Deborah Amberson | University of Florida (original) (raw)

Papers by Deborah Amberson

Humanimalia

Review of Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, eds., Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (C... more Review of Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, eds., Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

In his 1912 work, Il mio Carso, Scipio Slataper grants a structuring role to the limestone platea... more In his 1912 work, Il mio Carso, Scipio Slataper grants a structuring role to the limestone plateau of the Karst. The resulting centrality of mountains and of stone underpins three more or less sequential temporal configurations within the work as the protagonist grows from a childhood immersed in a natural idyll, through an adolescence defined by a growing historical awareness, and, finally, arrives at an adulthood in which a sense of geological time has imbued his maturity with a new humility. In this final temporal regime, the protagonist, to borrow Leopold’s phrasing, “thinks like a mountain,” a form of wisdom that, grounded in the ostensible infinity of stone, consists in objectively grasping the mutual entanglement of all beings. This same stony wisdom resonates with Slataper’s vision of cultural irredentism, as Trieste and its inhabitants meld with the Karst limestone, already itself a primordial blend of organic and inorganic materials, to become hybrids in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural space of border crossings.

Italian Studies, 2016

This essay argues that Zeno Cosini’s futile attempts to master the violin reveal Italo Svevo’s co... more This essay argues that Zeno Cosini’s futile attempts to master the violin reveal Italo Svevo’s contestation of a musical anti-Semitism that revolved around claims for Jewish imitation as opposed to non-Jewish originality, Jewish particularity as opposed to non-Jewish universality, and Jewish noise as opposed to non-Jewish concord. La coscienza di Zeno features a protagonist whose imperfect musicianship is far more than a comic manifestation of his critically well-trodden ineptitude and infirmity. Zeno’s musicality appropriates and subverts the anti-Jewish accusations formulated most infamously by Richard Wagner, and ultimately challenges conventional Western musical architectures and harmonies by opening art music to an aesthetics of fragmentation and instability. Zeno’s project might be paralleled with a modernist tonal reconfiguration that, to paraphrase Schoenberg, emancipated a Jewish dissonance.

The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel, " Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Mer... more The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel, " Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana ", find detective Ingravallo pursuing a clue as he investigates the brutal murder of Liliana Balducci, an upper-middle-class inhabitant of an apartment on the street of the novel's title. The location for the book's concluding showdown is a dilapidated house, or an " oikos ", to borrow from the Greek, into which the Investigator, an outsider, is introduced. " Oikos ", which became the prefix "eco" in both "economics" (literally, law of the house) and "ecology" (or, study of the house) here provides a dynamic lens for the final scenes of the Pasticciaccio, and for viewing its unremitting tension between singularity and generality, interiority and exteriority, anthropic and geological time, human and posthuman. Our article proposes the space of the impoverished Roman household as a key to entering the Gaddian narrative architecture, a space that resonates with what Jeffery Jerome Cohen describes as "the tangled, fecund, and irregular pluriverse humans inhabit along with lively and agency-filled objects, materials, and forces" (Prismatic Ecology, xxiii). The dwelling on Via Merulana, and even more distinctly the house (or hovel) in which the novel ends, challenge our notions of domestic spaces, their porosity, and their proper inhabitants. In fact, in the narrative's exploration of these two houses and their occupants, we find intriguing portraits of the tensions that trouble the supposed borders of the human and the posthuman. The "Pasticciaccio", as we argue, closes (or opens) the door on a narrative architecture of polarity, where material and ontological tensions lead to both human and posthuman conclusions.

The introduction to a special issue of Ecozon@ on "Animal Humanities," which features essays, cre... more The introduction to a special issue of Ecozon@ on "Animal Humanities," which features essays, creative writing, and visual arts on the topic.

Thinking Italian Animals, 2014

The Italianist, 2010

... Franciscan orgies to Schreberian unmannings of putrescence in Pasolini's Pet... more ... Franciscan orgies to Schreberian unmannings of putrescence in Pasolini's Petrolio Deborah Amberson In his final and unfinished novel, Petrolio, Pasolini presents a protagonist, Carlo, who undergoes a psychotic and allegorical splitting into two characters. ...

Quaderni D Italianistica, Jun 1, 2008

In his final novel, Petrolio, Pier Paolo Pasolini offers a dismal portrait of neo-capitalist Ital... more In his final novel, Petrolio, Pier Paolo Pasolini offers a dismal portrait of neo-capitalist Italy. Focusing on a programmatic referencing of sloth or acedia, this article explores a series of parallels between the symptomatology of the sin and what Pasolini saw as the unreality of consumerist culture. Conferring a central importance on Pasolini's declared intent to compose his final novel in a type of "non-style, " the article posits a stylistic implementation of the symptoms of acedia in Petrolio as part of a reconfiguration of intellectual engagement. This reconfigured engagement with neo-capitalist Italy is based on the provocative negation of the conventional author figure as purveyor of style and the related attempt to insert the living voice within the confines of literary artifice.

In Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957), Carlo Emilio Gadda presents a philosopher-de... more In Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957), Carlo Emilio Gadda presents a philosopher-detective who overturns the rudimentary formula of the classical detective novel in order to stage an ethical tension between philosophical generality and singularity. This tension illuminates the foundation of Gadda's baroque style of non-substitutable terms, a style that seeks to recreate the proliferation of a singular reality.

Books by Deborah Amberson

Writing in 1926, Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) acknowledges his peculiarity within the Italian l... more Writing in 1926, Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) acknowledges his peculiarity within the Italian literary field by describing himself as a giraffe or a kangaroo in Italy’s beautiful garden of literature. Gadda’s self-characterization as exotic and even ungainly animal applies in equal measure to Italo Svevo (1861-1928) and Federigo Tozzi (1883-1920), authors who, like Gadda, thwarted efforts at critical classification. Yet the ostensible strangeness of these three Italian authors is diminished when their writing is considered within the framework of modernism, a label traditionally avoided by the Italian critical establishment. Indeed, within a modernism preoccupied with human embodiment, these Italian literary giraffes find their kin. Here, the central nexus of body, subjectivity and style that informs and binds the writing of Svevo, Tozzi and Gadda resonates with a modernist renegotiation and revalorization of a human body whose dignity and epistemological authority have been contested by social and technological modernity.

Exceprt from the introduction to a volume edited by Deborah Amberson and Elena Past that draws to... more Exceprt from the introduction to a volume edited by Deborah Amberson and Elena Past that draws together essays on Italian writers and filmmakers whose work engages with nonhuman animal subjectivity. Analyzing works from unification to the present, they address three major strands of current philosophical thought: the perceived borders between man and nonhuman animals, historical and fictional crises facing humanity, and human entanglement with the nonhuman and material world. These essays are driven by philosophical, theoretical, and ethical questions that interrogate Italian cultural production in provocative new ways, and their analysis has implications not simply for Italianists, but for a range of scholars doing work within cross-disciplinary fields such as animal studies, ecocriticism, and posthuman philosophy.

Humanimalia

Review of Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, eds., Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (C... more Review of Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, eds., Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

In his 1912 work, Il mio Carso, Scipio Slataper grants a structuring role to the limestone platea... more In his 1912 work, Il mio Carso, Scipio Slataper grants a structuring role to the limestone plateau of the Karst. The resulting centrality of mountains and of stone underpins three more or less sequential temporal configurations within the work as the protagonist grows from a childhood immersed in a natural idyll, through an adolescence defined by a growing historical awareness, and, finally, arrives at an adulthood in which a sense of geological time has imbued his maturity with a new humility. In this final temporal regime, the protagonist, to borrow Leopold’s phrasing, “thinks like a mountain,” a form of wisdom that, grounded in the ostensible infinity of stone, consists in objectively grasping the mutual entanglement of all beings. This same stony wisdom resonates with Slataper’s vision of cultural irredentism, as Trieste and its inhabitants meld with the Karst limestone, already itself a primordial blend of organic and inorganic materials, to become hybrids in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural space of border crossings.

Italian Studies, 2016

This essay argues that Zeno Cosini’s futile attempts to master the violin reveal Italo Svevo’s co... more This essay argues that Zeno Cosini’s futile attempts to master the violin reveal Italo Svevo’s contestation of a musical anti-Semitism that revolved around claims for Jewish imitation as opposed to non-Jewish originality, Jewish particularity as opposed to non-Jewish universality, and Jewish noise as opposed to non-Jewish concord. La coscienza di Zeno features a protagonist whose imperfect musicianship is far more than a comic manifestation of his critically well-trodden ineptitude and infirmity. Zeno’s musicality appropriates and subverts the anti-Jewish accusations formulated most infamously by Richard Wagner, and ultimately challenges conventional Western musical architectures and harmonies by opening art music to an aesthetics of fragmentation and instability. Zeno’s project might be paralleled with a modernist tonal reconfiguration that, to paraphrase Schoenberg, emancipated a Jewish dissonance.

