Books by Nicoletta Pireddu
Routledge, 2022
_Migrating Minds. Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (co-edited by Didier Coste,... more _Migrating Minds. Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (co-edited by Didier Coste, Christina Kkona, and Nicoletta Pireddu; winner of the 2023 American Comparative Literature Association 'René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Collection") is a collection of innovative interdisciplinary essays on cosmopolitanism, written by leading scholars from different continents who engage with paramount aesthetic, ethical, political, historical, and pedagogical issues.
As the title implies, the volume discusses cosmopolitanism as an attitude and a thought process, but also as an object of fictional, documentary, and social representations, trying to move away from the divisive premise of radical difference, and implying, instead, that all communities are traversed by differentiations, oppositions and contradictions. Authors propose a solidarity of reason, able to craft interpretive norms and teaching methods that transcend exclusive localisms.
This book participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged “death of theory” and the current ... more This book participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged “death of theory” and the current post-theoretical condition, arguing that the “finitude” of theoretical projects does not mean “end”, but rather contingency and transformation of thinking, beyond irreconcilable doctrines. Contributors from different cultural and scholarly backgrounds and based in three different continents propose new areas of investigation and interpretive possibilities, reopening dialogues with past and present discourses from a plurality of perspectives and locations. After a first section that reassesses the status and scopes of critique, theory, and literature, the book foregrounds new or neglected critical vocabulary, literary paradigms, and narrative patterns to reread texts at the intersection with other branches of the humanities—history, philosophy, religion, and pedagogy. It then explores geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological domains that have been historically and ideologically overdetermined (such as postsocialist, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan spaces), recodifying them as unstable sites of both conflicts and convergences. By acknowledging the spatio-temporal and cultural delimitations of any intellectual practice, the book creates awareness of our own partiality and incompleteness, but treats boundaries as zones of contact, exchange, and conceptual mobility that promote crossings and connections.
Table of Contents
Introduction: “Recoding the Past, Re-situating the “Post-” (Nicoletta Pireddu, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian, Georgetown University)
Part I Theoretical Indisciplinarities
"Meta-Critiquing: Critique, Hermeneutics, Theory," (Ming Xie, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)
"Illegitimacy as Norm: On the Temporal Structure of Science and Theory” (Kirk Wetters, Professor and Chair of Germanic Literature, Yale University)
“The Scope of Literary Theory" (Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor, Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, U of Connecticut)
“The Empirical Turn of Literary Studies” (Alexandre Gefen, Directeur de recherche, Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne nouvelle and CNRS)
"Unstable Literature" (Sébastien Doubinsky, novelist; Professor of French, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part II Unruly Rereadings
"Reading Aristocratically" (Peter Y. Paik, HK Research Professor of the Humanities at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea)
“The Function of Criticism in a ‘Post-Secular’ Age” (Vincent Pecora, Gordon B. Hinckley Presidential Endowed Chair in British Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City)
“Literary Ciceronianism and the Novel” (Sandra Gustafson, Professor of English and Political Sciences, University of Notre Dame)
“Taliban Poetry for Veterans. On Critical Pedagogy” (Robert Cowan, Acting Assistant Dean for Program Development, Assessment, & Review, Hunter College; Professor of English, The City University of New York).
Part III Critical Resettlements
“Space, Mobility and Materiality: Rethinking Notions of Geographic Coherence” (Diana Sorensen, Harvard University, Dean of Arts and Humanities, and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and of Comparative Literature)
“Postsocialism and the Afterlives of Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent” (Neda Atanasoki, Associate Professor, Department of Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz; Erin McElroy, Graduate Program in Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Outsourcing Post-colonialism” (Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Professor of Linguistics and English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; Senior Professorial Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies)
"Experimental Cosmopolitanism" (Didier Coste, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Université de Bordeaux Montaigne/ JNIAS-JNU, Delhi)
Scipio Sighele, _The Criminal Crowd And Other Writings on Mass Society_
Edited, with Introductio... more Scipio Sighele, _The Criminal Crowd And Other Writings on Mass Society_
Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Nicoletta Pireddu
Translated by Nicoletta Pireddu and Andrew Robbins
Foreword by Tom Huhn
The so-called “age of crowds” still evokes primarily the late nineteenth-century French context, with the fearful popular uprising leading to the Paris Commune, the numerous disturbing images of masses in novels by Balzac, Sue, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, and Adam among others, and Gustave Le Bon’s renowned volume The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895).
