Lorenzo Casini | Università Di Messina (original) (raw)

Libri by Lorenzo Casini

Critical study, selection and Italian translation of the short stories published on the Egyptian ... more Critical study, selection and Italian translation of the short stories published on the Egyptian Literary Jounral Gallery 68.
Authors of the stories: Yahya Taher Abdallah, Ibrahim Aslan, Muhammad al-Bisati, Sulayman Fayyad, Gamal al-Ghitani, Muhammad Hafez Ragab, Khalil Kalfat, Baha Taher

Articoli su rivista by Lorenzo Casini

Quaderni di Studi Arabi, 2019

This article is a critical study of Fiʾrān Ummī Ḥiṣṣa (Mamma Ḥiṣṣa’s mice, 2015), the third novel... more This article is a critical study of Fiʾrān Ummī Ḥiṣṣa (Mamma Ḥiṣṣa’s mice, 2015), the third novel by the Kuwaiti author Saʿūd al-Sanʿūsī. Through the allegory of the plague spread by rats, the novel delves into the history of the sectarian tensions in Kuwait from the late 1980s to the dystopic future of 2020. The article focuses in particular on the narrative role performed by storytelling and the recovery of collective memory as antidotes to the autoreferential language of the sectarian groups that put the country on fire.

Adīb di Ṭāhā Ḥusayn e la Grande Guerra: I limiti del modernismo nazionalista egiziano attraverso la lente del Conflitto, 2016

This article examines the novel Adīb (A man of letter, 1935) by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn as a literary explora... more This article examines the novel Adīb (A man of letter, 1935) by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn as a literary exploration of the limits of the imaginaries produced by dominant modernist discourses in Egypt. The imaginaries of the European society, in particular, inform and determine the main choices of the protagonist who is characterized in the text as the quintessence of the man of letter (adīb) affected by “the illness of literature” (‘illat al-adab). Within this critical approach to the text, the article focuses on the narrative functions performed by the First World War. The Conflict is interpreted as a turning point in the trajectory of Adīb and the madness that originates from it is regarded as a metaphorical retaliation (“contrappasso”) that transforms the hero’s longing for Europe into the phobia of being exiled to “the Far West”.

carattere scientifico sulla letteratura e cultura araba dalla nahḍah all'epoca contemporanea, in ... more carattere scientifico sulla letteratura e cultura araba dalla nahḍah all'epoca contemporanea, in italiano, francese, inglese e spagnolo. Gli articoli (massimo 10000 parole) devono essere corredati da un abstract in lingua inglese (massimo 150 parole) e dovranno pervenire sia in formato .odt che .pdf all'indirizzo email: larivistadiarablit@ipocan.it. Gli articoli saranno sottoposti al vaglio di due referee anonimi. I singoli autori sono responsabili del contenuto dei propri scritti. La proprietà letteraria degli articoli è riservata agli editori della rivista ed è vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale.

The article examines the way Egyptian poems in colloquial Arabic have contributed to transform th... more The article examines the way Egyptian poems in colloquial Arabic have contributed to transform the existent order of discourse during the unaccomplished revolution of January 25, 2011. For this purpose the poems are examined in their written form and in some of their multiodal versions circulated on YouTube.

Clash of civilizations over an elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous - winner of the prest... more Clash of civilizations over an elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous - winner of the prestigious Flaiano and Racalmare Leonardo Sciascia awards - has been the object of great attention by scholars of Italian Literature, Comparative Literatures and Migration Studies who have based their analyses, except for a few works, on the Italian self-translation of the novel (2006) and subsequent translations from the Italian text. However, most of these studies overlook the fact that the novel was originally written in Arabic and published in Algeria in 2003.
This article examines both the Arabic and the Italian versions of Clash of civilizations over an elevator in Piazza Vittorio with reference to the different horizons of expectation of the readers of the two texts. This approach allows to understand a distinctive feature of Lakhous’ work that has been neglected by previous studies: the way the novel interacts with two different social imaginaries and operates to transform them.

