degnità. Le degnità nell’intenzione dell’autore sono pensieri degni di essere meditati, “alcune poche, ragionevoli e discrete domande” che forniscono il nutrimento profondo e pervasivo di tutto il ragionamento filosofico di Vico nella sua opera maggiore. Nella degnità da cui siamo partiti Vico presenta in una folgorante sintesi i due estremi della riflessione filosofica dell’umanesimo italiano. Il suo punto di partenza è rappresentato dall’Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486) di Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) che vede la maestà ed eccellenza dell’uomo nel suo essere termine medio di tutte le cose, essendo privo di una forma e di una natura definita (V, 18); il suo punto di arrivo è raffigurato dagli “infiniti mondi” di Giordano Bruno che relativizzano la posizione dell’uomo, non più inteso come centro dell’universo ma armonizzato con tutti gli enti di natura e gli esseri umani.

Il volume Umanesimo, postumanesimo e neoumanesimo degli Annali d’Italianistica intende proporre una riflessione articolata in diverse sezioni. In primo luogo si sollecitano contributi che propongano un ripensamento dell’umanesimo storico, delle sue origini e dei suoi sviluppi, appunto da Pico della Mirandola a Giordano Bruno, seguendo l’orientamento proposto dalla degnità di Giambattista Vico. Contributi recenti, da Michele Ciliberto (Pensare per contrari. Disincanto e utopia nel Rinascimento, 2005) a Paolo Rossi (Il tempo dei maghi. Rinascimento e modernità, 2006), sostengono che dell’umanesimo storico (e del Rinascimento italiano) è stato dato un quadro troppo equilibrato e coerente; e che a questo punto occorre valorizzare la ricchezza e la pluralità dei suoi modelli culturali se si vuole che il discorso dell’umanesimo e sull’umanesimo continui a partecipare al dialogo letterario e filosofico del nostro tempo, confrontandosi con i bisogni della cultura contemporanea.

Le interpretazioni più diffuse dell’umanesimo, da Burckhardt a Cassirer, da Gentile a Garin, lo hanno esaltato come un movimento intellettuale che ha “riscoperto” l’uomo e i suoi valori immanenti. Contro questa riduzione dell’umanesimo ad una dimensione antropologica si sono levate diverse voci, a partire da Heidegger che nella sua Lettera sull’umanesimo (1947) ha assunto una posizione “anti-umanista” sostenendo che l’essenza dell’umanesimo è la metafisica incapace di porre la questione per lui fondamentale della “verità dell’Essere”. Heidegger non promuove una difesa dell’“inumano” nel mentre che egli condanna l’umanesimo, non solo quello storico ma anche quello esistenzialista di Sartre, perché esso “non pone l’humanitas dell’uomo a un livello abbastanza elevato”. Secondo Heidegger, il destino del mondo e l’apertura dell’essere non vanno ricercate nel soggetto umano ma sono annunciate nel linguaggio e in particolare nella parola poetica, dai frammenti dei presocratici a Hölderlin. Ernesto Grassi ha condiviso la condanna dell’interpretazione antropologica dell’umanesimo ma, in polemica con Heidegger, accusato di non conoscere l’umanesimo italiano, ha sostenuto che le origini della concezione della parola poetica come rivelatrice del mondo sono da vedere proprio nell’umanesimo, in particolare negli autori secondo lui meno compromessi con il neoplatonismo, da Albertino Mussato (1261-1329) a Cristoforo Landino (1424-98).

Occorre allora chiedersi se sia ancora possible oggi partire dall’umanesimo della parola per porre la questione della poesia come lingua originaria dell’umanità, negli stessi termini in cui ne avevano parlato i primi umanisti. La questione della tecnica sembra oggi imporsi in maniera schiacciante lasciando spazi sempre più ridotti non solo per il ruolo del soggetto umano ma anche per concezioni originarie e sacrali della poesia come rivelazione del mondo. Questi problemi, al centro della seconda sezione di questo volume, impongono una riflessione etica che si rende sempre più urgente. Pur parlando della necessità di un’etica originaria e radicale capace di rammemorare la questione dell’essere, Heidegger non ha scritto un’etica. È stato Emmanuel Lévinas a farlo, ponendo la priorità dell’etica sull’ontologia e rifiutando la concezione dell’uomo e della soggettività a suo dire propria dell’umanesimo. All’umanesimo storico egli ha opposto un “umanesimo dell’altro uomo” capace di riconoscere l’alterità, non solo la soggettività umana. In questa sezione si sollecitano quindi contributi che ripensino l’umanesimo italiano alla luce del pensiero etico contemporaneo. La domanda che risulta centrale a questo proposito è questa: l’etica contemporanea può trovare nella tradizione umanista un’ispirazione che sia all’altezza dei tempi e dei drammi del presente?