Yet, four years before Le Bon, Italian jurist, sociologist, cultural and literary critic Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) had published La folla delinquente. Saggio di psicologia collettiva [The Criminal Crowd. An Essay on Collective Psychology], to be followed by other pioneering explorations of group behavior and of the power of suggestion upon collective crime.
This volume offers the first English translation of Sighele’s seminal book and of excerpts from his subsequent works in the domains of sociology, psychology, law, politics, and literary criticism: La coppia criminale [The Criminal Couple], La delinquenza settaria [Sectarian Delinquency]; L’intelligenza della folla [The Intelligence of the Crowd]; La donna nova [The New Woman]; Eva moderna [Modern Eve]; Letteratura tragica [Tragic Literature]; Nell’arte e nella scienza [In Art and in Science]. An extensive introduction by Nicoletta Pireddu contextualizes Sighele’s overall contribution as a public intellectual negotiating between tradition and modernity in the European fin de siècle, able to grasp both the destructive and the constructive power of masses.
This collection draws the multifaceted portrait of a provocative and problematic thinker who, by participating in crucial international debates, brings to post-unification Italy a new outlook on paramount issues like the role of urbanization in the development of criminality, the unstable borders between individual and collective accountability in mass society, the legal and ideological constraints in the education and emancipation of women, the social and institutional challenges to the care and upbringing of children, and the responsibility of literary representation in the relationship between aesthetic standards and ethical norms.
This volume on the relationships between decadent literature and anthropology in late 19th- and e... more This volume on the relationships between decadent literature and anthropology in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe studies the unnoticed connection between, on the one hand, a purposeless and ephemeral beauty, and, on the other hand, the disinterestedness and the spontaneity ascribed by anthropologists to the ceremonial expenditure of “primitive” civilizations. The book highlights how, in those two apparently opposed discourses, prodigality and uselessness challenge the Western cult of profit by working in two directions: beauty is a form of lavishness, and lavishness is a source of beauty. An innovative theoretical and cultural framework at the crossroads of aesthetics, anthropology, and philosophy allows me to reexamine the works of O. Wilde, G. D’Annunzio, and J.-K. Huysmans, and to claim the crucial role of neglected authors like Paolo Mantegazza and Vernon Lee in what I trace as the emergence of a proto-theorization of gift-exchange in the European fin de siècle culture. The pervasiveness of symbolic economy in those writers establishes a new dynamic relationship between decadence and modernism, and also exposes the limits of the allegedly disinterested forms of expenditure that will soon lure the modernists to go “primitive”.
_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegaz... more _The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation
Oscar Wilde, _The Importance of Being Earnest_. Ed. and intro. by Nicoletta Pireddu; textual notes by Eileen Mulligan (Napoli: Loffredo, 1999).
Journal Issues by Nicoletta Pireddu
_The European Legacy. Towards New Paradigms_ 27 (7-8), 2022
As one of the foremost European writers and intellectuals of our time, Claudio Magris has consist... more As one of the foremost European writers and intellectuals of our time, Claudio Magris has consistently kept Europe at the center of his work. In addition to numerous volumes of literary criticism spanning over four decades, Italian translations of German masterpieces, and contributions to European journals and public debates, Magris has gained international recognition for his literary works—among them, the award-winning Danube (1989) and Microcosms (1999), Blindly (2008), Blameless (2017), and his most recent Tempo curvo a Krems (2019).
This special issue of _The European Legacy_ aims to connect Magris's thought and poetics to the broader European discourse from a variety of methodological, cultural, and comparative perspectives. We explore the complexities of the European idea in and through Claudio Magris’s oeuvre, with a particular focus on the role of literature and the humanities as creative and critical tools to engage with community building and human values.