Questo numero speciale di Quaderni di Studi Arabi si ispira agli insegnamenti e al percorso scien... more Questo numero speciale di Quaderni di Studi Arabi si ispira agli insegnamenti e al percorso scientifico di Lidia Bettini. The Language(s) of Arabic Literature vuol essere un omaggio affettuoso da parte di allievi ed amici a una studiosa che tanto ha contribuito allo sviluppo dell'arabistica in ambiti anche molto diversi tra loro. Il morfema –s, marca del plurale di " language " , è stato messo tra parentesi nel titolo del volume per sottolineare come la nozione di " lingua araba " , nonostante compaia al singolare nella dizione che denota la disciplina accademica, sia caratterizzata da una pluralità di referenti. Varietà, registri, dialetti costituiscono un aspetto determinante (sia per ricchezza che per problematicità) anche dei fenomeni letterari.

Despite the ambition of Postcolonial Studies to place deconstruction of " the West " at the heart... more Despite the ambition of Postcolonial Studies to place deconstruction of " the West " at the heart of contemporary social sciences and humanities, the authority of this notion has never been so strong, and the West appears today to belong to a " natural order " of thinking and speaking about our current reality. Having pointed out the limits of the postcolonial critique of the West, this study then individuates and connects several lines of research to a common epistemological basis in order to map the contours of an emerging field: " the politics of imagining the West ". From this perspective, the West is no longer conceived of as a subject of history but as a historically determined narrative articulated by individuals and social groups with strategic aims in the context of wider discourses.

The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), directed by Stefano Bartolini since Septe... more The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), directed by Stefano Bartolini since September 2006, is home to a large post-doctoral programme. Created in 1992, it aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research and to promote work on the major issues facing the process of integration and European society.

The article investigates Abd al-Rahmàn al-Abnudi's 1 al-Midàn (The Square), the celebrated poem i... more The article investigates Abd al-Rahmàn al-Abnudi's 1 al-Midàn (The Square), the celebrated poem in colloquial Egyptian Arabic dedicated to the Egyptian young people who occupied the central Midàn al-Tahrìr (Tahrìr Square or Liberation Square) in Cairo on 25th January 2011 paving the way for the revolution. The poem, written during the very first days of the uprising, is analyzed in the context of the major transformations in the Egyptian literary field during the decade 2001-2011. In this period the state's cultural institutions lost much of their traditional power to exert authority over the contents of literary production and its circulation among the reading public. One of the most outstanding features of these transformations, is represented by the role of internet as a means of circulation and reception of literary texts, especially by means of blogs and YouTube. The article considers several versions of al-Midàn uploaded on YouTube and highlights the process by which the poem was transformed by each user into a (re) newed multimodal text, where different semiotic resources interact: the reading of the poem, the video images, and (if present) the soundtrack. These videos were viewed and commented on by hundreds of thousands of YouTube users in the weeks following the writing of the poem and have made a decisive contribution to the shaping of the revolution's collective imaginary.

Capitoli di libro by Lorenzo Casini

From new values to new aesthetics

Chapter 2.5 from the book Modernità Arabe co-authored with Maria Elena Paniconi and Lucia Sorbera

The existence of a close relationship between the establishment of the novel as a canonical genre... more The existence of a close relationship between the establishment of the novel as a canonical genre in Egyptian (and Arabic) literature, and the spread of Egyptian territorial nationalism is now regarded as an unquestioned evidence by scholars of Arabic literature. The present article makes use of Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to examine the spatial embodiments of the temporality of the nation in the Egyptian novels written during the first half of the twentieth century. After examining the chronotope of the countryside in the first Egyptian canonical novels, the article centres on the dialectics between the two chronotopes of the «alley» and the «new Cairo» in a renowned novel by Nagib Mahfuz: Zuqaq al-Midaqq (Midaqq Alley, 1947).

Recensioni by Lorenzo Casini

Istituto per l'Oriente C.A. Nallino, Roma RECENSIONI Shabo TALAY et Hartmut BOBZIN (eds), Arabisc... more Istituto per l'Oriente C.A. Nallino, Roma RECENSIONI Shabo TALAY et Hartmut BOBZIN (eds), Arabische Welt. Grammatik, Dichtung und Dialekte. Beiträge einer Tagung in Erlangen zu Ehren von Wolfdietrich Fischer, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2010; 276 p. Ce volume rassemble quinze contributions, choisies parmi les communications présentées à une conférence internationale tenue du 2 au 5 Juillet 2008 à l'université d'Erlangen-Nürnberg en l'honneur de Wolfdietrich Fischer (né en 1928), qui y occupa de 1964 à 1995 la chaire de Philologie orientale. Ces quinze contributions, toutes en allemand, à l'exception d'une en français et d'une en anglais, sont ventilées en trois sections représentant les domaines de prédilection de Fischer : grammaire, poésie, dialectes. S'agissant de la grammaire, Fischer est, entre autres, l'auteur d'une Grammatik des Klassischen Arabisch (1 ère édition 1972, 2 ème éd. 1987, 3 ème éd. 2002), aujourd'hui traduite en anglais, ce qui en fait 256 rentes déclinaisons de l'arabe le conduit à refuser absolument (à juste titre, selon moi) d'y voir une quelconque marque d'indéfinition ou d'indétermination.

