Tommaso Pepe
Lecturer in Global History, Wenzhou-Kean University, Zhejiang, China
Digital editor: AIILIC, Associazione Insegnanti Italiani di Lingua Italiana in Cina
Previous academic appointments: Assistant Professor in Italian Studies, Guangzhou Maritime University, Postdoctoral fellow at SUSTech, Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen.
PhD in Italian Studies, Brown University, USA, MA in Italian Studies, Florida State University, Laurea Magistrale in Modern Philology, Pavia, Italy, Visiting Student at: Trinity College Dublin (2010), University of Cambridge (2011-2012), Universität Hamburg (2018).
Main research interests: Italian literature, Holocaust and memory studies, cultural relations between Europe and East Asia, GIS and digital humanities.
Digital editor: AIILIC, Associazione Insegnanti Italiani di Lingua Italiana in Cina
Previous academic appointments: Assistant Professor in Italian Studies, Guangzhou Maritime University, Postdoctoral fellow at SUSTech, Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen.
PhD in Italian Studies, Brown University, USA, MA in Italian Studies, Florida State University, Laurea Magistrale in Modern Philology, Pavia, Italy, Visiting Student at: Trinity College Dublin (2010), University of Cambridge (2011-2012), Universität Hamburg (2018).
Main research interests: Italian literature, Holocaust and memory studies, cultural relations between Europe and East Asia, GIS and digital humanities.
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n’était pas seul lors de sa visite : il était en fait accompagné par un autre journaliste italien, Alceo Valcini, dont la figure est intégralement supprimée dans le récit de Kaputt. Correspondant de Varsovie pour le Corriere, Valcini aurait assisté en tant que témoin oculaire à l’invasion allemande de 1939, à l’occupation de la ville et à la révolte du ghetto juif au printemps 1943. Les souvenirs de ces événements ont été rassemblés dans un volume, Il calvario di Varsavia (« Le calvaire de Varsovie ») publié par Garzanti en 1945. Cet article se propose de présenter une lecture sélective de ces deux récits atypiques sur le ghetto varsovien, élaborés par des auteurs dont la trajectoire intellectuelle fut, en outre, profondément compromise avec l’univers idéologique du fascisme.
isolated example of this writing in the second degree, organized in complex textual palimpsests, is the one that Marco Belpoliti defined as the «macrotext of the Lager»: an intra- and intertextual network that, starting form If This is a Man, developed
with a rhizomatic structure through different writing and genealogical stratifications that extend up to The Drowned and the Saved.
critical perspective has investigated the intertextual relationships existing between Levi’s poems
and other portions of his narrative production, highlighting significant parallels between Levi’s
first work, Se questo è un uomo, and his poems. The essay tries to shift the attention from the
analysis of intertextual resonances to a valorization of the « intrinsic » elements of the collection
Ad ora incerta, related to its thematic organization and its evolution. Thus, it has been possible to
emphasize a gradual process of « desegregation » of the poetic voice taking place in the collections,
resulting in the elaboration of a centrifugal and « uncertain » poetry.
n’était pas seul lors de sa visite : il était en fait accompagné par un autre journaliste italien, Alceo Valcini, dont la figure est intégralement supprimée dans le récit de Kaputt. Correspondant de Varsovie pour le Corriere, Valcini aurait assisté en tant que témoin oculaire à l’invasion allemande de 1939, à l’occupation de la ville et à la révolte du ghetto juif au printemps 1943. Les souvenirs de ces événements ont été rassemblés dans un volume, Il calvario di Varsavia (« Le calvaire de Varsovie ») publié par Garzanti en 1945. Cet article se propose de présenter une lecture sélective de ces deux récits atypiques sur le ghetto varsovien, élaborés par des auteurs dont la trajectoire intellectuelle fut, en outre, profondément compromise avec l’univers idéologique du fascisme.
isolated example of this writing in the second degree, organized in complex textual palimpsests, is the one that Marco Belpoliti defined as the «macrotext of the Lager»: an intra- and intertextual network that, starting form If This is a Man, developed
with a rhizomatic structure through different writing and genealogical stratifications that extend up to The Drowned and the Saved.
critical perspective has investigated the intertextual relationships existing between Levi’s poems
and other portions of his narrative production, highlighting significant parallels between Levi’s
first work, Se questo è un uomo, and his poems. The essay tries to shift the attention from the
analysis of intertextual resonances to a valorization of the « intrinsic » elements of the collection
Ad ora incerta, related to its thematic organization and its evolution. Thus, it has been possible to
emphasize a gradual process of « desegregation » of the poetic voice taking place in the collections,
resulting in the elaboration of a centrifugal and « uncertain » poetry.
have usually tried to chart a taxonomic map of the plurilingual structures employed by the author, in the attempt to clarify which are the languages used by Levi and where they have been used. However, the complexity that often marks the multilingual backgrounds of works such as If This is a Man, The Truce or The Periodic Table further raises interpretative issues. The problem is represented not only by which are the languages employed by Levi, but also how and why such diverse linguistic horizons are so acutely interwoven. The logics and dynamics that lay behind these heterogeneous language combinations reveal in fact to be extremely articulated and, at least so far, scarcely explored. The specter of Levi’s prose embraces extremely variegated idiomatic universes, ranging from German to the Slavic languages, from Russian to the parlances of the Jewish diaspora. So diverse linguistic sources are suspended between two biographical extremes: the nightmare of the death camp and the subtle thread of a frail but intensely yearned Hebraic tradition. This paper will attempt to chart this rich plurilingual journey, from Levi's initial testimonial works up to his later fiction works, where the author will progressively explore the universe of the languages of the Jewish diaspora.
