Francesca Billiani

Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the 1950s

Abstract This article focuses on the literary review Paragone and on the debate on realism articulated by the review and by the Cultural Commission of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1950s. By analysing the review’s internal composition, correspondence between its contributors, and records of the PCI’s Cultural Commission, this article highlights a series of issues relating to the debate on realism in the 1950s, as a critical time, in both aesthetic and political terms, for the determination of Italian culture’s identity profile. Specifically, the article discusses the key features of the debate on realism that unfolded in Paragone, and relates these to the debate simultaneously developing within the Cultural Commission. This comparison allows us to argue for a close connection between the aesthetic habitus displayed by an independent review and that embraced by a cultural institution with a distinctly political as well as cultural agenda.

Introduction: rupture and continuity in the Italian literary field 1926-1960

This special issue of Italian Studies, entitled Continuity and Rupture in the Italian Literary Field 1926– 1960, is the third of a series of guest-edited volumes addressing the role played by periodicals in Italian twentieth-century literary culture. Like its predecessors, this volume too is the result of the research carried out as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Mapping Literary Space: Literary Journals, Publishing Firms, Intellectuals in Italy 1940–1960 (2012–2015).1 Similarly, this issue continues the discussion on how periodicals react and adapt to political and institutional pressures, by selecting and orienting aesthetic, political, and cultural interventions into topical debates of the day. It does so by contributing rigorous archive-based explorations of key journals, which shaped the Italian literary discourse in the years under scrutiny. Thus the volume intends to re-evaluate journals which, emerging from localised literary milieux, contributed to nurturing literary talents, to shaping the debate on disinterestedness and the autonomy of the arts from the field of power, and – with various degrees of success – to engaging with foreign literatures and transnational exchanges of ideas. Taken as a whole, the articles here collected explicitly engage with the journal’s action in local, national, and international cultural networks, from Solaria’s inception in 1926 to the demise of Botteghe Oscure in 1960. In this sense, the chronological spectrum of this guest-edited issue ensures that, for instance, we can identify the main phases of the development of a disinterested, and seemingly apolitical, approach to the role of the arts, cutting across Solaria, Letteratura, and Botteghe Oscure, linking together Florence, Rome and the various foreign republics of letters with which these journals dialogued over the years. However, a rigorous discussion of the factors that contributed to the emergence and consolidation of the discourse of disinterestedness during the Fascist regime and in the early Republican years must take into account the rise of competing narratives and intellectual forces that voiced an increasing discomfort with this posture and, therefore, elaborated an alternative ideologically inflected model of cultural intervention. The Florentine literary field in the years under scrutiny is a test case for the interaction of these evolving, competing paradigms. Given its exemplarity, several of the contributions in this volume refer to literary experiences which originated in Florence, and from this city made substantial contributions to the national literary discourse. The contributions gathered in this special issue do not claim to offer a comprehensive account of periodical culture in Italy but present a number of case studies to illustrate how networks, institutions, and individuals interact behind the journal’s printed page and how these interactions shape the journal’s message.This special issue gathers together articles which explicitly engage with the journal’s action in local, national, and international cultural networks, from Solaria’s inception in 1926 to the demise of Botteghe Oscure in 1960. The chronological spectrum of this guest-edited issue ensures that, for instance, we can identify the main phases of the development of a disinterested, and seemingly apolitical, approach to the role of the arts, cutting across Solaria, Letteratura, and Botteghe Oscure, linking together Florence, Rome and the various foreign republics of letters with which these journals dialogued over the years

Firenze 1937-1947: Letteratura e l’indifferenza engagée

Abstract This article explores the literary journal Letteratura (Florence, 1937–1947), both to assess its role and position within the Italian cultural landscape in the years of transition from the Fascist dictatorship to the Republic, and to provide a broader reflection on the profile and activity of literary journals under repressive regimes. To this end, the article discusses debates concerning the Italian novel and the emerging critical methodologies of the day, to ask how the idea of literary writing changed during the shift between radical totalitarianism and democracy. In particular, by looking at the journal’s internal composition and range of contributions, it analyses the role played by Letteratura as a cultural agent in its own right, in developing an intellectual model of ‘engaged indifference’ through literary writing and criticism. It shows how Italian intellectuals, critics, and writers, revolving around the Florentine journal, adopted this model as a productive strategy for surviving the cultural limitations imposed by the regime.

Italian Reactionary Thought and Critical Theory: An Inquiry into Savage Modernities

Serao was a limit imposed by their social conditions and historical circumstances. Their middle-class background might be read within the context of the discourses on modernization which started in 1870; as Silvio Lanaro has shown, those discourses were fully realized only after ideological mobilization facilitated their emergence as genuine and urgent political issues. Otherwise, those discourses retained their fragmentary state as specks of discursive dust freely and loosely propagated and contaminated by a mob of popularisers. One might also add that, towards the end of the century, the advent of the new political dimension of the mass – an idea that captured the imagination of many authors and of a new rising figure, the social scientist – at the expense of the individual, and its reduction in turn to an almost non-entity in the machinery of the new imperialist aim of the nation, resulted in a temporary loosening of all discourses on gender and sexual difference. Katharine Mitchell has offered a thorough account of a previously unwritten story. This very readable book is destined to be a useful resource not only for scholars interested in the specific issue of gender and women writers, but also for those interested in Italian literature and history after Unification.