Middle Eastern Literatures, 2012

Books by Lorenzo Casini

Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel, 2024

Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel Lorenzo Casini 'A fascinating and insightful exploration of ... more Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel Lorenzo Casini 'A fascinating and insightful exploration of the importance and many uses of the idea of the West in Egyptian literature, and an important contribution to our understanding of Occidentalism.' ALASTAIR BONNETT, NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY, UK 'Timely and insightful. Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel is a cogent and original intervention in the debates about the role of the " West" in the "Eastern" literary imaginary and modernity.' WEN-CHIN OUYANG, SOAS, UK

Critical study, selection and Italian translation of the short stories published on the Egyptian ... more Critical study, selection and Italian translation of the short stories published on the Egyptian Literary Jounral Gallery 68.
Authors of the stories: Yahya Taher Abdallah, Ibrahim Aslan, Muhammad al-Bisati, Sulayman Fayyad, Gamal al-Ghitani, Muhammad Hafez Ragab, Khalil Kalfat, Baha Taher

Quaderni di Studi Arabi, 2019

This article is a critical study of Fiʾrān Ummī Ḥiṣṣa (Mamma Ḥiṣṣa’s mice, 2015), the third novel... more This article is a critical study of Fiʾrān Ummī Ḥiṣṣa (Mamma Ḥiṣṣa’s mice, 2015), the third novel by the Kuwaiti author Saʿūd al-Sanʿūsī. Through the allegory of the plague spread by rats, the novel delves into the history of the sectarian tensions in Kuwait from the late 1980s to the dystopic future of 2020. The article focuses in particular on the narrative role performed by storytelling and the recovery of collective memory as antidotes to the autoreferential language of the sectarian groups that put the country on fire.

Adīb di Ṭāhā Ḥusayn e la Grande Guerra: I limiti del modernismo nazionalista egiziano attraverso la lente del Conflitto, 2016

This article examines the novel Adīb (A man of letter, 1935) by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn as a literary explora... more This article examines the novel Adīb (A man of letter, 1935) by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn as a literary exploration of the limits of the imaginaries produced by dominant modernist discourses in Egypt. The imaginaries of the European society, in particular, inform and determine the main choices of the protagonist who is characterized in the text as the quintessence of the man of letter (adīb) affected by “the illness of literature” (‘illat al-adab). Within this critical approach to the text, the article focuses on the narrative functions performed by the First World War. The Conflict is interpreted as a turning point in the trajectory of Adīb and the madness that originates from it is regarded as a metaphorical retaliation (“contrappasso”) that transforms the hero’s longing for Europe into the phobia of being exiled to “the Far West”.

carattere scientifico sulla letteratura e cultura araba dalla nahḍah all'epoca contemporanea, in ... more carattere scientifico sulla letteratura e cultura araba dalla nahḍah all'epoca contemporanea, in italiano, francese, inglese e spagnolo. Gli articoli (massimo 10000 parole) devono essere corredati da un abstract in lingua inglese (massimo 150 parole) e dovranno pervenire sia in formato .odt che .pdf all'indirizzo email: larivistadiarablit@ipocan.it. Gli articoli saranno sottoposti al vaglio di due referee anonimi. I singoli autori sono responsabili del contenuto dei propri scritti. La proprietà letteraria degli articoli è riservata agli editori della rivista ed è vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale.

The article examines the way Egyptian poems in colloquial Arabic have contributed to transform th... more The article examines the way Egyptian poems in colloquial Arabic have contributed to transform the existent order of discourse during the unaccomplished revolution of January 25, 2011. For this purpose the poems are examined in their written form and in some of their multiodal versions circulated on YouTube.

