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
Il Divino Pregio del Dono": Andrea Sperelli's Economy of Pleasures
Annali D Italianistica, 1997
Anthropology on Screen: Luigi Pirandello, Virginia Woolf
"TransEuropa: idiomi in movimento, identità in costruzione"
in _Eutopías: A Journal on Interculturality, Communication, and European Studies_ 13, (2017). Spe... more in _Eutopías: A Journal on Interculturality, Communication, and European Studies_ 13, (2017). Special issue "Cosmopolitanism and Cross-Cultural Negotiation", edited by Didier Coste: 113-131.
The outcome of the Brexit referendum is the apex of a long history of Euro-British relationships ... more The outcome of the Brexit referendum is the apex of a long history of Euro-British relationships characterised by two opposing but coexisting stereotypes. On the one hand, England appears as the freedom-seeking nation resisting restrictive collective policies imposed by a totalitarian EU regime of faceless Brussels bureaucrats. On the other hand, England seems to resurrect its imperialistic superiority against the purported democracy and horizontality of European institutions. Adopting the notion of “cultural intimacy”—with which Michael Herzfeld analyzes the mutual engagement of contrasting positions in political and administrative practices—this paper addresses the equally stereotypical images of an indifferent, inhuman European bureaucracy and of an insular, cynical Great Britain in the works of Malcolm Bradbury and Tim Parks. Be it the allegedly liberal yet nationalistic stance of Thatcherist anti-Europeanism in Bradbury, or the British disaffection with the purported identitarian and cultural levelling within the common borders of the Schengen area and of the single currency, both authors’ symbolic constructions of European institutions and of British Euroscepticism are built as cultural entanglements of these two realities, and show the need to overcome the reductive conception of Europe as a failed super-state.
Forum Italicum, 2017
D’Annunzio’ s approach to beauty has largely unnoticed connections with the anti-modern anthropol... more D’Annunzio’ s approach to beauty has largely unnoticed connections with the anti-modern anthropological discourse on symbolic economy that at the turn of the century begins to reject instrumentality in life and representation. From the cultural primitivism of his time, D’Annunzio develops a consistent reflection on the aesthetic and ethical significance of ritual exchange that informs his search for a higher morality through art.
Focusing on the nexus of art, giving and temporality, this essay addresses the intuitions and the contradictions of unconditional expenditure in D’Annunzio’s works, analyzing the leitmotif of the hand as an ambivalent carrier of lavishness and power. From Trionfo della morte to Il Fuoco, from Le vergini delle rocce to his autobiographical writings, the implications of D’Annunzio’s argument contribute to an extended theoretical debate that interrogates the role of value in aesthetic and social practices—from Nietzsche, Mauss, and Bataille to Heidegger and Derrida. Can art’s luxurious dissipation truly break the circle of speculation and restitution?
Nonostante la fama internazionale di Claudio Magris e l'indubbio impatto delle sue opere nell'ita... more Nonostante la fama internazionale di Claudio Magris e l'indubbio impatto delle sue opere nell'italianistica mondiale, la sua produzione saggistica e narrativa non sembra avere ancora fatto breccia nella critica e nella teoria nordamericana. Questa situazione è tanto più paradossale se si considera che Magris è probabilmente il più multiculturale, il più comparatista e il più interdisciplinare degli scrittori italiani contemporanei, per tematiche e per formazione. La sua prospettiva storico-filosofica, come egli stesso sottolinea, deriva dalla cultura tedesca, ma la sua prosa, specialmente la sintassi, è rigorosamente italiana, mentre le sue vicende biografiche e letterarie sono fondate su sensazioni ed eventi che lo portano ad attraversare multipli confini.
http://complit.dukejournals.org.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/content/67/3/267.abstract
Uploads
Journal Articles by Nicoletta Pireddu
Focusing on the nexus of art, giving and temporality, this essay addresses the intuitions and the contradictions of unconditional expenditure in D’Annunzio’s works, analyzing the leitmotif of the hand as an ambivalent carrier of lavishness and power. From Trionfo della morte to Il Fuoco, from Le vergini delle rocce to his autobiographical writings, the implications of D’Annunzio’s argument contribute to an extended theoretical debate that interrogates the role of value in aesthetic and social practices—from Nietzsche, Mauss, and Bataille to Heidegger and Derrida. Can art’s luxurious dissipation truly break the circle of speculation and restitution?