Parallax 28 (1), 2022
How does the coexistence of different linguistic codes redefine speakers’ collective allegiances?... more How does the coexistence of different linguistic codes redefine speakers’ collective allegiances? How do literary and aesthetic representations symbolise the multiple identification mechanisms enabled by linguistic diversity and what do they entail for our understanding of community formation outside the frame of nationhood, which historically has relied upon geopolitical and linguistic delimitation?
The essays in this special issue engage with a wide range of geographies and localities, art works, and historical periods, tracing continuously how these works, in their attention to language(s), imagine issues of belonging, identity, and living together. The various contributors pursue both a critique and an elaboration of Anderson’s work from the perspective of literary, artistic, and societal multilingualism. Focusing on non-conventional corpora, each of them interrogates the representation of communities by paying attention to multilingualism, matters of migration and integration, and peripheral identities.
The essays look at novels, travelogues, poetry, video art, and oral history from all around the world, and centrally investigate the legacies of enforced monolingualism and language standardisation in different continents and epochs. In the process, they show the importance of bringing marginalised voices into mainstream discussions on identity and belonging to undermine the nation-state’s ideological apparatus in the twinned issues of the multilingual imagination of community and the imagination of multilingual community.
Journal Articles by Nicoletta Pireddu
Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism, 2024
ovelist, poet, essayist, and playwright Yoko Tawada is one of the most original voices in contemp... more ovelist, poet, essayist, and playwright Yoko Tawada is one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Born in Tokyo and living in Berlin, she writes in both Japanese and German, and, from this dual perspective, she narrates often surreal encounters with geographic, cultural, and linguistic otherness, in a condition of physical and conceptual mobility. With a misleadingly simple style and a playful tone, her stories explore the thresholds between homelands and foreign spaces, the complexities of identity and belonging, the blurred boundaries between mother tongues and translation, the intersections of the human and the non-human. Against nativism, polarizations, and territorial divides, her cosmopolitan imagination constructs fictional worlds made of perpetual crossings, coexistences, and mutable alliances-fluid spaces of possibilities and shifting meanings. Yoko Tawada has been recognized with numerous international awards, including the Adalbert-von-Chamisso Prize, the Goethe-Medal, the Kleist Prize, the Akutagawa "Just listen and open your mind." A Conversation with Yoko Tawada
Introduction: Claudio Magris, A Portrait of the Writer as a European Citizen
_The European Legacy. Towards New Paradigms," Special Issue "Claudio Magris and the Quest for Europe," Guest Editor Nicoletta Pireddu, 2022
Gothic Studies, 2014
In the framework of contemporary ecocritical theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paol... more In the framework of contemporary ecocritical theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Fisiologia del dolore and Upilio Faimali in tension with proanimal essays by Ouida and Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.
Abstracts Issue 10 – Fall/Winter 2017 in the Cold War era. The play, in fact, assaults the US cha... more Abstracts Issue 10 – Fall/Winter 2017 in the Cold War era. The play, in fact, assaults the US chauvinist and anti-communist ideology of the 1950s, and displays its consequences upon individuals and society. The post-war paranoia is acted out in the hidden corpse of Mr. Rosepettle, which Mme. Rosepettle preserves in her closet. The corpse, as a fetishistic object (for Mme. Rosepettle) and a source of fear and anxiety (for Jonathan), signals the impossibility, for the US of the time, to identify with tangible models and positive values (despite the materialistic ethos of the culture of the 1950s, as witness Mme. Rosepettle's obsessive need for fun and self-gratification). On the contrary, only death and loss, as overhanging threats and macabre horizon of collective expectation, paradoxically provide the nation with a unifying sense of identification. The Cold War, as a conflict that was never directly waged or fought, but nevertheless informed American identity, politics and cultu...