Infine, nella terza sezione del volume, si propone una ricerca sul significato e valore che viene oggi attribuito da una parte alle espressioni “postumano” e “postumanesimo” e dall’altra all’idea di neoumanesimo emersa nel recente volume curato da Sergio Moravia, Firenze e il neo umanesimo. Arte, cultura, comunicazione multimediale all’alba del terzo millennio (2005). La tecnicizzazione della vita nel nostro tempo ha travalicato la sfera della produzione e delle merci per investire direttamente le facoltà basilari dell’uomo. La biologia molecolare e le scienze cognitive hanno esaltato il ruolo delle tecnoscienze mettendo in crisi il dualismo natura-cultura come idea e metodologia capace di comprendere quello che consideriamo “umano”. Oggi non appare più possibile pensare ad un’antropologia scientifica e/o filosofica senza fare i conti con una dimensione biologica dell’umano profondamente modificata nei suoi aspetti essenziali, dal nascere al vivere il proprio corpo e morire (N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, 1999; Roberto Marchesini, Post-Human. Verso nuovi modelli di esistenza, 2002; Giuseppe Longo, Il simbionte. Prove di umanità futura, 2003; Massimo De Carolis, La vita nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica, 2004). Nel “post-human Manifesto” di Robert Pepperell si legge tra l’altro: “It is now clear that humans are no longer the most important things in the universe. This is something that humanists have yet to accept” (The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain, 2003: 177). Occorre domandarsi allora come si debba leggere le origini e le motivazioni di questa ondata di pensiero che si autodefinisce postumanista e che fa leva sul supposto carattere epocale delle trasformazioni tecnologiche che mutano sotto i nostri occhi la specie umana. È forse venuto il tempo, lugubramente profetizzato da Foucault, della fine dell’uomo come fatale risultato di una conoscenza che, decomponendo l’immagine umana nelle scienze e nelle trasformazioni tecnologiche, ne cancella l’esistenza “come sull’orlo del mare un volto di sabbia” (Le parole e le cose. Un’archeologia delle scienze umane, 1988: 414). Oppure è ancora possibile leggere questo pensiero postumanista utilizzando le categorie dell’umanesimo? L’idea che gli esseri umani non sono al centro dell’universo si trova già in Giordano Bruno, che annuncia un’indifferenza degli esseri per cui la forma non è indizio della sostanza e l’Asino Cillenico in una delle sue rinascite può diventare Aristotele e fare la parodia dell’Oratio de hominis dignitate di Pico della Mirandola. Possiamo considerare il Nolano l’ultimo filosofo “umanista” o dobbiamo pensare a lui come a un geniale anticipatore del pensiero postumanista?

Description (English)

In one of his memorable axioms (“assiomi o degnità”) Giambattista Vico writes: “Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things.” (New Science, par. 120). The axioms in Vico’s intention are thoughts worth thinking in order to ponder “a few, reasonable and discrete questions” that provide the profound and pervasive nourishment of his philosophy and major work. In the axiom just quoted, Vico presents in a brilliant synthesis the two extremes of Italian Humanism’s philosophy. The starting point is represented by Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486), emphasizing the excellence and majesty of human being set by God at the center of the world as a “creature of indeterminate image” (V, 18). The concluding point of Italian humanism’s trajectory is represented by Giordano Bruno’s “infinite worlds,” which relativize the human position as a part of the universe in harmony with all natural entities and other human beings.

