Charles Leavitt

‘An entirely new land’? Italy’s post-war culture and its Fascist past

Abstract Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945: parenthesis, disease, flood, childhood and discovery. While the current critical consensus would lead us to expect a cultural conversation characterized by repression and evasion, an analysis of these five post-war metaphors instead reveals both a penetrating reassessment of Italian culture after Fascism and an earnest adherence to the cause of national revitalization. Foregrounding the inter-relation of Italy’s prospects for change and its continuities with Fascism, these metaphors suggest that post-war Italian intellectuals conceived of their country’s hopes for renewal, as well as its connections to the recent past, in terms that transcend the binary division favoured in many historical accounts.

Realisms and idealisms in Italian culture, 1300-2017

Italy is perhaps unique among the European nations in defining its origins culturally and artistically rather than politically. It is thus historically significant that, since such foundational works as Dante’s Comedy and Boccaccio’s Decameron, Italian culture has displayed a close association with the characteristics of what we now call realism: namely, verisimilitude and the depiction of everyday life. These realist techniques have often defined Italy’s image, both internally and externally, and the notion of realism remains at the forefront of Italian cultural studies in the twenty-first century. At the same time, however, the desire for an Italian real has always co-existed and overlapped with an idealized conception of truth, from the Neo-Platonism of Pico della Mirandola to the nationalistic fervour of the Risorgimento and later Fascism. Even now, varieties of idealism continue to shape Italian thought, infusing historicist and realist narratives with teleologies – and an array of culturally determined axioms – that often remain unrecognized or unacknowledged, and thus effectively under-examined. Indeed, despite the pervasive importance of both realism and idealism to Italian culture, their different historical instantiations are rarely juxtaposed or compared across time. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constructed throughout history continues to inspire innovative work on virtually every period of Italian culture. We invited scholars from Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom to a conference at Dartmouth College in spring 2016, asking them to consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. We have collected their contributions in this special issue of the Italianist, which aims to explore Italian realism from a number of angles, critically assessing rather than accepting the many assertions of realism and the many projections of idealism that have characterized Italian culture from its beginnings. One of the primary developments of the new millennium has been the rise of what has come to be called the ‘New Realism’. In Italian philosophy, Maurizio Ferraris’s New Realism has been hailed for asserting reality’s autonomy from language, society, and the human mind. In place of the exhaustion and retreat of his mentor Gianni Vattimo’s ‘weak thought’, Ferraris speaks of a turn to ontology as a boost to the philosophical metabolism that can provide the same nourishment to the twenty-first century that the linguistic turn delivered to the twentieth. New Realism aims to overcome postmodernism’s conceptual frameworks, which have been designed to answer epistemological questions. Contending that ‘nothing social exists outside the text’,

Probing the limits of Crocean historicism

ABSTRACT This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical reappraisal of Crocean historicism that followed the defeat of Italian Fascism. Motivated by a growing sense of historical uncertainty, Italians increasingly dissented from Croce, but they remained more wedded to Crocean thought – and in particular to Crocean historicism – than has often been argued. Like their predecessors in previous generations, post-war Italian intellectuals positioned themselves dialogically, in constant conversation with Croce’s hegemonic philosophy. The antecedents of their reaction against Crocean historicism can therefore be identified in earlier responses to Croce’s thought, and in this essay I examine two such responses: those of Antonio Gramsci and Renato Serra. I also examine the contemporary resonances of the (partial) anti-Crocean turn, exemplified by a consequential 1992 debate over Holocaust historiography pitting Carlo Ginzburg against Hayden White. Comparing these various assaults on the ‘Crocean citadel of historicist idealism’, I argue that the challenge to Croce has been posed most cogently by those whose dissent from his dominant intellectual paradigm was inspired not by outright opposition but rather by doubt and scepticism. In the essay’s conclusion, I explore the significance of such scepticism, exemplified by the post-war critique of Crocean historicism, for the ongoing debates over ‘probing the limits of representation’.