Clash of civilizations over an elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous - winner of the prest... more Clash of civilizations over an elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous - winner of the prestigious Flaiano and Racalmare Leonardo Sciascia awards - has been the object of great attention by scholars of Italian Literature, Comparative Literatures and Migration Studies who have based their analyses, except for a few works, on the Italian self-translation of the novel (2006) and subsequent translations from the Italian text. However, most of these studies overlook the fact that the novel was originally written in Arabic and published in Algeria in 2003.
This article examines both the Arabic and the Italian versions of Clash of civilizations over an elevator in Piazza Vittorio with reference to the different horizons of expectation of the readers of the two texts. This approach allows to understand a distinctive feature of Lakhous’ work that has been neglected by previous studies: the way the novel interacts with two different social imaginaries and operates to transform them.

Questo numero speciale di Quaderni di Studi Arabi si ispira agli insegnamenti e al percorso scien... more Questo numero speciale di Quaderni di Studi Arabi si ispira agli insegnamenti e al percorso scientifico di Lidia Bettini. The Language(s) of Arabic Literature vuol essere un omaggio affettuoso da parte di allievi ed amici a una studiosa che tanto ha contribuito allo sviluppo dell'arabistica in ambiti anche molto diversi tra loro. Il morfema –s, marca del plurale di " language " , è stato messo tra parentesi nel titolo del volume per sottolineare come la nozione di " lingua araba " , nonostante compaia al singolare nella dizione che denota la disciplina accademica, sia caratterizzata da una pluralità di referenti. Varietà, registri, dialetti costituiscono un aspetto determinante (sia per ricchezza che per problematicità) anche dei fenomeni letterari.

Despite the ambition of Postcolonial Studies to place deconstruction of " the West " at the heart... more Despite the ambition of Postcolonial Studies to place deconstruction of " the West " at the heart of contemporary social sciences and humanities, the authority of this notion has never been so strong, and the West appears today to belong to a " natural order " of thinking and speaking about our current reality. Having pointed out the limits of the postcolonial critique of the West, this study then individuates and connects several lines of research to a common epistemological basis in order to map the contours of an emerging field: " the politics of imagining the West ". From this perspective, the West is no longer conceived of as a subject of history but as a historically determined narrative articulated by individuals and social groups with strategic aims in the context of wider discourses.

The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), directed by Stefano Bartolini since Septe... more The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), directed by Stefano Bartolini since September 2006, is home to a large post-doctoral programme. Created in 1992, it aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research and to promote work on the major issues facing the process of integration and European society.

The article investigates Abd al-Rahmàn al-Abnudi's 1 al-Midàn (The Square), the celebrated poem i... more The article investigates Abd al-Rahmàn al-Abnudi's 1 al-Midàn (The Square), the celebrated poem in colloquial Egyptian Arabic dedicated to the Egyptian young people who occupied the central Midàn al-Tahrìr (Tahrìr Square or Liberation Square) in Cairo on 25th January 2011 paving the way for the revolution. The poem, written during the very first days of the uprising, is analyzed in the context of the major transformations in the Egyptian literary field during the decade 2001-2011. In this period the state's cultural institutions lost much of their traditional power to exert authority over the contents of literary production and its circulation among the reading public. One of the most outstanding features of these transformations, is represented by the role of internet as a means of circulation and reception of literary texts, especially by means of blogs and YouTube. The article considers several versions of al-Midàn uploaded on YouTube and highlights the process by which the poem was transformed by each user into a (re) newed multimodal text, where different semiotic resources interact: the reading of the poem, the video images, and (if present) the soundtrack. These videos were viewed and commented on by hundreds of thousands of YouTube users in the weeks following the writing of the poem and have made a decisive contribution to the shaping of the revolution's collective imaginary.

From new values to new aesthetics

Chapter 2.5 from the book Modernità Arabe co-authored with Maria Elena Paniconi and Lucia Sorbera

The existence of a close relationship between the establishment of the novel as a canonical genre... more The existence of a close relationship between the establishment of the novel as a canonical genre in Egyptian (and Arabic) literature, and the spread of Egyptian territorial nationalism is now regarded as an unquestioned evidence by scholars of Arabic literature. The present article makes use of Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to examine the spatial embodiments of the temporality of the nation in the Egyptian novels written during the first half of the twentieth century. After examining the chronotope of the countryside in the first Egyptian canonical novels, the article centres on the dialectics between the two chronotopes of the «alley» and the «new Cairo» in a renowned novel by Nagib Mahfuz: Zuqaq al-Midaqq (Midaqq Alley, 1947).