Résumé / Resumen / Riassunto At a moment when free circulation within the European Union is hampe... more Résumé / Resumen / Riassunto At a moment when free circulation within the European Union is hampered by particularisms and populisms, and the European project seems increasingly endangered by the non-European «other» inside and outside its geopolitical confines, this essay investigates Europeanness shaped by the joint action of travel and translation, as forms of transit and border crossing promoting exchange and difference. Focusing on Christine Brooke-Rose and Diego Marani, the essay explores the act of «carrying across» common to geographic dislocation and linguistic transfer as an agent of transformation able to regenerate the European power of symbolization through linguistic and cultural grafts. The two authors undermine eurocentrism from within by presenting language and identity as unstable spaces of multiple interactions. Their practice of spatial and cultural transfer situates Europeanness between national singularity and the levelling indistinction of globalism, redefinin...
Beyond Figuration, Below the Threshold: Some Observations on Postmodernism and the Sublime
Abstract Pireddu begins our discussion of transcendence and art as critical principle. The plural... more Abstract Pireddu begins our discussion of transcendence and art as critical principle. The plurality of standpoints vis-a-vis the sublime--which contemporary reality invokes at the levels of both form and content--suggest a far more articulated overview than the one ...
Scribi del caos: Carlo Emilio Gadda, Samuel Beckett
Reflections from the Borders of Poetry
The U.S. tour of female poets Mia Lecomte and Candelaria Romero after the publication of the volu... more The U.S. tour of female poets Mia Lecomte and Candelaria Romero after the publication of the volume _A New Map. The Poetry of Migrant Writers in Italy_ prompts a discussion on the status of female writing and migration in the framework of contemporary Italian poetry. Attention to these new poetic voices not only highlights the need for a more complex notion of subjectivity and identity but also reopens the debate about the function of poetry as a genre and its relevance in the classroom as a critical and pedagogical tool.
Foreignizing the Imagi-Nation: Giovanni Ruffini’s Contrapuntal Risorgimento
Giovanni Ruffini, author of the 1855 novel Doctor Antonio , is mainly remembered as the quintesse... more Giovanni Ruffini, author of the 1855 novel Doctor Antonio , is mainly remembered as the quintessential exiled Risorgimento patriot who, in Mazzini’s footsteps, from London advocated Italy’s freedom and unification. This article presents Ruffini as a more complex contributor to the politics of nation-ness. It highlights how Doctor Antonio engages with a neglected aspect of the Risorgimento, namely, the coexistence of the nation-building project and of a European consciousness as openness to geographical displacement and cultural crossfertilization. Ruffini raises the paradoxical possibility of inhabiting dislocation, projecting emotional attachment upon a plurality of cultural visions rather than upon the monadic paradigm of the nation-state.
Comparative Literature Studies, 2021
In the Beginning Was the Symbol
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 10848770 2015 1004910, Jan 23, 2015
Scribes of a Transnational Europe. Travel, Translation, Borders
The Translator Studies in Intercultural Communication, 2006
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Books by Nicoletta Pireddu
As the title implies, the volume discusses cosmopolitanism as an attitude and a thought process, but also as an object of fictional, documentary, and social representations, trying to move away from the divisive premise of radical difference, and implying, instead, that all communities are traversed by differentiations, oppositions and contradictions. Authors propose a solidarity of reason, able to craft interpretive norms and teaching methods that transcend exclusive localisms.
Table of Contents
Introduction: “Recoding the Past, Re-situating the “Post-” (Nicoletta Pireddu, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian, Georgetown University)
Part I Theoretical Indisciplinarities
"Meta-Critiquing: Critique, Hermeneutics, Theory," (Ming Xie, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)
"Illegitimacy as Norm: On the Temporal Structure of Science and Theory” (Kirk Wetters, Professor and Chair of Germanic Literature, Yale University)
“The Scope of Literary Theory" (Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor, Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, U of Connecticut)
“The Empirical Turn of Literary Studies” (Alexandre Gefen, Directeur de recherche, Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne nouvelle and CNRS)
"Unstable Literature" (Sébastien Doubinsky, novelist; Professor of French, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part II Unruly Rereadings
"Reading Aristocratically" (Peter Y. Paik, HK Research Professor of the Humanities at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea)
“The Function of Criticism in a ‘Post-Secular’ Age” (Vincent Pecora, Gordon B. Hinckley Presidential Endowed Chair in British Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City)
“Literary Ciceronianism and the Novel” (Sandra Gustafson, Professor of English and Political Sciences, University of Notre Dame)
“Taliban Poetry for Veterans. On Critical Pedagogy” (Robert Cowan, Acting Assistant Dean for Program Development, Assessment, & Review, Hunter College; Professor of English, The City University of New York).