The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel, " Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Mer... more The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel, " Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana ", find detective Ingravallo pursuing a clue as he investigates the brutal murder of Liliana Balducci, an upper-middle-class inhabitant of an apartment on the street of the novel's title. The location for the book's concluding showdown is a dilapidated house, or an " oikos ", to borrow from the Greek, into which the Investigator, an outsider, is introduced. " Oikos ", which became the prefix "eco" in both "economics" (literally, law of the house) and "ecology" (or, study of the house) here provides a dynamic lens for the final scenes of the Pasticciaccio, and for viewing its unremitting tension between singularity and generality, interiority and exteriority, anthropic and geological time, human and posthuman. Our article proposes the space of the impoverished Roman household as a key to entering the Gaddian narrative architecture, a space that resonates with what Jeffery Jerome Cohen describes as "the tangled, fecund, and irregular pluriverse humans inhabit along with lively and agency-filled objects, materials, and forces" (Prismatic Ecology, xxiii). The dwelling on Via Merulana, and even more distinctly the house (or hovel) in which the novel ends, challenge our notions of domestic spaces, their porosity, and their proper inhabitants. In fact, in the narrative's exploration of these two houses and their occupants, we find intriguing portraits of the tensions that trouble the supposed borders of the human and the posthuman. The "Pasticciaccio", as we argue, closes (or opens) the door on a narrative architecture of polarity, where material and ontological tensions lead to both human and posthuman conclusions.

The introduction to a special issue of Ecozon@ on "Animal Humanities," which features essays, cre... more The introduction to a special issue of Ecozon@ on "Animal Humanities," which features essays, creative writing, and visual arts on the topic.

Thinking Italian Animals, 2014

The Italianist, 2010

... Franciscan orgies to Schreberian unmannings of putrescence in Pasolini's Pet... more ... Franciscan orgies to Schreberian unmannings of putrescence in Pasolini's Petrolio Deborah Amberson In his final and unfinished novel, Petrolio, Pasolini presents a protagonist, Carlo, who undergoes a psychotic and allegorical splitting into two characters. ...

Quaderni D Italianistica, Jun 1, 2008

In his final novel, Petrolio, Pier Paolo Pasolini offers a dismal portrait of neo-capitalist Ital... more In his final novel, Petrolio, Pier Paolo Pasolini offers a dismal portrait of neo-capitalist Italy. Focusing on a programmatic referencing of sloth or acedia, this article explores a series of parallels between the symptomatology of the sin and what Pasolini saw as the unreality of consumerist culture. Conferring a central importance on Pasolini's declared intent to compose his final novel in a type of "non-style, " the article posits a stylistic implementation of the symptoms of acedia in Petrolio as part of a reconfiguration of intellectual engagement. This reconfigured engagement with neo-capitalist Italy is based on the provocative negation of the conventional author figure as purveyor of style and the related attempt to insert the living voice within the confines of literary artifice.

In Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957), Carlo Emilio Gadda presents a philosopher-de... more In Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957), Carlo Emilio Gadda presents a philosopher-detective who overturns the rudimentary formula of the classical detective novel in order to stage an ethical tension between philosophical generality and singularity. This tension illuminates the foundation of Gadda's baroque style of non-substitutable terms, a style that seeks to recreate the proliferation of a singular reality.

Writing in 1926, Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) acknowledges his peculiarity within the Italian l... more Writing in 1926, Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) acknowledges his peculiarity within the Italian literary field by describing himself as a giraffe or a kangaroo in Italy’s beautiful garden of literature. Gadda’s self-characterization as exotic and even ungainly animal applies in equal measure to Italo Svevo (1861-1928) and Federigo Tozzi (1883-1920), authors who, like Gadda, thwarted efforts at critical classification. Yet the ostensible strangeness of these three Italian authors is diminished when their writing is considered within the framework of modernism, a label traditionally avoided by the Italian critical establishment. Indeed, within a modernism preoccupied with human embodiment, these Italian literary giraffes find their kin. Here, the central nexus of body, subjectivity and style that informs and binds the writing of Svevo, Tozzi and Gadda resonates with a modernist renegotiation and revalorization of a human body whose dignity and epistemological authority have been contested by social and technological modernity.

Exceprt from the introduction to a volume edited by Deborah Amberson and Elena Past that draws to... more Exceprt from the introduction to a volume edited by Deborah Amberson and Elena Past that draws together essays on Italian writers and filmmakers whose work engages with nonhuman animal subjectivity. Analyzing works from unification to the present, they address three major strands of current philosophical thought: the perceived borders between man and nonhuman animals, historical and fictional crises facing humanity, and human entanglement with the nonhuman and material world. These essays are driven by philosophical, theoretical, and ethical questions that interrogate Italian cultural production in provocative new ways, and their analysis has implications not simply for Italianists, but for a range of scholars doing work within cross-disciplinary fields such as animal studies, ecocriticism, and posthuman philosophy.