Istituto per l'Oriente C.A. Nallino, Roma RECENSIONI Shabo TALAY et Hartmut BOBZIN (eds), Arabisc... more Istituto per l'Oriente C.A. Nallino, Roma RECENSIONI Shabo TALAY et Hartmut BOBZIN (eds), Arabische Welt. Grammatik, Dichtung und Dialekte. Beiträge einer Tagung in Erlangen zu Ehren von Wolfdietrich Fischer, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2010; 276 p. Ce volume rassemble quinze contributions, choisies parmi les communications présentées à une conférence internationale tenue du 2 au 5 Juillet 2008 à l'université d'Erlangen-Nürnberg en l'honneur de Wolfdietrich Fischer (né en 1928), qui y occupa de 1964 à 1995 la chaire de Philologie orientale. Ces quinze contributions, toutes en allemand, à l'exception d'une en français et d'une en anglais, sont ventilées en trois sections représentant les domaines de prédilection de Fischer : grammaire, poésie, dialectes. S'agissant de la grammaire, Fischer est, entre autres, l'auteur d'une Grammatik des Klassischen Arabisch (1 ère édition 1972, 2 ème éd. 1987, 3 ème éd. 2002), aujourd'hui traduite en anglais, ce qui en fait 256 rentes déclinaisons de l'arabe le conduit à refuser absolument (à juste titre, selon moi) d'y voir une quelconque marque d'indéfinition ou d'indétermination.

Middle Eastern Literatures, 2012

Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel, 2024

Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel Lorenzo Casini 'A fascinating and insightful exploration of ... more Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel Lorenzo Casini 'A fascinating and insightful exploration of the importance and many uses of the idea of the West in Egyptian literature, and an important contribution to our understanding of Occidentalism.' ALASTAIR BONNETT, NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY, UK 'Timely and insightful. Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel is a cogent and original intervention in the debates about the role of the " West" in the "Eastern" literary imaginary and modernity.' WEN-CHIN OUYANG, SOAS, UK

Pubblicazione degli Atti di Colloqui, Convegni, Seminari dedicati allo studio dei rapporti interc... more Pubblicazione degli Atti di Colloqui, Convegni, Seminari dedicati allo studio dei rapporti intercorsi nel Medioevo fra Occidente e Oriente nell'ambito della produzione letteraria e più in generale culturale. Studi Monografie relative ad autori, opere, documenti, questioni metodologiche, storia della critica. Testi Pubblicazione, in quanto edizione critica, riedizione, traduzione, antologia, di testi che siano documento degli influssi reciproci fra Occidente e Oriente.

Deadline for paper submissions 31 October 2018. Please send the proposal to: torino2019@sesamoita... more Deadline for paper submissions 31 October 2018. Please send the proposal to: torino2019@sesamoitalia.it and state the title of the panel: "Challenging narratives of oppression"

Url: http://www.sesamoitalia.it/convegno-2019-torino-2019-conference-turin/call-for-panels/

The counter-revolutionary wave that has recently swept through the Middle East has found legitimation in Europe and the US in a " discursive order " (Fairclough 1989, 1995) in which the claims of the Arab revolutions have been disqualified as naïve utopias, while systematic human rights violations by Arab regimes have been minimized or justified. Within this emerging discursive order, old orientalist ideas long discarded by the academic community (e.g. the incompatibility between Islam and democracy; Arab exceptionalism and so on) have turned into incontestable assumptions on which narratives of imminent threats coming from the region (e.g. " terrorism " , " migration ") have been articulated. Besides legitimizing the Arab counter-revolutions, mainstream discourses on the Middle East have served also to ground dominant discursive and social orders in the West where a new nationalist rhetoric is rapidly catching on in several countries. Drawing on ongoing debates within the Italian Society for Middle Eastern Studies (SeSaMO) on the role of scholars of the Middle East in the present political scenario, this panel explores the potential of research as a means of resistance and transformation. Within this wide framework, the panel invites contributions that address the following themes:-The political implications of epistemological paradigms employed in Middle Eastern Studies-Critical analyses of hegemonic discourses on the Middle East-Research freedom in Middle Eastern Studies in the Middle East and abroad CONVENOR'S ACADEMIC PROFILE: Lorenzo Casini is Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Messina. Most of his research concerns the study of the Arabic novel through theoretical approaches drawn from debates in " cultural studies " and the " sociology of literature ". Currently he is preparing a monograph in English language on the poetical and political deployments of the European theme in the Egyptian novel and working on a new project on recent developments in Gulf literature.