Federico Bellini
Address: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Dipartimento di Italianistica e Comparatistica
Largo Gemelli 1
20123 Milano (MI)
Dipartimento di Italianistica e Comparatistica
Largo Gemelli 1
20123 Milano (MI)
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habit at the dawn of the twentieth century by touching upon a series of paradigmatic texts of the modernist canon and by investigating their debts to and consonances with the contemporary philosophies of habit. My thesis is that during those decades – seen as a mere chapter in the longer history of modernity – the philosophical and literary theme of habit served not only as a way to understand and represent the ordinary dimension of life, but also as a means to develop an idea of human subjectivity that could mediate between the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies that permeated the competing ideologies of the time. The crisis of subjectivity that characterized modernism and which has often been simplistically represented as a disintegration of the subject into irredeemably broken fragments, should rather be seen as the development of a dialectical idea of a “minor subject”, that is, an open, dynamic, multilayered subjectivity still endowed by a certain malleable consistency. Both modernist literature and its philosophical counterparts found in the “minor subject” (here in the sense of “subject matter”) of habit, the opportunity to investigate and represent the porosity between activity and passivity, volition and determinism, individual identity and social structures, that characterize this idea of subjectivity.
I focus on three different representative – though not exhaustive – facets of the issue. In the first section, relying on Virginia Woolf's work, I highlight how some of the narrative techniques developed by modernist writers can be seen as an attempt to give a plastic representation to the blurred boundaries of subjectivity as captured in the everyday existence of their characters. I then connect these innovations to the theory of habit of Samuel Butler, whom Woolf identified as one of the harbingers of modernity. In the second section I focus on Marcel Proust to discuss how modernist writers proved to be able to combine two opposed views of habit: on the one hand, the view of habit as purely mechanical and leading to inauthentic life; on the other, the idea of habit as essential to the human being's potential for self-perfecting and creativity. The third section is dedicated to addiction, seen as a form of habit in which the subject is radically torn between opposite forces. Following insights from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I interpret Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience as a meditation on how such a torn subjectivity manifests the essential incompleteness of the human subject and life's insuppressible nostalgia for the inorganic.
Virginia Woolf’s blurred boundaries, Marcel Proust’s ambiguous authenticity, and Italo Svevo’s split selfhood are three interconnected facets of the modernists’ interest in the “minor subject” of habit. Investigating the interaction between the philosophical and the literary discourses on habit at the dawn of the twentieth century can contribute to a more nuanced reconstruction of a pivotal moment in the history of thought but also to the contemporary philosophical debate. Almost exactly one century later, the current renewed interest in the theme of habit mirrors a situation in part similar to what characterized the ideological landscape of the time, as now too it is concerned with the attempt to reimagine a “minor subject” that mediates between the postmodern pulverization of identity and the temptation of reaffirming anachronistic forms of strong subjectivities.
it is measured against the real world in which values have to be constantly renegotiated in order to be useful. In this essay, I analyze how the tension between the ideal of the “craftsman hero,” represented by Papaw, and Ben’s attempt to live up to it traverses The Stonemason through three distinct if intertwined levels. First is the individual level, at which craft is intended as Ben’s personal experience of learning from Papaw how to lay stone upon stone as he struggles to hold his family together. Second is the social level: stonemasonry is one element of the economic system which is the battlefield for the struggle between the effort of the oppressed to improve
their position and the ever-renewing ways in which the oppressors defend and exercise their power. Finally, there is the symbolic-mythical level: here stonemasonry is seen as the archetypical craft embodying a view of the world as the product of either a benevolent or an evil God. It is in the tension between the ideal and the reality of craftsmanship as it crosses these three dimensions that one can appreciate the full scope and complexity of McCarthy’s ethic of craft.
roots and adventure, destiny and determinism, sense and nonsense of all life; to the search for God as the guarantor of a full life that can never be achieved; the conditions of possibility of the truth in the narration and history. Finally, we consider how the work and philosophy of McCarthy can be interpreted as part the literature and postmodern thought.