Mediating culture in the Italian literary field 1940s–50s

Abstract This introduction lays out the scholarly and methodological context in which to situate the contributions to this special issue. By combining a rigorous scrutiny of hitherto untapped archival sources with a re-examined application of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture within the field of periodical studies and publishing history in Italy (1940s–50s), the studies illuminate the complex ways in which journals, periodical editors and the connected publishing houses negotiate cultural practice in a literary field increasingly dominated by the polarization of political discourse.

Documenting the Real Across Modernity in the 1930s: Political and Aesthetic Debates Around and About the Novel in Fascist Italy.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the anti-liberal modernizing regimes based in Rome, Berlin, and Moscow created new totalitarian aesthetic apparatuses for the control of the individual/citizen in the social sphere, seeking total control, mass consensus, and the constitution of the ‘new man/woman’ as the foundation of a modern collective social identity. In their claims, these anti-liberal regimes progressively adopted modernist aesthetics as the privileged paradigm for the modernization of the public sphere. However, it was not simply a totalitarian, and therefore largely political, modernity, but also an attempt to find an aesthetic dimension, that of realism, which could document the cultural and political climate of the day. By analysing some significant aesthetic debates unfolding in literary journals and by looking at Moravia’s Gli indifferenti, in this article we shall discuss the new theorization of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity and the construction of the new man’s urban reality as key steps towards the creation of the new Italian novel within the fascist system of the arts.

Francesca Billiani speaks to Gisèle Sapiro: translating sociology

Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of sociology at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France. She specialises in the sociology of translation and of intellectuals, as well as in the sociology of literature, an area to which she devoted her most recent book, La Sociologie de la Littérature (Sapiro 2014a). In her first book, published in 1999 and recently translated into English, The French Writers’ War, 1940–1953 (Sapiro 2014b), she drew on Bourdieu’s field theory to analyse French writers’ political choices during the German occupation. Focusing on literary trials, her second major book, La Responsabilité de l’Ecrivain. Littérature, Droit et Morale en France, XIXe–XXe siècles (Sapiro 2011) traces the processes through which writers’ and intellectuals’ struggles for freedom of speech and the autonomy of the arts in France freed the literary field from the State’s control. She has also edited several books on translation, building a theoretical and methodological framework for the study of the international circulation of literary works and of the world market of translation: Translatio (Sapiro 2008b); Les Contradictions de la Globalisation Editoriale (Sapiro et al. 2009); L’Espace Intellectuel en Europe (Sapiro 2009); Traduire la Littérature et les Sciences Humaines (Sapiro 2012b); Sciences Humaines en Traduction Sapiro 2014c, Institut français/Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique [CESSP]). In this conversation, the main issues addressed are the relationship between sociology and translation, the application of sociological methods to the study of translation (and vice versa), the relationship between the history and the sociology of translations, and the connections between translation and publishers, the book market, globalization, national identity and gender.

The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture

to produce proper concentration. He encouraged their use, but only by people with proper knowledge, thus standing both for intensity of religion and for the correct tradition. This is a very good book. The scholarship is first rate, with every claim backed up by evidence. The presentation is also excellent, being well organized, clear and above all interesting. A bit more explanation of kabbalistic terminology and doctrines would help many of us. But overall the author is to be congratulated and the book firmly recommended.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body

the end of their experience within its walls (pp. 219–38). At the same time, the approach followed by Mondini in his book is very helpful to clarify ways and characteristics of the penetration of politics inside this little collegial community – research up to now limited to the intellectual biography of significant faculty members such as Cantimori, Pasquali or Gentile – and to verify the reception of myths, images and tropes of Fascist culture and the level of consent spread around it among a young intellectual élite. With regard to this, if a large field of studies has shown the level and the intensity of the nationalization of Italian cultural institutions, the picture outlined by Mondini, as already pointed out by some important research on the Pisan academic world, seems to tell a different story. Giovanni Gentile notwithstanding, only a few students were expelled from the school or were watched over by the police or members of the local Fascist party, and at the same time the biographies of young antifascists such as Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Umberto Segre and Vittorio Enzo Alfieri, who were all thrown out of the college in the years 1929–31, did not mirror the general trend of students’ beliefs. On the contrary, the rooms and the seminars of the institution analysed by Mondini, housed young scholars substantially uninterested if not hostile to fascism’s rhetoric, militarism and, after 1938, racism, but at the same time inert in the face of the persecutions inflicted on their nonconformist roommates. Silence and inactivity in almost all the turning points of the dictatorship – with the exception of the Vatican Treaty and the related Concordat – seemed to join professors and boarders, as indolent rather than unarmed (pp. 105–36), a conclusion that seems to overthrow the image of the Pisan college as ‘enchanted island’, an image upheld by Gentile from the attacks delivered by radical fascism against the philosopher and ‘his’ institution especially after the Lateran Agreements. The result of impressive archival research, Generazioni intellettuali avoids all the stereotypes spread by the memories that flourished after World War II, which passed on the image of the Scuola Normale as a substantially antifascist college. This picture was created by the texts and memoires written by former students during or significantly after the Resistance, where the feelings and the impressions of the new democratic Italy together with the denial of an obscure past experienced as shame, precluded the real comprehension of the facts, a limit that is brilliantly overcome by the author thanks to his sympathetic, shrewd and rigorous philology.