Andrea Sartori indaga I’impatto delle teorie darwiniane nella letteratura italianafra Otto e Novecento. In questo workshop esploreremo l’influenza che il concetto di “lotta per la vita”, il rischio di soccombere a tale lotta, l’incapacità – o l’impossibilità – di adattarsi alle trasformazioni sociali messe in moto dall’industrializzazione hanno avuto nelle opere di Federico de Roberto, Italo Svevo, Luigi Pirandello e altri autori nel contesto culturale dell’Italia postunitaria.
Marco Polo’s "Divisament dou Monde" (“The Description of the World”, 1298) is located exactly in the middle of this transformation of medieval literary and conceptual geographies. Starting from a comparison of these two astonishing mappaemundi and the Divisament, whose influence on the Catalan Atlas has been widely documented, this lecture aims to re-assess the cultural significant of Polo’s book in the context of premodern European travel writing. Moving away from an oversimplified reduction of Polo’s narrative to a (stereo)typical account about the “wonders of the East”, I will try to reconsider some most significant and intriguing interpretive issues related to the cultural geographies of medieval Eurasia traced in the "Divisament dou Monde".
Such appropriation of the Homeric archetype, however, provides both authors with a topological structure to conceptualize the double dimension that characterizes their own exile: an experience where a centrifugal movement of displacement is accompanied by a vertical movement of descent towards the “bottom” of an in/human condition.
In this talk, we will explore the work and biographies of two outstanding figures of travelers and writers who engaged– without ever crossing their paths – in this unprecedented network of transcontinental mobilities: the Venetian Marco Polo (1254-1324) and Ibn Battuta (1304-1377), a Muslim scholar and jurist who, over a period of almost thirty years, ventured across India, Central Asia and Indonesia from his native Tangiers.
Investigating the ambivalent role that literature, language and identity play in the representation of cultural diversity, in this talk we will explore how these two premodern writers mediated perception and knowledge of Asia within the multiform context of a global Middle Ages.
La prima è incentrata sulla nozione (foucaldiana) di contromemoria. Se l’Italia dopoguerra avrebbe dissennatamente alimentato il mito autoillusorio del «bravo italiano», minimizzando l’entità del coinvolgimento italiano nelle politiche genocidarie del nazismo e di fatto sopprimendo la memoria scabrosa della campagna antisemita promossa dal fascismo, una lettura ragionata di due testi di Giacomo Debenedetti e Giorgio Bassani – Otto ebrei e Una lapide in via Mazzini – sembra invece suggerire l’esistenza d’una contromemoria critica della persecuzione mediata dalla letteratura e volta ad illuminare l’inquietante zone d’ombra dell’opera di complicità prestata dai «carnefici italiani» alla distruzione dell’ebraismo europeo.
Il secondo termine guida è autofinzione. In che modo autori pesantemente compromessi con il regime fascista hanno ripensato, nel dopoguerra, il loro coinvolgimento o la loro compiacenza nei confronti del «regime della menzogna» su cui venne edificata l’ideologia antisemita? Prendendo a modello paradigmatico la complessa parabola intellettuale di Curzio Malaparte, che nel suo Kaputt descrive con un linguaggio volutamente allucinatorio e surreale le persecuzioni dai nazisti perpetrate in Europea orientale, la seconda parte dell’intervento si soffermerà su una serie di manipolazioni di memoria – o di false memorie letterarie – che problematizzando ulteriormente il quadro della rappresentazione del genocidio nella letteratura del dopoguerra italiano.
Da ultimo verranno indagate le risonanze che un nota aporia concettuale evidenziata da Adorno, sintetizzata nel dictum «scrivere una poesia, dopo Auschwitz, è barbaro», avrebbe suscitato nella cultura poetica italiana. Verranno prese in modo particolare in considerazione la «ricostruzione poetica» proposta dalla poesia civile di Salvatore Quasimodo e, dall’altro lato, la vertiginosa poesia-non-poesia con cui, nelle sue Scorciatoie e raccontini, Umberto Saba avrebbe tentato di evidenziare l’«inespiabilità» di un trauma indelebile.
contextualization, 'La scrittura violata' interlaces two parallel critical itineraries within a persuasive and cogent argumentative progression: the first aims at unearthing the path of conceptual and moral maturation
that lies behind the composition of Fontamara, a maturation profoundly linked to the acute moral and psychological crisis experienced by Silone at the beginning of the 1930s; the other dissects an articulated network of intellectual exchanges that projected Silone’s novel at the center of the European antifascist debate, foregrounding the multiple and conflictual tensions that animated the field of a cosmopolitan – and profoundly politicized – Exilliteratur."