Il saggio offre una lettura del primo romanzo pubblicato da Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper, tesa a identificare in esso alcuni dei nuclei tematici che riappaiono in continue elaborazioni e variazioni in tutta la produzione dell'autore. Questi sono: l’assenza del padre, da intendersi tanto in senso letterale quanto come figura della mancanza di un orizzonte di riferimento trascendente; la ricerca di un senso dell’esistenza attraverso l’incontro con una figura d’autorità che riempie il vuoto lasciato dal padre; l'insistito ripercorrere la crisi della modernità come nostalgia per un passato tradizionale vissuto sempre solo nel ricordo; il confronto con il mondo della natura quale spazio di una alterità tanto vivificante quanto perturbante.
In Moby-Dick, Melville represents the natural environment as the mere superficial layer of an abyss populated by indifferent and ungraspable forces, overwhelming the human being and ultimately crushing him. McCarthy, in particular in The Road, forces his characters to face a natural world that clearly “was not made for man,” and much less for his happiness. In this paper, I evaluate commonalities and differences in the representation of the Gnostic dark side of Nature offered by the two authors. In particular, I focus on the ethical stance taken by the authors in front of the indifference of Nature – namely, Melville's ironic exercise of devotion without faith and McCarthy's elegiac praise of discipline beyond duty – in order to evaluate their potential purport for contemporary ecocritical debate.
habit at the dawn of the twentieth century by touching upon a series of paradigmatic texts of the modernist canon and by investigating their debts to and consonances with the contemporary philosophies of habit. My thesis is that during those decades – seen as a mere chapter in the longer history of modernity – the philosophical and literary theme of habit served not only as a way to understand and represent the ordinary dimension of life, but also as a means to develop an idea of human subjectivity that could mediate between the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies that permeated the competing ideologies of the time. The crisis of subjectivity that characterized modernism and which has often been simplistically represented as a disintegration of the subject into irredeemably broken fragments, should rather be seen as the development of a dialectical idea of a “minor subject”, that is, an open, dynamic, multilayered subjectivity still endowed by a certain malleable consistency. Both modernist literature and its philosophical counterparts found in the “minor subject” (here in the sense of “subject matter”) of habit, the opportunity to investigate and represent the porosity between activity and passivity, volition and determinism, individual identity and social structures, that characterize this idea of subjectivity.
I focus on three different representative – though not exhaustive – facets of the issue. In the first section, relying on Virginia Woolf's work, I highlight how some of the narrative techniques developed by modernist writers can be seen as an attempt to give a plastic representation to the blurred boundaries of subjectivity as captured in the everyday existence of their characters. I then connect these innovations to the theory of habit of Samuel Butler, whom Woolf identified as one of the harbingers of modernity. In the second section I focus on Marcel Proust to discuss how modernist writers proved to be able to combine two opposed views of habit: on the one hand, the view of habit as purely mechanical and leading to inauthentic life; on the other, the idea of habit as essential to the human being's potential for self-perfecting and creativity. The third section is dedicated to addiction, seen as a form of habit in which the subject is radically torn between opposite forces. Following insights from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I interpret Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience as a meditation on how such a torn subjectivity manifests the essential incompleteness of the human subject and life's insuppressible nostalgia for the inorganic.
Virginia Woolf’s blurred boundaries, Marcel Proust’s ambiguous authenticity, and Italo Svevo’s split selfhood are three interconnected facets of the modernists’ interest in the “minor subject” of habit. Investigating the interaction between the philosophical and the literary discourses on habit at the dawn of the twentieth century can contribute to a more nuanced reconstruction of a pivotal moment in the history of thought but also to the contemporary philosophical debate. Almost exactly one century later, the current renewed interest in the theme of habit mirrors a situation in part similar to what characterized the ideological landscape of the time, as now too it is concerned with the attempt to reimagine a “minor subject” that mediates between the postmodern pulverization of identity and the temptation of reaffirming anachronistic forms of strong subjectivities.
it is measured against the real world in which values have to be constantly renegotiated in order to be useful. In this essay, I analyze how the tension between the ideal of the “craftsman hero,” represented by Papaw, and Ben’s attempt to live up to it traverses The Stonemason through three distinct if intertwined levels. First is the individual level, at which craft is intended as Ben’s personal experience of learning from Papaw how to lay stone upon stone as he struggles to hold his family together. Second is the social level: stonemasonry is one element of the economic system which is the battlefield for the struggle between the effort of the oppressed to improve
their position and the ever-renewing ways in which the oppressors defend and exercise their power. Finally, there is the symbolic-mythical level: here stonemasonry is seen as the archetypical craft embodying a view of the world as the product of either a benevolent or an evil God. It is in the tension between the ideal and the reality of craftsmanship as it crosses these three dimensions that one can appreciate the full scope and complexity of McCarthy’s ethic of craft.
roots and adventure, destiny and determinism, sense and nonsense of all life; to the search for God as the guarantor of a full life that can never be achieved; the conditions of possibility of the truth in the narration and history. Finally, we consider how the work and philosophy of McCarthy can be interpreted as part the literature and postmodern thought.