The volume Humanism, Posthumanism and Neo-humanism published in the Annali d’Italianistica series proposes a reflection articulated in different sections. First, it solicits contributions engaged in rethinking historical humanism, its origins and developments, precisely from Pico della Mirandola to Giordano Bruno, following the inspiration of Vico’s axiom. Recent bibliography, from Michele Ciliberto (Pensare per contrari. Disincanto e utopia nel Rinascimento, 2005) to Paolo Rossi (Il tempo dei maghi. Rinascimento e modernità, 2006), upholds that Humanism and Italian Renaissance have been characterized within a too harmonic and coherent frame; and that at this point it is necessary to valorize the richness and plurality of its cultural models, if one wants humanism to continue being part of contemporary cultural and literary debate, addressing the deep cultural needs of contemporary society.

The most widespread interpretations, from Burckhardt to Cassirer, Gentile and Garin, conceived humanism as an intellectual movement that “rediscovered” the immanent values of humanity. This reduction of humanism to an anthropological dimension has been criticized by Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism (1947) in which he holds an “anti-humanist” stand, arguing that the essence of humanism is metaphysics, which for him is unable to posit the fundamental question of the “truth of Being.” Heidegger does not promote a defense of the “inhuman,” even though he condemns both historical humanism and Sartre’s existential humanism because “it does not set the humanitas of man high enough.” According to Heidegger the “destiny” (Geschick) of human world and the openness of Being are not to be found in the human subject but are announced in the language, particularly in the poetic word, from pre-Socratic fragments to Hölderlin’s poems. Ernesto Grassi shared the criticism of the anthropological interpretation of humanism, but he accused Heidegger of not knowing Italian humanism and held that the origin of the conception of poetic word as revealing the world are to be found precisely in humanism, particularly in those authors he considered less involved with Neoplatonism, from Albertino Mussato (1261-1329) to Cristoforo Landino (1424-98).

Is it still possible today to conceive the “humanism of the word” as the beginning point to pose the question of poetry as the primordial human language, in the same terms developed by early humanists? Nowadays, the question concerning technology seems to impose itself cogently, leaving more and more limited space for the human subject and for primeval and sacred conceptions of poetry as revelation of the world. These issues will be at the core of the second section of this volume; they call for an ethical reflection that is more and more urgent. Heidegger spoke of the necessity of an original and radical ethics capable of remembering the question of Being. Nevertheless Heidegger did not write an ethics, whereas Emmanuel Levinas did, by posing the priority of ethics over ontology, and by refusing the idea of man and subjectivity he thought was developed by humanism. To the historical views of humanism Levinas opposed the “humanism of the other man,” able to recognize not only the subjectivity but also the alterity of human beings. For this section of the volume we solicit contributions that rethink Italian humanism in the light of contemporary ethics. In this regard, the crucial question to ask is the following: Can contemporary ethics find in humanist tradition an adequate inspiration to address the dramatic concerns of the present?

Finally, in the third section of this volume we propose an inquiry on the meaning and value that is nowadays attributed, on the one hand, to “post-humanism” and the so called “post-human, and, on the other hand, to the idea of neo-humanism that emerged in the recent volume edited by Sergio Moravia, Firenze e il neo umanesimo. Arte, cultura, comunicazione multimediale all’alba del terzo millennio (2005). The overwhelming presence of technology in our life and time goes beyond the sphere of production and goods, reaching directly the basic human faculties. Molecular biology and cognitive sciences exalted the role of techno-sciences putting into crisis the dualism nature-culture as an idea and methodology able to comprehend what we consider human. Nowadays it does not appear possible anymore to think of a scientific and/or philosophic anthropology without coming to terms with the biological dimension of the human as profoundly modified in its essential aspects, from being born to living one’s own body and dying (N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, 1999; Roberto Marchesini, Post-human. Verso nuovi modelli di esistenza, 2002; Giuseppe Longo, Il simbionte. Prove di umanità futura, 2003; Massimo De Carolis, La vita nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica, 2004). In the “Post-human Manifesto” by Robert Pepperell, one reads: “It is now clear that humans are no longer the most important things in the universe. This is something that humanists have yet to accept” (The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain, 2003: 177). How should one read the origins and motivations of this self-proclaiming “post-humanist” wave of thinking, relying on the supposed epochal character of the technological transformations that modify under our eyes the human species? Has perhaps come the time of the “end of man” gloomily prophesied by Michel Foucault? Is this the fatal result of a model of knowledge that, fragmenting the human image in the techno-sciences, erases human existence “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”? (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1970: 386-87). Or is it still possible to read post-human thinking through humanist categories? The idea that human beings are not at the center of the universe is already developed by Giordano Bruno; he announces the indifference of beings through which the form is not indicative of substance and the Cillenican ass in one of its rebirths may become Aristotle and parody Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate. Should we consider Bruno the last “humanist” philosopher or should we think of him as a genial forerunner of post-humanist thinking?