Part III Critical Resettlements
“Space, Mobility and Materiality: Rethinking Notions of Geographic Coherence” (Diana Sorensen, Harvard University, Dean of Arts and Humanities, and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and of Comparative Literature)
“Postsocialism and the Afterlives of Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent” (Neda Atanasoki, Associate Professor, Department of Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz; Erin McElroy, Graduate Program in Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Outsourcing Post-colonialism” (Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Professor of Linguistics and English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; Senior Professorial Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies)
"Experimental Cosmopolitanism" (Didier Coste, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Université de Bordeaux Montaigne/ JNIAS-JNU, Delhi)
Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Nicoletta Pireddu
Translated by Nicoletta Pireddu and Andrew Robbins
Foreword by Tom Huhn
The so-called “age of crowds” still evokes primarily the late nineteenth-century French context, with the fearful popular uprising leading to the Paris Commune, the numerous disturbing images of masses in novels by Balzac, Sue, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, and Adam among others, and Gustave Le Bon’s renowned volume The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895).
Yet, four years before Le Bon, Italian jurist, sociologist, cultural and literary critic Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) had published La folla delinquente. Saggio di psicologia collettiva [The Criminal Crowd. An Essay on Collective Psychology], to be followed by other pioneering explorations of group behavior and of the power of suggestion upon collective crime.
This volume offers the first English translation of Sighele’s seminal book and of excerpts from his subsequent works in the domains of sociology, psychology, law, politics, and literary criticism: La coppia criminale [The Criminal Couple], La delinquenza settaria [Sectarian Delinquency]; L’intelligenza della folla [The Intelligence of the Crowd]; La donna nova [The New Woman]; Eva moderna [Modern Eve]; Letteratura tragica [Tragic Literature]; Nell’arte e nella scienza [In Art and in Science]. An extensive introduction by Nicoletta Pireddu contextualizes Sighele’s overall contribution as a public intellectual negotiating between tradition and modernity in the European fin de siècle, able to grasp both the destructive and the constructive power of masses.
This collection draws the multifaceted portrait of a provocative and problematic thinker who, by participating in crucial international debates, brings to post-unification Italy a new outlook on paramount issues like the role of urbanization in the development of criminality, the unstable borders between individual and collective accountability in mass society, the legal and ideological constraints in the education and emancipation of women, the social and institutional challenges to the care and upbringing of children, and the responsibility of literary representation in the relationship between aesthetic standards and ethical norms.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation
Journal Issues by Nicoletta Pireddu
This special issue of _The European Legacy_ aims to connect Magris's thought and poetics to the broader European discourse from a variety of methodological, cultural, and comparative perspectives. We explore the complexities of the European idea in and through Claudio Magris’s oeuvre, with a particular focus on the role of literature and the humanities as creative and critical tools to engage with community building and human values.
The essays in this special issue engage with a wide range of geographies and localities, art works, and historical periods, tracing continuously how these works, in their attention to language(s), imagine issues of belonging, identity, and living together. The various contributors pursue both a critique and an elaboration of Anderson’s work from the perspective of literary, artistic, and societal multilingualism. Focusing on non-conventional corpora, each of them interrogates the representation of communities by paying attention to multilingualism, matters of migration and integration, and peripheral identities.
The essays look at novels, travelogues, poetry, video art, and oral history from all around the world, and centrally investigate the legacies of enforced monolingualism and language standardisation in different continents and epochs. In the process, they show the importance of bringing marginalised voices into mainstream discussions on identity and belonging to undermine the nation-state’s ideological apparatus in the twinned issues of the multilingual imagination of community and the imagination of multilingual community.
Journal Articles by Nicoletta Pireddu