Il saggio offre una lettura del primo romanzo pubblicato da Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper, tesa a identificare in esso alcuni dei nuclei tematici che riappaiono in continue elaborazioni e variazioni in tutta la produzione dell'autore. Questi sono: l’assenza del padre, da intendersi tanto in senso letterale quanto come figura della mancanza di un orizzonte di riferimento trascendente; la ricerca di un senso dell’esistenza attraverso l’incontro con una figura d’autorità che riempie il vuoto lasciato dal padre; l'insistito ripercorrere la crisi della modernità come nostalgia per un passato tradizionale vissuto sempre solo nel ricordo; il confronto con il mondo della natura quale spazio di una alterità tanto vivificante quanto perturbante.
In Moby-Dick, Melville represents the natural environment as the mere superficial layer of an abyss populated by indifferent and ungraspable forces, overwhelming the human being and ultimately crushing him. McCarthy, in particular in The Road, forces his characters to face a natural world that clearly “was not made for man,” and much less for his happiness. In this paper, I evaluate commonalities and differences in the representation of the Gnostic dark side of Nature offered by the two authors. In particular, I focus on the ethical stance taken by the authors in front of the indifference of Nature – namely, Melville's ironic exercise of devotion without faith and McCarthy's elegiac praise of discipline beyond duty – in order to evaluate their potential purport for contemporary ecocritical debate.
Analyzing from some of the most significant texts, I discuss the intrinsic reasons of these formal experiments in the light of Beckett's whole artistic trajectory. First I highlight how Beckett's short forms are not to be considered as something given, but as the result of a process. Then, I propose a typology of techniques characterizing the two opposite but complementary aspects of such process: abstraction on the one hand – produced by means of symmetry and excavation – and complication on the other – produced by means of fragmentation and condensation. Geometrical simplification and condensed complication, the external compression of form and the internal contraction of matter: Samuel Beckett finds a balance between these two complementary aspects, creating works that are at the same time miniaturized and distilled, cameos and fragments.
was one of the most popular books on diet and hygiene across the whole of
Europe from its publication in the sixteenth century up to the early twentieth century.
In this chapter, I show that the reasons for the success of Cornaro’s work in
early modern England lie in the fact that two very different communities of practice
saw the work’s conclusions as grounded upon a particular configuration of evidence
that resonated with them: one spiritual, where it was used as part of an attempt to
forge a via media between Puritans and Anglicans; the other medical, where it
served as a case study from which more general conclusions about how to prolong
life might be extrapolated. The unique context in which the first English translation
of the Discorsi was conceived, produced, and published—involving some of the
most prominent intellectual figures of the time, such as Francis Bacon, Nicholas
Ferrar, and George Herbert—make this an important case study, useful for the
reconstruction of a significant chapter of the history of dieting and hygiene, and the
history of conceptions of evidence and their relationship to different communities of
practice.
"Transnational Subjects: Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Encounters"
Gerald Brenan is a very interesting if uncommon figure in English modernism. Grown up in India and South Africa, he received his education in England, and after fighting in WWI in France he became an active member of the Bloomsbury Group. Shortly afterward, not being able to face the costs of the expensive life of the London bohème, he took the surprising decision of moving to Yegen, a tiny and primitive village of then wild Andalusia. There, he led the life of an intellectual hermit, studying the thousands of books he had brought with him on a mule's back and struggling to become an accomplished writer. At the same time, though, he kept constantly in communication with some of the most prominent figures of the Group, some of which (V. Woolf, L. Strachey, R. Partridge, and D. Carrington among others) undertook the difficult trip to Yegen to visit him.