Vol. 27, AdI 2009: A Century of Futurism: 1909-2009

Call for Papers

The Futurist movement marked a crucial moment of rupture within European literature and art, whether one considers it “l‘epilogo negatore di quel romanticismo astratto che si è chiamato decadentismo,” as Franco Ferrarotti put it in a recent essay (Arte d’avanguardia e società, ed. Ilaria Riccioni, 2006), or as “the first truly formed […] truly international avant-garde movement,” as Charles Russell states (Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud to Post-Modernism, 1985). For all its political and cultural contradictions, Italian Futurism called into question all aspects of literary and artistic production, from the sacrality and eternalness of the work of art to the privileged role of the artist and the passivity of the reader and the spectator. Before Dada and Surrealism, according to Peter Bürger’s classic definition of the avant-garde’s distinguishing feature, Futurism is the first artistic group to negate “not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men” (Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1984).

As manifest in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated statement, however, the critical reception of Futurism has often been conditioned by its entanglement with Fascism: “‘Fiat ars — pereat mundus,’ says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expect war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art.’ […] This is the situation of politics that Fascism is rendering aesthetic” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936). While in Italy the marginalization of the movement, especially in literary studies, ended with the early 1970s, significantly the great amount of critical work produced since then could not prevent the questionable exploitation of the connection between Fascism and Futurism in the new political climate of the 1990s. Also in Anglo-American scholarship Futurism is likewise often approached as an almost paradigmatic example of Fascist modernism, in spite of a number of important studies — such as Cinzia Blum’s The Other Modernism, 1996, and Emilio Gentile’s The Struggle for Modernity, 2003 — that have attempted to call into question such simplistic readings. With the 2009 issue, Annali d’Italianistica sees the one-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Futurism as an opportunity to re-assess the current state of scholarship on the movement and to identify new lines of research.

The volume will be articulated in four sections. In the first section, the volume’s editors are interested in contributions that consider Futurism in relation to the broader cultural, political, and social context of the first half of the twentieth century. While welcoming traditional studies on the reciprocal influences between Futurism and other cultural, political, and social movements (including those that preceded its foundation, such as symbolism or Spanish modernismo), the editors are especially interested in essays that consider the responses of Futurism to specific aspects of modernity — e.g., technological advances, new forms of political organization, the loss of authority of the work of art, feminism, etc. — vis-à-vis those of other modernist groups and authors.

The second section will seek to provide original interpretations of the most representative figures of the Futurist movement, such as F. T. Marinetti, Palazzeschi, Boccioni, and Severini. This section’s methods of inquiry may vary from close textual readings to culturalist and philosophical or philological approaches.

The third section will aim at opening up the Futurist canon to contributions of other figures associated with the movement. As in the previous section, essays may include readings of specific texts and authors, but may also address themes that have been comparatively neglected, such as, for instance, the close relationship between Futurist fiction and genre fiction — Volt, Corra, Rosà, and Folgore, among others, wrote works that can be described as science fiction or detective fiction — or the later poetics of the movement (aeroplastica, poesia sonora, etc.). This third section may also include essays on the interdisciplinary dimension of Futurism and its contribution to fields such as visual arts, music, architecture or cooking, to name just a few.

The fourth section will be dedicated to the cultural and theoretical legacy of Futurism. This section welcomes in particular essays that explore the new expressive and conceptual territories opened up by Futurist practices such as happenings and manifestos, political interventions, and parole in libertà. Other themes worth exploring are the relations between Futurism and machine-aesthetics, biopolitics, and the “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord).