La polvere dei sogni

This editorial marks the sixth issue of the Italianist dedicated entirely to film, but cinema has been one of the journal’s areas of focus from the beginning. In no small part, this is due to the contributions of Christopher Wagstaff, one of the pioneering scholars of Italian cinema in the UK. Wagstaff, who retired this year after four decades at the University of Reading, should be celebrated for his ‘commitment to raising Italian film studies to a high academic standard’, says Zygmunt Barański, Wagstaff’s former Reading colleague. ‘He worked tirelessly and, at times, eccentrically, to develop new undergraduate and graduate courses, to build a major film library, to establish national and international contacts and networks, to enlighten and encourage students, and, most importantly, to demand the highest standards of scholarly seriousness from himself and his students’. Wagstaff’s students echo this sentiment. ‘Chris has taught me not to be satisfied with easy solutions, but to think hard, the best I can’, says Sergio Rigoletto. In the words of Alex Marlow-Mann, ‘it is no coincidence that so many of today’s Italian cinema scholars studied under Chris, and his legacy rests not solely on his own hugely influential scholarship, but also on the way he shaped and informed the work of so many others, myself included’. Wagstaff’s contributions to Italian Film Studies range widely, from meticulous investigations of the film industry and its international markets, to subtle explorations of popular cinema and the media, to rigorous readings of the work of Italy’s most renowned directors. Especially remarkable is his scholarship on neorealism, which culminated in his monograph Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (University of Toronto Press, 2007), a commanding study that is ‘destined to become a classic in film studies’, in the words of Pierre Sorlin. Working against the received wisdom of ‘the institution of neorealism’, Wagstaff insists on examining the canonical neorealist films with exacting care, and in so doing he debunks some of the mythology that continues to surround them. Wagstaff’s is one of the most significant efforts at de-mystifying Italy’s post-war cinema to have emerged since the 1976 Pesaro Film Festival, which engendered a momentous reconsideration of neorealism’s debts to the ‘Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo’. Among the giovani leoni leading the post-Pesaro charge for an

Recent Work on Neorealism

In a March 2009 article in the New York Times Sunday magazine, A. O. Scott announced the arrival of what he called American neo-neorealism, a cluster of ‘vital, urgent and timely’ films that he believed took up the legacy of Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic, Ladri di biciclette. More than a critical appraisal of contemporary American independent cinema, Scott’s article was a call to arms, expressing both hope for an ‘escape from [the] escapism’ of Hollywood and an incitement for viewers and critics alike to consider whether, after September 11 and the economic downturn, ‘what we need from movies [...] is realism’. Rather than inspiring a new critical consensus in favour of American neo-neorealism, however, Scott instead provoked a passionate backlash, led by Richard Brody, film critic at the New Yorker. Brody denounced the supposed neo-neorealism as a ‘granola cinema, [...] made to look good for you but [...] no less sweetened than mass-market products’, while at the same time calling into question Scott’s valorization of Italian neorealism, emphasizing what he saw as its ‘limits’ and suggesting that it was no less reliant on generic conventions than were other forms of cinematic expression. Defending himself against the ‘diehard formalist’ Brody, Scott replied that, invoking neorealism, he was not referring to ‘a style or a school or a movement, but rather [to] a cinematic ethic that has surfaced in different forms in different nations at different moments and that now seems to be flowering in some precincts of American independent cinema’. Brody, in turn, reiterated his claim that the so-called American neo-neorealist films were not ‘offering a more virtuous ‘‘cinematic ethic’’ or greater ‘‘contact with reality’’ than others’. And David Edelstein, film critic for New York Magazine, entered the fray in order to complain of what he saw as Scott’s ‘lack of rigor in defining neorealism’, arguing that neorealism should be understood not as an international ‘cinematic ethic’ but rather as ‘a specific (and short-lived) aesthetic’. In the end, few seemed to accept the moniker of American neo-neorealism. Scott’s essay was far from inconsequential, however: if it failed to rebrand the new American independent cinema, as Scott had hoped, it nonetheless inspired a substantial reconsideration of the ethics of cinematic realism and reinvigorated a debate over the legacy of Italian neorealist cinema. It appears to be neorealism’s fate, and one might add also its good fortune, always to be at the centre of debates over cinema, always to be caught between competing critical camps, and always to be undergoing reconsideration and reevaluation in the work of new generations of scholars. Even today, when neorealism’s cultural centrality appears more secure than ever, and when the study The Italianist, 33. 2, 325–335, June 2013

Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema

Giuseppe Prezzolini. Marazzi concludes his volume with an essay entitled ‘Italian Americans and Italian Writers’, in which he reflects on what he contends are the three distinct stages – ‘tradition’, ‘silence’ and ‘present’ (p. 295) – that characterize the relationships between Italian intellectuals and the culture of Italian America as it evolved from the early twentieth century to the present. In the first stage he detects feelings of superiority vis-àvis Italian Americans on the part of the Italian literary establishment, as illustrated by works of Mario Soldati, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Emilio Cecchi and Amerigo Ruggiero, among others. The second stage, from the end of World War II to the 1970s, is marked by a disregard towards the culture of the diaspora, as testified by the absence of interest by Italian authors who wrote about the United States. By contrast, present-day intellectuals, such as Guido Fink, Fernanda Pivano, Marco d’Eramo, Rossana Campo, Gina Lagorio and Gianni Celati, express a newly found interest in diasporic culture, particularly with regard to nomadic, transnational characters. Marazzi’s work is certainly a worthy endeavour, and the excellent translation by Ann Goldstein documents for the English reader the existence of a large body of literature of emigration. Moreover, since much of this literature is scattered in newspapers and literary journals or was published by small presses, Marazzi’s archeological retrieval will be of great value to teachers and scholars of Italian-American literature. However, the volume would have benefited from a more uniform organization. While the depth and scope of the introductory essays are uneven, the anthologies vary in length and degree of comprehensiveness, with some of them devoted to a single author promoted to represent an entire era (i.e. Taddei, Corsi) or question (i.e. Prezzolini).

Cronaca, Narrativa, and the Unstable Foundations of the Institution of Neorealism

Abstract The author contends that many of the conventions of Italian film studies derive from the conflicts and the critical vocabulary that shaped the Italian reception of neorealism in the first decade after the Second World War. Those conflicts, and that critical vocabulary, which lie at the foundation of what has been called the ‘institution of neorealism,’ established an irreconcilable binary: cronaca and narrativa. For the neorealists and their critics, cronaca stood for the effort to record data faithfully, while narrativa represented the effort to employ the shaping force of human invention in the representation of information. This essay’s first section analyzes the earliest reviews of Rossellini’s Roma città aperta alongside the contemporaneous literary debates over cronaca and narrativa. The second section reconsiders the reception of Pratolini’s Metello and Visconti’s Senso, which similarly centered upon the conflict between cronaca and narrativa. The third section proposes that the concepts which have often been employed to unify neorealism are destabilized by the cronaca/narrativa binary. In search of a solution to neorealism’s conceptual instability, this essay proposes more critical and purposeful appropriations of the movement’s problematic genealogy.

Weltliteratur as Anti-Fascism : philology and politics in Luigi Foscolo Benedetto's 'Letteratura mondiale'

Political, economic, and cultural globalization has in recent years occasioned a renewed interest in Weltliteratur, the call for a world literature first developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1827, and renewed by Edward Said in the early 1990s.1 With what has been called the “reemergence of world literature” as a critical model, scholars now seek to transcend Weltliteratur’s originary Eurocentricism, and to develop a critical practice characterized by a pluralistic vision of global cultural interaction.2 As it is currently formulated, world literature endeavors to encompass a multiplicity of texts and traditions, not bounded by national canons, but receptive instead to the interrelated yet variegated historical development of literature worldwide. The central problem of the study of world literature now is therefore one of methodology, as scholars work to develop reading strategies and interpretive techniques that might make Weltliteratur a truly global phenomenon. From Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” to Vilashini Cooppan’s “uncanny reading” and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s