Brenan's self-exile to the geographical periphery of the cultural world of the time is probably one of the main reasons why he never attracted much critical attention. Nonetheless, that same peripheral collocation also served as a privileged vantage point from which to observe the dynamics of modernity as Brenan – despite his decision to live in a rural and underdeveloped area – always kept up with the British cultural climate. Moreover, even though Brenan never really entered in close contact with the Spanish cultural scene – apart from some sporadic exchanges with prominent Spanish intellectuals such as Luis Araquistáin –, he was an attentive observer of the cosas de Espaňa and he considered himself as an interpreter of the Spanish world for his British readers. In particular, he authored one of the earliest and most important books on the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Labyrinth, which was highly influential both in Britain and Spain. He also wrote a History of the Spanish Literature, a biography of Santa Teresa and several other books on Spanish topics.
In my paper I intend to investigate Brenan's role as 'cultural mediator' between Spain and Britain. On the one hand, I will take into account both Brenan's receptiveness to Spanish culture and his ability in adapting it for his readers; on the other hand, I will focus on the author interpretation, as a partial outsider, of the intellectual atmosphere of Bloomsbury modernism. In particular, I intend to study – within an imagological framework – to what extent Brenan's representation of the Spanish world was influenced by previous conventional images. On the one hand, Brenan knows that for his readers Andalusia “represents the height of the exotic and the Oriental” and tries to react against such stereotype; on the other, as claimed by Sir Raymond Carr, “there can be no doubt that Brenan inherited […] the stereotypes of the Romantics”. Such ambiguity, typical of Brenan's stance, will be finally evaluated against other authors' works, in particular those of Laurie Lee and Mario Praz.
ESSE Conference, 22-26 August 2016
The National University of Ireland, Galway
Nei romanzi di Cesare Pavese le Langhe non sono uno sfondo pittoresco, ma quasi un personaggio che assiste agli eventi con regale o divino distacco. "Gli dèi sono il luogo", scrive nei Dialoghi con Leucò, e le sue colline appaiono davvero intrise di una vitalità pagana, che le riveste con gli attributi antropomorfi di divinità ctonie, come nel celebre passaggio di Paesi Tuoi nel quale si stagliano come profili di mammella. Nella loro ruvida morbidezza Pavese ritrova un senso femmineo della natura, i segni di un mondo ancestrale con il quale la cultura contadina conservava un rapporto fatto di riti, celebrazioni, abitudini. Dalle Langhe come teatro di questa ritualità legata alla terra Pavese risale ai tempi preistorici di un'umanità primitiva, ai culti delle madri, all'intreccio violento di sacrificio e fecondità. L'essere donna della terra Pavese l'aveva prima intuito vivendo in questo paesaggio, poi riscoperto nei testi della nuova antropologia che curava per la "Collezione di studi religiosi, etnologici e psicologici" e infine ribadito, capovolgendo l'identità, nelle sue poesie, in cui è l'amata a identificarsi con le colline.
In modo tutto diverso Beppe Fenoglio guardava allo stesso territorio, dove trascorse gran parte della sua vita e soprattutto l'esperienza della lotta partigiana. Il suo occhio non cerca i segni di un passato mitico e di storie archetipiche, ma le cicatrici ancora fresche di un passato storico saturo di violenza. Attorno ai paesi teatro dei suoi romanzi le colline non si stringono in un abbraccio di madre o matrigna, ma si dispongono in una folla di quinte ammassate, che proiettano ombre stranianti a seconda della prospettiva che le investe. Così esse mutano in una fantasmagoria di forme, facendosi ora il riparo che in anfratti e cascine offre calore e protezione, ora figure modellate in una sostanza d'incubo. In Una questione privata la fuga del protagonista è incanalata in un paesaggio che gli preme addosso e scivola via in frammenti sconnessi, mentre in Primavera di Bellezza la deformazione espressionistica del paesaggio si esprima talvolta in un'atmosfera fatata e sospesa, dai colori di fiaba gotica.
Pavese come Fenoglio nonostante la diversità di tavolozza, si ritrovano in un tono di fondo comune, un carattere anche stereotipicamente piemontese, che è come il riflesso morale della geologia di queste valli: una sobrietà appassionata, una virilità affettuosa, la declinazione del mito in una scala domestica e della tragedia in una forma composta.