Prospective contributors are invited to contact either editor of this volume: Luca Somigli (luca.somigli@utoronto.ca) or Federico Luisetti (luisetti@email.unc.edu). Deadline for submission is December 1, 2008. Publication is expected by fall 2009. All contributions will be refereed. Essays, not to exceed 25 double-spaced pages, will conform to the MLA style if written in English; if they are written in Italian, they should conform either to the MLA style or to the style posted on the journal’s website.

Vol. 28, AdI 2010: Capital City: Rome, 1870-2010

The twenty-eighth issue of Annali d’Italianistica, to be published in 2010, will devoted to the city of Rome from 1870 to the present day.

For the past century and a half, as for the rest of its long history, Rome has been both the product of the imagination and one of its more prolific and enduring agents; Rome is a material, geographical place, but it also occupies the space of cultural representation. “Rome was not built in a day,” it is commonly said; less frequently does one realize that Rome was, and continues to be, built with words, images, and sounds as much as with bricks, stone, and cement: no clear boundary may be drawn between the real and the imagined Rome, between the city of myth and the city on the map. Thus, the volume intends to investigate Rome’s presence since 1870 in texts, films, events, works of art and architecture, popular culture, and more.

The volume will be articulated chronologically into four parts: 1. Across Two Centuries; 2. Fascism and World War II; 3. The Postwar Period; 4. Into the Third Millennium.

1. Across two centuries. With the “Breach of Porta Pia,” Rome was freed from the political authority of the pope and, shortly thereafter, made the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Because it promised balance and mediation, in addition to its considerable historic weight, Rome was designated as the symbolic center of the young nation, through an active manipulation of both its urban outline and its less tangible urban culture: literature, politics, the arts, and those events that eventually formed the text of Rome’s history between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. All this was placed on top and in the interstices of a city already some twenty-five hundred years old, an urban palimpsest whose past never gets completely erased before the present is built to take its place.

2. Fascism and World War Two. Viewing Rome’s recent past as a decadent failure, Mussolini notoriously refashioned the capital so that it might better reflect his grandiose ideals of a new Italy; his approach was a mixture of reverence for Rome’s ancient past and ruthless desecration of its legacy. Artists, writers, and filmmakers have reflected on the novelties and the shortcomings of the regime’s myth of a monolithic capital, their critiques often veiled so as to avoid censorship—though the Duce’s demise and the traumas of the Second World War brought about copious and far more diverse representations of Rome in all available media.

3. The postwar period. The traces of its fascist experience rethought and rewritten (with the names of streets changed, the significance of monuments altered), Rome underwent further transformations during the second half of the twentieth century. But continuity prevailed over breaks with the past, and the city did not lose its long-standing significance as a place of mediation and circulation with respect to the rest of the country. Rome’s physical and allegorical contradictions, and its social and political role for the Italian peninsula as a whole, are expressed in the city’s art and architecture, literature and poetry, but also its cinema and its popular culture.

4. Into the third millennium: Along with the urban face-lifts inspired by the 2000 Jubilee and the cultural politics of Rome’s recent mayors, the late twentieth century and the new millennium have marked Rome with a multicultural stamp. From the immigrants inhabiting both center and periphery, and peopling contemporary films and books, to the visible presence of foreign architects and artists, to the building of the largest mosque in Europe, Rome’s provincial face is changing rapidly. Rome was chosen as the capital of united Italy because it signaled a mythical view of a nation unified in the past, while pointing to a unified future. One of the many questions contemporary Rome invites us to ponder, then, concerns the ways in which Rome’s 1870 promise of unity has been and is being fulfilled, betrayed, or, rather, whether such a view should be re-examined altogether.

For each section we welcome scholarly investigations on any aspect of the city of Rome from 1870 to 2010.

Essays are due to the editor by May 1st, 2009, with final versions due no later than December 1st, 2009. Essays must be in English, not exceed 25 double-spaced pages, and conform to the MLA style; they need to be submitted electronically, using Microsoft Word, and should include a list of works cited. Interested scholars are invited to contact the volume’s editor as soon as possible.

For further information or to submit an essay, please contact Guest Editor Cristina Mazzoni, Dept. of Romance Languages, University of Vermont.