After the Second World War

L’elaborato ricostruisce la vicenda della biblioteca dello United States Information Service di Palermo. Il centro sorse in città alla fine della Seconda guerra mondiale con lo scopo di informare gli italiani circa i modi di vivere, gli usi e i costumi, le istituzioni americane, e di suscitare consenso intorno alle scelte della politica estera statunitense. Il programma dell'USIS prevedeva l'apertura di biblioteche aperte al pubblico nelle maggiori città italiane. Nel 1945 il governo americano istituì a Palermo una delle prime American libraries in Italia.

Alla fine degli anni Settanta, a causa di forti tagli al bilancio del governo americano, la collezione bibliografica dell’USIS fu donata alla Biblioteca Centrale della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università degli Studi di Palermo, affinché fosse mantenuta in vita la biblioteca americana. Nell’elaborato si analizza il patrimonio del fondo librario statunitense oggi conservato presso la Facoltà di Lettere e presso le altre biblioteche cittadine.

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Paper tells the story of the library of the United States Information Service in Palermo. The center was founded in the town at the end of the Second World War. The aim of USIS was to inform Italians about the ways of life, habits and customs, American institutions, and encourage consensus around the choices of U.S. foreign policy. The program of USIS was intended to open public libraries in most important Italian towns.
In 1945 the U.S. government established in Palermo one of the first American libraries in Italy.
At the end of the Seventies because of deep cuts to the budget of the U.S. government, the books of USIS was donated to the University of Palermo, to keep the American Library alive. This paper analyzes the U.S. book collection.

Keywords: USIS (United States Information Service), library, advertising, DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification), After the Second World War

Published documents on the course of anti-Jewish violent obtrusions on 4 August 1946 in Nové Zámky are almost an unknown material, informing on other riots against the Jewish minority in the territory of Slovakia after the WW2. Nové Zámky became in this way one of the Slovak towns and villages, as e.g. Topoľčany, Bratislava, Komárno, Žilina,
Rajecké Teplice, Zbehy, Šurany, Nová Sedlica, Ulič and Kolbasov, where the Jews were persecuted also after the period of the so-called final solution of the Jewish question. Although in that town, which belonged to Hungary after the First Vienna Award, no Jews were murdered after the war as it was the case in some of above given communities, there were number of injured, some of them seriously, after the incidents provoked by former partisans.

This conference aims to question the notion of collapse and analyse how it contributes to produce new aesthetical and semiotic forms as well as new kinds of reading. What kind of literary genres appear in parallel with a discourse on collapsology (science-fiction, dystopia, essays, post apocalyptic fiction)? Do these genres include a direct form of ideological interpretation of the world? How do they relate to the factual processes of climate change and sixth mass extinction? What type of reading do these works trigger?
Comparison is the key to understand the emergence of these new genres. The conference welcomes analysis of works that have a relation to the notion of collapse so that a comparative corpora can be built. One objective is to analyze literary works on collapse in Romance literature but other case-studies or comparisons are welcomed.

In the past few years, discourses on collapse have been more and more visible in the public space, as if it was too late to address the major challenges posed by climate change. The idea of systemic collapse is not new, as many civilizations had what was called Kulturpessimismus in Germany at the turn of the 19th. What is striking about the current situation is the multiplication of theological, scientific and philosophical discourses dealing with the notion of collapse, as if the globalization process with its main ideas (rapidity of exchanges, acquisition of new markets, cult of growth) reached its final phase. The cultural images of collapse are further endorsed by the extinction of biological species and disappearance of familiar biological communities.

https://www.su.se/romklass/om-oss/evenemang/registrera-evenemang/collapse-and-extinction-art-literature-and-discourse-1.523572